Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education: Person, Profession and Organization in a Global Southern Context 9780367437305, 9781003005353

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Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education

Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education explores the realities of contemporary teacher education in Kenya. Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it views the teacher training institution as a space to grow, become and be shaped as teachers in complex moral worlds. Drawing on a rich conceptual and theoretical vocabulary, the book shows how students in these teacher education institutions constantly negotiate and confront the complex constructions of ethnicity, gender and class, as well as moral, religious and academic issues and a lack of resources encountered in the different institutional cultures. It outlines a complex array of concerns affecting student teachers that shape what professional becoming means in a stratified and diverse culture. This story of the process of growing up and becoming a professional teacher in an African setting will appeal to researchers, academics and students in the fields of teacher education, organizational studies, international education and development, social anthropology and ethnography.

Kari Kragh Blume Dahl is an associate professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a PhD in education, is a licensed psychologist and has published widely within the field of teachers and teacher professionalism, schools and educational practice in comparative and international perspectives.

Routledge Research in Teacher Education

The Routledge Research in Teacher Education series presents the latest research on Teacher Education and also provides a forum to discuss the latest practices and challenges in the field. Teacher Representations in Dramatic Text and Performance Portraying the Teacher on Stage Edited by Melanie Shoffner & Richard St. Peter School-Based Deliberative Partnership as a Platform for Teacher Professionalization and Curriculum Innovation Geraldine Mooney Simmie and Manfred Lang Technology-Enabled Mathematics Education Optimising Student Engagement Catherine Attard and Kathryn Holmes Integrating Technology in English Language Arts Teacher Education Donna L. Pasternak Research-Informed Teacher Learning Critical Perspectives on Theory, Research and Practice Edited by Lori Beckett Europeanisation in Teacher Education A Comparative Case Study of Teacher Education Policies and Practices Vasileios Symeonidis Study Abroad for Pre- and In-Service Teachers Transformative Learning on a Global Scale Laura Baecher Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education Person, Profession and Organization in a Global Southern Context Kari Kragh Blume Dahl For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Teacher-Education/book-series/RRTE

Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education

Person, Profession and Organization in a Global Southern Context Kari Kragh Blume Dahl

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Kari Kragh Blume Dahl The right of Kari Kragh Blume Dahl to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-43730-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00535-3 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by SPi Global, India

For my children, Viktor Virgil Dahl Aimelet Fanny Vanilla Dahl Aimelet

C?\ Taylor & Francis � Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Fields of teacher education Constructions of a field in friction  1 Setting the scene: teacher education in an international and a Kenyan context  5 Person, profession, politics and pedagogy  21 Fieldwork 37 Structure of the book  49 2 ‘No time for us’: Struggling for success to become professional, urban middle class The fortress: a stronghold of history and tradition  50 Apparatus  55 Management  64 Tutors  70 Pedagogy: mock exams, distinctions and professional formation  73 Students: struggling for success  76 Secret lives and pockets of freedom  78 Bureaucratic rationality  82 3 ‘I have someone’: Community learning in social space College life on the dry savannah  84 Structure  87 Moralism and the termination of management  92 Senses of belonging: social life and school life  100 Students: class elders, teacher parents and ethnic prefects  103 Tutors: teamwork and communality in the staff room  109 Pedagogy: the personal lecturer  113 Social rationality  115

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50

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viii  Contents 4 ‘I am someone’: Self-display in capitalism and reversing the social order The rise of an enterprise  117 Values  122 Bosses, untouchables, high classes and the principled ones  126 Pride, status and ‘the superiority complex’  136 In no-man’s-land? Power in reverse  142 Tutors: young, urban professionals – on the move to somewhere else  147 Sex, love and domination  149 Pedagogy: ‘Here to give us a clue’  153 Laissez-faire rationality: lost in empty space?  156

117

5 Becoming somebody in institutional contexts Learning, participation and becoming in context  160 Spaces for possibility and searching processes  163 Evidence of becoming: personal self-constructions  170 Paths to professionalism: learning to relate to the teaching profession  179 Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  199

159

6 Fields reconstructed: Teacher education at a crossroad New times, other lives: policies in practice  205 Cultural universes, categorisation and issues of professional becoming  211 Trajectories of person, profession and pedagogy  216 Reconstructing teacher education: lessons  222

204

Appendix226 References229 Index245

Acknowledgments

Writing this book was a great pleasure and a great work that took place during several years and in different contexts and institutions. Hoping for another future for the many people I met, for those who became part of the work in different ways, and for the many others whose voices were never heard. I was gone for several years, then came back to my home and Western civilisation in Denmark, just to realise that I missed the tough, demanding, strenuous, dangerous life in Kenya that persistently challenged my realm of understanding. The biggest resource in Africa is people and the way they relate to each other. Without the help of others, I could not have completed this work. There are many more thanks than what is noted here. Many thanks to all the students and staff at the teacher education institutions in Kenya for sharing their time and lives with me. A special thanks to the student teachers Maggie, Elizabeth, Alfred, Martin and Anett. I am also deeply indebted to Jacqueline Oyoo, Ken Ondoro, Emily Akinyi, Veronica Akonya, Martha Njoki, Daniel Jumba, Gabriel Mukuna, Teresa Oyoo for assisting with the fieldwork – many thanks. Sincere thanks to my good colleagues in Kenya, Denmark and the US for inspiration and support: in Kenya to Washington Onyango-Ouma and Isaac K. Nyamongo from University of Nairobi, to Rachel Kaki and James E. Otiende from Kenyatta University, and to Olive Mbuthia from Kenya Institute of Education; in Denmark to Anne Maj Nielsen and my other good colleagues at the School of Education at Aarhus University. Professors Roger Hart and Michelle Fine provided shelter and accommodation at the Graduate Center at City University of New York, USA, where a portion of this book was rewritten. Many thanks to both. I am grateful to Karen Valentin at Aarhus University for her highly constructive review and suggestions to previous versions of this book. Thanks to the three anonymous peer-reviewers provided by Routledge, who made valuable and helpful comments on a previous version of this book. Thanks to Elizabeth Walton from University of Nottingham, UK, for useful comments. Thanks to Routledge – to Emily Coin and the production team – for assistance during the publication process. Simon Rolls from Aarhus University language edited parts of this book, and Jason Hallman from Roskilde University Press language edited earlier drafts too – thanks to both. Also thanks to Birgit Vrå from Roskilde University Press for allowing this book to materialise

x  Acknowledgments in a new version at Routledge. The Consultative Research Committee for ­ evelopment Research, Danida, provided a research grant to support the D fieldwork in Kenya, for which I am grateful. Thanks to my mother Lone Dahl and to Jean-Baptiste Aimelet for their support throughout. My family and friends have been great inspirations and helped this book to emerge. The responsibility for the content in this book, still, is completely mine. Most of my thanks, however, go to my two children, Viktor Virgil and Fanny Vanilla, who were aged 7 and 2 at the time of my fieldwork. Without their patience and support, this work could not have been completed. Kari Kragh Blume Dahl

1 Fields of teacher education

Constructions of a field in friction Teaching is a profession that profoundly influences society and affects the lives of children and young people. It is a profession to which there are many expectations, yet it is also a paradoxical profession. Teachers are expected to provide high standards of performance so as to ensure that all of their students can and do learn; they face demands to learn new skills – new styles of teaching, collegial teamwork, effective use of information technologies; and they are expected to develop students’ skills and capacities in ways that allow societies to persist and progress, and to establish a foundation for new generations to become flexible, innovative and committed members of society. At the same time, however, tightening policy controls, rising demands for administrative regulations and shrinking public-sector finances situate teachers in underpaid, overworked jobs, where they must balance and counteract challenges produced by modern societies, such as consumerism, pollution, pandemics and, in Global Southern contexts, problems related to wars, poverty, live-threaten diseases and epidemics, child labour, trafficking, lack of technology and industrialisation, and political instability, to name a few. These trends become increasingly visible in under-resourced and fragile school systems in the South, in which the individual teacher is often responsible for teaching a large number of pupils under conditions far from those in which the profession’s theoretical landscapes and standards were ­formulated – i.e. in the North. In this book, I refer to the Global South simply as ‘the South’. ‘The South’ therefore refers to technologically less developed and economically disadvantaged countries, while ‘the North’ refers to the richest and most technologically developed and industrialised countries. Teachers are often thought of as responsible for providing what has been labelled ‘quality education’, yet at the same time they are given central responsibility for the successes and failures of the education system (cf. Cochran-Smith, 2004; Hargreaves, 2000). Teachers are needed to build society, yet they are also members of a profession that few want to enter and many want to leave. Teachers around the world are taught in teacher education systems that share many similarities and in some senses are universal, yet they are tasked with educating children in preparation for different

2  Fields of teacher education social realities in different societies. It is assumed that teachers learn their skills and capabilities through formal classroom teaching and practices in teacher education institutions, but we know virtually nothing about how the non-curricular learning in these institutions influences them. So how do teachers become prepared for these multiple tasks and responsibilities during their teaching studies? What kinds of learning environments do teacher education institutions provide for student teachers, if we look beyond the obvious – tuition, classroom teaching and teaching practice – and take the whole institution into account? Are there differences between teacher education institutions? If so, how do they differ in the possibilities they provide for students to learn and develop? How do these differences influence students, both professionally and personally? This book is about teacher education in Kenya, but it resonates beyond Kenya and the South, arguing that institutional contexts may provide grounds for becoming and being in ways other than those envisioned by policies, plans, curricula and prominent actors. It explores how the development of self is constructed in site, place and space, and what this means for student teachers’ learning and becoming as professionals and as groups of professionals. It explores how teacher education in different ‘sites’ and forms of organisation provide different pathways to professionalism, and what this means for the development of the personal and professional self. Overall, the book offers a look into the somewhat neglected field of teacher education, about which little is written compared to the extensive literature on teachers and schools in general. In literature focusing on teachers, schools and education in the South, the topic of teacher education is virtually non-existent. Within this literature, non-curricular aspects and the construction of self in schools and teacher education, for instance, are grossly overlooked topics. Some literature conducted in Northern settings has provided evidence that organisational learning stems from different educational institutions that constitute ‘sites’ or cultures of learning and becoming that may impact students in different ways (Dahl, 2019b; Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Luttrell, 1996; Reay et al., 2011; Wexler, 1992; Willis, 1977). However, only few studies on teacher education in the South focus on this (see Dahl, 2014b, 2015a, 2020a). Teacher education plays a crucial role in the South, training the teachers that staff primary schools for children who, in many cases, encounter no other formal education. Yet most of these children and young people live and grow up in school systems where colonial, and thus foreign, curricula have been implanted. At first sight, schools in Kenya – as in many other settings in the South – appear hierarchical, authoritarian and non­democratic: hundreds of barefoot children in bookless and often noisy classrooms, where rote learning and behaviour modification are teachers’ primary pedagogical strategies. Classroom practices seem strict, demanding, whole-class driven and focused on the fundamentals (cf. Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012, p. 78). Schools generally lack resources – everything from textbooks to toilets and sanitation facilities, from staffrooms to desks and sometimes even classrooms.

Fields of teacher education  3 Yet writing this book was also a way of opening up for thinking about the possibilities that schooling presents without prescribing which kind of schooling should be realised. Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education seeks to expand the thinking about what is possible in a schooled life by exploring understandings, power, and habitual practices in educational institutions, while acknowledging the impact of the local sociocultural context. The book explores how student teachers engage in positioning, negotiation and socio-psychological and cultural processes of becoming and development as they grow into being someone and somebody in the context of these institutions. Contextual surroundings ‘do’ something to people, though less deterministically than classical poststructuralism implies, but people also change the world around them, albeit less freely than liberalism suggests. Paraphrasing Butler (2002), it seems to me that pedagogy ought to be careful not to idealise certain ways of ‘doing schooling’ that produce new forms of hierarchy, exclusion, elimination and abuse, and in this way become regimes of truth telling us that certain kinds of pedagogy are beneficial and ideal, while others are false and lacking. The idea in this book is therefore not to recommend certain ways of doing schooling over others, but rather to open up a critical discussion about how schooling is thought of and realised, and its effects, and to explore what is possible under which circumstances.

Photo 1.1  Break time in a primary school in Nairobi.

Teachers are fascinating subjects to study because, in rural villages in the South, which are home to the great majority of the population, they are often the only formally educated inhabitants. Nearly every village in Kenya has a school, so teachers have immense impact on children and young people’s access to and success in the education system, often acting as gatekeepers (Lewin, 1966) for dreams of becoming educated. Teachers are providers

4  Fields of teacher education of ‘the gift of education’ (Jacobsen, 1997) and distributors of life chances (Dahrendorf, 1979) and hope (Meinert, 2009). While this book tells a story of teacher education in Kenya, it also speaks more generally about teacher education in sub-Saharan African societies in the South. But it is also a story about teacher education in all parts of the world, since it contributes to our understandings of the ways in which institutions – in this case educational institutions – are shaped by and shape particular ways of being and becoming. The book focuses on pathways to teaching professionalism by exploring how personal and professional selves become shaped in the specific institutional setting of Kenyan teacher education institutions, at the time of the fieldwork called ‘teacher training colleges’ (TTCs). It explores the ‘context of becoming’ in three concrete teacher education institutions, and thus explores the idea of how different sites foreground different pathways to professionalism. The book is therefore a story that ‘fights familiarity’ (cf. Delamont, 2014, p. 15), in this case by constructing new ways of understanding teachers’ professional preparation during teacher education. By doing so, it hopes to ‘re-culture’ teacher education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009, p. 458) and to make evidence central to decision-making, for instance by recognising that real change requires shifts in, among other things, organisational culture. It wishes to decentre, complement and challenge studies of the impact of standards-based accountability to consider questions related to how education professionals actually interpret and use their teaching studies, how different professional practices shape and are shaped by organisational structures, routines and cultures, and how this fosters learning, professional agency and professionalism. At present, there is no common understanding among the academic community regarding what constitutes teacher professionalism or what processes of professionalism look like (Beijaard et al., 2004; Dahl, 2020a; Edmond and Hayler, 2013; Eraut, 2000; Hanushek and Rivkin, 2006; Hargreaves, 2000; Lei et al., 2012). Despite extensive research covering virtually every individual and collective aspect of professionalism, sociocultural and personal aspects of teacher professionalism have been grossly overlooked in international research, and research focusing on the link between institutional culture and how individuals become professionals and teachers is, to my knowledge, virtually non-existent. This story therefore turns from the obvious to the invisible and tacit by studying informal and embedded processes of becoming instead of focusing on learning from limited skills-based knowledge communicated in classrooms. It turns from exploring scholastic and academic knowledge to focusing on personal, social and cultural aspects of teacher becoming, emphasising teachers as professionals that use human aspects of their professionalism to nurture, relate to and engage with other human beings. It explores learning-in-context as opposed to an individualised understanding of learning that oversimplifies the complex processes of learning and

Fields of teacher education  5 becoming, ignores how people interpret and make sense of the world in multiple ways and implies a linear relationship between evidence and courses of action. It takes a theoretically diverse approach drawing on social psychology, social anthropology and critical pedagogy to revitalise and revisit the field. It explores learning cultures in a particular part of the world, as anthropologists used to before they turned their attention to their own backyards, but does so by taking a new approach to studying a contemporary African society. It takes the standpoint of the researcher as ‘Other’, articulating a social constructionist approach that emphasises positionality and thus works, to paraphrase Geertz (1983), at a distance, ‘from afar’, while at the same time ingraining conceptually rich and empirically grounded work in the analyses, and thereby working ‘from near’. Paraphrasing Foucault (cited in Ball, 2019, p. 132), the book invites readers to ‘think differently’ (penser autrement) about teaching and learning. It aims to tell a different story about schooling and growing up in education institutions than that found in educational literature focusing on scholastic knowledge or individualised perspectives. Education in Africa is a field interwoven with grand narratives (Dahl, 2010, 2012b), some of which depict the educational project in an optimistic and hopeful way (see, for instance, Otiende et al., 1992, p. 149), others as a crisis and a modern welfare project that has gone wrong (see, for instance, Coombs, 1985; Dore, 1997; Fuller, 1991), and others again as part of global imbalances of power and politics between the North and South and efforts to decolonise schooling from foreign intrusion (De Kock et al., 2018; Sayed and Badroodien, 2016; Van der Walt, 2010). Telling the story means critically engaging with both romantic narratives of ancestral roots and negative narratives rooted in economic concerns about modern welfare, as well as concerns focusing on the effects of colonialism. However, this is not the entire story: the narratives and stories force us to discard the possibility of a ‘real’ and objective reality that is shared and visible to us all. On the other hand, not all evidence of a reality can be discarded as constructed and unreal. The process of telling a story is situated somewhere in-between the objective and the subjective, selecting, constructing, recomposing, and deconstructing experiences, which means that some stories are represented and told while others are omitted. This work is neither essence nor fiction, but a cultural and social analytic construction.

Setting the scene: teacher education in an international and a Kenyan context Schools, teachers and pupils are not Western inventions, in spite of what the literature on decolonisation tends to suggest. Yet contemporary notions of schooling and teaching and how they construct meaning and significance for those involved are heavily influenced by the foundations of education systems stemming from Western settings and the North. The African continent has

6  Fields of teacher education been occupied for centuries by various colonial powers, and in many of these countries, the coloniser’s culture and language continues to influence how teachers and education – and hereby teacher education – are thought of and implemented. The British empire in Eastern Africa, Dutch settlers in South Africa and French colonialists in Northern Africa all marked and changed teachers’ dispositions, as they needed to adopt new roles in their classes when responding to changes required by their government (Idri, 2016; Salmon and Sayed, 2016). Today, new systems of colonialism have entered the scene: many countries in the South, including on the African continent, have school systems and teacher education institutions that reflect ideas and values from the North, for instance about democracy, human rights and literacy. Yet teacher education in many countries in the North was developed in contexts where basic education, financial and technical resources, legislative frameworks, skilled teachers and allied professionals were widely available (cf. Walton, 2018). The agenda of international donor communities regarding Education for All (EFA) (WCEFA, 1990) has influenced national agendas in countries like Kenya, where Free Primary Education (FPE) was introduced in 2003, and in neighbouring countries like Tanzania, where Universal Primary Education (UPE) was implemented in the early 2000s. Critical scholars argue that mass schooling in Africa attempts to signal a modern, Western lifestyle (Fuller, 1991; Samoff, 1993). Fuller (1991), for instance, called schools in Kenya modern ‘look-a-like schools’ that try to signal modernity through school set-ups that mimic their Western counterparts. But are schools and teacher education institutions in the South really hollow structures empty of meaning and significance? How can we understand how colonial heritages, postcolonial legacies and modern westernised education agendas building on universal imperatives like democracy and EFA travel into schools in the South? And what does this mean for how schooling, and by extension teacher education, is understood and practised? Writing about contemporary education also means engaging with the past. In Africa, political action and indigenous education focusing on the African philosophy of ‘Ubuntu’ (Bangura, 2005), or, in Kenya, the ‘Harambee’ movement (Van der Walt, 2010), have been proposed as pedagogical solutions for a continent suffering from colonial interference. ‘Ubuntu’ has been mentioned in relation to indigenous African education, emphasising human virtues such as compassion and humanity towards others, and, in relation to international declarations about human rights, has been proposed to give new meaning to the idea of human rights, transforming it ‘into moral behavior that could benefit the entire sub-continental [Sub-Saharan] (educational) community’ (Van der Walt, 2010, p. 251). But these accounts also represent normative conceptualisations and political agendas of education, similar to international communities’ agendas of EFA and FPE. If culture is understood as ‘the organisation of people’s everyday interactions in concrete contexts’ (Pollock, 2008, p. 369), then political and educational agendas are also part of how we make sense of the world. Schooling and teacher education do not exist in social and cultural vacuums but arise within discursive

Fields of teacher education  7 fields of different and often opposing agendas. Political intentions, ideas and markers often translate into new practices and visions as they seed to local levels and construct ‘a multiple production of cultural logics’ (Marcus, 1995, p. 97), for instance in schools and teacher education institutions. In the following, I situate teacher education in the South and Kenya within the wider context of colonialism and explore how it is represented in the literature about teacher/education in Kenya and the international literature, and do so within a historical perspective. Colonialism, education and the South Kenya gained independence from colonial power in 1963, just as many other countries in colonial Africa and the South did from the mid-20th century onwards. However, while the legislative presence of the colonial powers seemingly disappeared from the South, colonialism continued (and continues) to function and is expressed in many interrelated ways in processes of oppression, domination and exclusion between the South and the North. Colonialism, however, is an ambiguous term that has been referred to in the literature about the South in many ways, including the ‘coloniality’ of knowledge, of power and of being (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, cited in ­Walton, 2018, p. 34). Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1992) concept of situated knowledge, colonialism too is a historical and cultural condition that, in regard to education, may be understood in broader terms than merely as the presence of ‘colonial content’, such as a ‘foreign’ curriculum based on Western philosophy; it can also include notions of transnational power discourses concerning what are regarded as ‘proper’ and dominant understandings of education, global economic power imbalances, etc. The understanding of education in a postcolonial context may thus not only be about understanding the often-violent and oppressive historical evolutions of education systems, but also target how we explore and come to understand these systems of education – from minds that have been colonised with particular ways of understanding what education ought to be. In Kenya, the donor community and postcolonial heritage played a major part in framing the education system and institutions as we know them today. The international donor community, through Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (WCEFA, 1990), promised universal primary education in 2015. Kenya, among other countries, made certain decisions regarding their national school agenda based on, for instance, the World Bank and MDG imperatives. Voices critical of the donor-led reform agenda complained that international aid and development agencies were exerting undue influence far from the countries for which these reforms were meant (Buchert, 1995; Grigorenko, 2007; King, 2007). In Kenya, the programmes launched by the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) and World Bank (WB) have been criticised for being harsh, rushed and a poor fit for Kenyan social structures and conditions, as well as for adding objectives and conditions to programmes that were initially only meant to provide

8  Fields of teacher education financial aid (Rono, 2002, p. 85). The push for universal primary education in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, has also been criticised for being based on Western educational philosophies that draw on a tradition of democracy, individualism and human rights (Samoff, 1999). The literature on teachers, schools and teacher development in the South reflects very varied and often opposing understandings of what the ‘problem’ of schools and teachers is, and consequently of the possible solutions. This may be related to the problematic nature of the concepts of quality education and Education for All, since 250 million children across the globe are still without access to teaching of basic literacy and numeracy skills, and for those who do have access to education, the quality (of education) is often directly linked to their economic status (Sayed and Badroodien, 2016, p. 1). Ever-widening inequalities within and between countries in the South and the North, global economic crises, conflicts, processes of democracy, climate changes, pandemics, etc., are all issues raised in the overarching but highly abstract and difficult to comprehend UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), formulated in 2015. This would seem to lead to a vast number of concerns, including various research agendas about what quality education provided by school teachers in the South should look like. Approaching diversities in the literature on teachers in African schools Overall, the literature about teachers, schools and education in the South is limited compared to literature reporting and stemming from Western settings. Nevertheless, it covers a diverse array of topics. This section seeks to provide an overview of strands in this literature, each representing particular philosophies of education. A first strand in the literature on teachers and schools in the South focuses on teachers’ skills to teach literacy, numeracy and basic school competencies. This strand dominated much 20th-century literature within the field and is still influential in terms of how education is perceived. This approach is reflected in reports from the international communities that measure education worldwide in terms of numbers: accessibility, level of schooling, literacy and numeracy skills. It has been criticised for favouring a ‘narrow instrumentalism that privileges a focus on numeracy and literacy for economic growth’ and thus ‘hollowing out the very concerns and aspects’ – for instance in relation to democracy and human rights – that make societies peaceful, stable, and equitable (Sayed and Badroodien, 2016, p. 13). According to Samoff (1999, p. 249), ‘thousands of reports’ were published by the international donor community, along with papers and articles from research bodies that often originated in the West, that analysed the education sector with a ‘massive research that contributes more to legitimacy than understanding’. From this perspective, schools in the South were being offered no more than a neoliberal approach to education (Ball, 2003), characterised by individualised (Vally and Spreen, 2006) and performative (Lyotard, 1984) education

Fields of teacher education  9 cultures, foreign to the contexts in which they were implemented. A newer book focusing on ‘Politics of Education in Developing Countries’ hence also concludes that there is a learning crisis in the South, where learning outcomes have stagnated or worsened, despite progress towards UPE since the 1990s (Hickey and Hossain, 2019). A second strand in the literature focuses on teachers’ pedagogical skills and subject-specific academic knowledge, arguing that teacher-dominated discourses promote rote learning, repetition and recitation in African school settings that often suffer from stilted and stifled teacher approaches that are authoritarian and teacher-dominated (Hardman et al., 2009, 2011; Pontefract and Hardman, 2005; Tessema, 2008). This strand argues that strengthening pre- and in-service training for teachers in the region therefore relies on balancing the tension between teaching quality (in the form of skills and pedagogical practice) and cost-effectiveness (Hardman et al., 2011). For instance, the Handbook of Teacher Education (Townsend and Bates, 2007a) reports from different countries on topics such as teachers’ reflective thinking through practice, training of middle school leaders, networked learning communities, etc., which is a broad and somewhat disparate account of a range of contexts and areas. Most of the literature in this strand – with a few notable exceptions – stems from Western-informed studies, in which ‘teacher quality’ has been on the agenda in recent decades as the single most influential factor in determining the success of teaching and learning. Influential scholars from the North like Eric Hanushek (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2006), John Hattie (2009) and Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan (2012) argue for the centrality of teachers to schools, yet there is little consensus among researchers on the characteristics of a good teacher (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2006, p. 1053), let alone the importance of teachers in comparison to other determinants of academic performance. Similarly, ‘teacher quality’ is a term often emphasised in the literature as important to schools and pupils’ learning, yet there is little consensus on what it is or how to measure it (Peterson, 2016, p. 4; Cochran-Smith, 2004). In spite of this, much of the research focusing on ‘teacher quality’ in sub-Saharan countries has focused exclusively on teachers, their motivations, commitment and practices, arguing that ‘effective practices’ for teachers should be at the heart of teacher education (Akyeampong et al., 2013, p. 273). These studies are positioned within a larger body of studies focusing on teachers’ classroom pedagogy as a means to enforce better school practices in African schools, arguing that the problem of concern regarding teacher quality is largely reduced to an individual level, i.e. teachers’ pedagogical choices and practices in classrooms. Although there is a widespread – and justified – consensus in the literature that teacher quality is one of the most significant factors affecting students’ achievements and educational improvement, this conclusion is also problematic. As highlighted by Cochran-Smith (2004), it places teachers at the centre of responsibility for the successes and failures of the educational system and does not define what quality education is. Thereby, it potentially neglects the complexities of teaching and learning

10  Fields of teacher education (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Cochran-Smith et al., 2009), disregarding sociocultural contexts, not to mention individual and personal aspects of what it means to be a teacher. A third strand focuses on educational change and – often – the issue of mobilising teachers as social resources and teaching/education as a means of social change. Much of this literature draws on the work of Paulo Freire (1971, 1973) on Brazilian rural farmers and a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, arguing that education must empower people to function as critical agents in wider society through ‘conscientisation’, a process whereby a person becomes aware of his or her context and hence is empowered with knowledge and skills to instigate change. The issues of empowerment, oppression and social change have been influential in literature about schools in the South. Ivan Illich, for instance, argued in Deschooling Society (1971) that societies must be ‘deschooled’ due to educational institutions’ tendency to work in ways that reverse their original purpose. Bruce Fuller’s book Growing-up Modern: The Western State Builds Third-World Schools (1991) focuses on how mass schooling in the South is used to mobilise ideological statements in favour of the central state, which tend to signal modernity and mass opportunity but actually remain fragile and selective, increasing gaps between rich and poor families. Illich and Fuller both argue for a shift from government-influenced institutions of schooling to other methods with less unintended effects on teachers and children. Though both of these works specifically focus on Southern education, similar points about how schooling favours the interests of an elite have been made in literature focusing on education in the North. Such literature emphasises the ideological and oppressive aspects of schooling and suggests critical pedagogy as a philosophy of education that views teaching as a political act. The problem of inequality and power imbalances between the South and North is approached by emphasising education as a means to provide social justice for the oppressed masses. However, it may be argued that efforts to expand opportunities and capacities in order to empower educational practices cannot ignore the complex challenges in education systems, particularly those in the South, and that dealing with these challenges requires much more than a restructuring of teaching methods (cf. Dahl, 2014a). In addition, this body of research does not address what happens to people in non-Western settings, who are confronted with Western schooling and the sociocultural production it provokes (cf. Boyden, 1997; Levinson and Holland, 1996), for instance in relation to becoming an ‘educated person’, who possesses a particular form of cultural capital. Cultural and social learning connected to growing up within the structure of schools is something that people in East Africa are aware of and regard as important aspects of schooling (Meinert, 2009; Stambach, 2000). A fourth strand focuses on schools and what it means to become a teacher in postcolonial and developing settings like Africa. The core of this work proposes that colonial rule and policies ‘splintered social identities along race and ethnic lines, and were accompanied by economic disparities

Fields of teacher education  11 and inequalities along race and class divides’ (Salmon and Sayed, 2016, p. 38), leaving schools and other education institutions at the centre of a transformative agenda that requires education to be democratised in accordance with human rights. Within this body of literature, some have argued that the emphasis on technocratic measures of accountability, for instance in teacher education, constrain teachers’ agency to promote peace and social cohesion (Salmon and Sayed, 2016), since teachers face multiple and conflicting demands from various environments that focus narrowly on accountability measures (Sayed and Badroodien, 2016). The solution offered here is to place quality education at the core of a global agenda of education with a strong social justice orientation that does not ‘delegitimise the affective and “soft” aspects of education in favour of a narrow instrumentalism that privileges a focus on numeracy and literacy for economic growth’ (Sayed and Badroodien, 2016, p. 13). It is an agenda which challenges schools as raced and classed and as undervaluing black learners’ linguistic and social experiences through an assumed neutrality (De Kock et al., 2018). Much of the aforementioned work seems inspired by a post-Freirean critical pedagogy in its progressive approach to understanding education as a vehicle for social change, but it is an approach that emphasises the historical, oppressive and structural patterns of inequality in decolonialised perspectives. In this strand, teacher agency and pedagogy are seen in a broader perspective of not only personal responsibility and action but also divisions based on race, gender, social class and religion within the education and political systems (see Sayed and Badroodien, 2016, p. 10; Sayed et al., 2016). Although this strand offers an account in which political structures and educational discourse are seen as central to the problem of what constitutes quality education, it tends to ignore individual voices and diversities at the level of the person. In addition, realising social cohesion as ‘a key challenge of education policies’ that aims to provide ‘social meaning and respect for all citizens’ (Fraser, 2005, cited in Sayed and Badroodien, 2016, p. 11) may be seen as an idealistic and value-loaded philosophy that, in spite of good intentions regarding democracy and equality for all, reflects certain ideological content that ascribes universality to local realities and people’s logics. Finally, a fifth strand focusing on sociocultural aspects of schools and schooling explores the lived life of schools and teachers in sociocultural contexts and schooling as embedded in systemic-driven structures. The core of this work highlights school life as something that is local, dynamic and vivid and that unfolds in often unpredictable ways, focusing on conflicts, resistance, social meaning and diversity. This strand puts aside the claims of Western educational philosophy for universality, naturalness and rationality, which, as mentioned by Prout and James (1997, p. 10), are often inherent in dominant, Western educational theory. Instead, the literature explores schools, lives, and educational practices through more culturally sensitive approaches, which are less deterministic and more dynamic, open, and descriptive. Although some scholars have addressed

12  Fields of teacher education schooling and education in more culturally sensitive perspectives in the South (see  Boyden, 1997; Dybdahl and Hundeide, 1998; Hundeide, 1995; LeVine, 1988; Levinson, Foley and Holland, 1996; Rogoff, 1990) and in Eastern Africa (for instance, Dahl, 2005, 2012b; Meinert, 2009; Onyango-Ouma, 2000; Stambach, 2000), much of the literature in this strand originates from Western education settings, is written by Western scholars, and concerns youth and higher education, such as high schools and universities, not teacher education. The core of this work focuses on schooling’s effects on individuals. For instance, the work of Willis (1977) and Holland and Eisenhart (1990) on college cultures and local responses to these cultures employed expressive accounts of meaning-making by individuals as subjects. James and Prout (1997), along with Levinson, Foley, and Holland (1996), contributed a new view on how human cultural and social reproduction is determined specifically by the school system. All these works demonstrate that schooling – in opposition to the findings of influential researchers such as Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) – is not a purely deterministic sorting and selection device, but also something that initiates constructions of schooled identities that actively reject and negotiate what is happening to them. Such work (Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Holland et al., 1998a; Wexler, 1992; Willis, 1977) illustrates how the study of schools and schooling might be linked to understanding the process of identity and agency as something occurring in schools and education institutions. In teacher education institutions, ‘institutional cultures’ have been found to be organising themes that are unifying principles or metaphors rooted within and extending beyond the institution as a kind of informal programme for students’ learning (Dahl, 2019b), influencing student teachers’ personal and professional trajectories through college (Dahl, 2020a). Although there have been some traces of acknowledgement in the literature regarding local constructions of ‘meaning universes’, and although the link between the person and the context of school has been established, we know virtually nothing about how teacher education influences students’ professional selves through personal and professional processes of becoming in educational cultural fields that may not be uniform. Teachers and teacher education in the South As mentioned in the literature, teacher education is currently facing a number of tensions in the form of pressure from various quarters; scholars have argued that the literature focuses intensely on the issue of ‘teacher quality’ (see Townsend and Bates, 2007b, p. 3), but without a clear definition of what this term involves. Most often, ‘teaching quality’ has been associated with issues pertaining to the teachers (Hanushek, 2011; Hanushek and Rivkin, 2006), but this understanding is problematic – not because it emphasises the role of the teacher and the teachers’ work, but because, in doing so, it also concludes that everybody and everything else is ‘off the hook’ when addressing what Cochran-Smith (2004, p. 3) refers to as ‘the structural inequa’.

Fields of teacher education  13

Photo 1.2  First-year students.

Arthur Levine (2006, p. 109) described teacher education as ‘the Dodge City of the education world’. According to Levine, the landscape of teacher education is unruly and disordered like ‘the fabled Wild West town’. This disorder increases as ‘traditional programs vie with non-traditional programs, undergraduate programs compete with graduate programs, increased regulation is juxtaposed against deregulation, universities struggle with new teacher education providers, and teachers are alternatively educated for a profession and a craft’. In other words, teacher education is a field in constant movement and flux, and about which there is little consensus where the important and essential focus should be. Presently, there is very little empirical evidence to support the methods used to prepare teachers. According to Hattie (2009), there is ‘no standard approach to where and how teachers should be prepared’ (pp. 109–110), though ‘for those working in many teacher education institutions, there is the strong claim that there is a “standard” approach, there is order, and there is core knowledge and understandings that all future teachers should have’ (Hattie, 2009, pp. 109–110). The quotes in the previous paragraph are highly representative of the problems and uncertainty regarding the focus in contemporary literature on teacher education. Although there is seemingly a consensus among both practitioners and scholars in the field that teacher education is important in preparing for teaching in schools, that teachers are at the core of teaching processes and children’s learning and that teachers therefore should be at the heart of educational development, there is no consensus as to what teacher education is and how it should prepare teachers. In addition, there is an increasing awareness that, even though globalisation may have led to a belief in the existence of certain global ‘landscapes’ of

14  Fields of teacher education education and of teacher education, we cannot suppose that ‘one size fits all’. Teachers can no longer assume that what seemed to be right to a white Western middle class community, will have meaning for students from other countries that have different cultural values, different understandings of the values important for human development and different habits and structures of knowledge. (Townsend and Bates, 2007b, p. 7) This calls for a less deterministic and more culturally sensitive approach to understanding teaching and teacher education. The vast majority of research on teacher development and teacher education has been conducted in Western contexts outside the realms of Africa, although this literature is somewhat limited compared to the overall body of literature on schools, teachers and education. Overall, there are only a limited number of research-based books and anthologies focusing on teacher education. Some of the literature on schools and teacher education in the South is published by international (aid) organisations like UNESCO or by regional/local school authorities; some of these works are in the form of reports which express particular organisational agendas. Examples of research on teacher education in the South are critical works that include a decentralised and discursive view on teacher development, for instance in South Africa (e.g., Sayed et al., 2016; Salmon and Sayed, 2016). However, the case of South African teacher preparation and teacher education is somewhat different from that in other sub-Saharan settings. A body of studies report that education in general in the South is somewhat lacking and of ‘low quality’. This research portrays a negative image of life in schools as characterised by violence, the destruction of property, laziness, a lack of punctuality, etc. (cf. Van der Walt, 2010, p. 249). This literature neglects what is going on in and between the institutional grids in the complexities of everyday life. Furthermore, much of the existing literature on teacher education focuses on ‘measurable’ aspects of teacher education and quantifiable aspects related to school (i.e. number of teachers, teacher-pupil ratios, drop-out numbers, academic performances, etc.) in continuation of the five main literature ‘strands’ outlined earlier. Such articles fail to consider the real-world learning conditions in teacher education institutions, which in themselves are ‘sites’ for professional becoming. It is difficult to provide a coherent review of literature on teacher education in the South (and sub-Saharan Africa in particular), simply because the literature is scarce and addresses a scattered range of topics. However, I will mention a few recent books that solely or in part have sought to explore teachers and teacher education in Southern/African contexts by moving away from limited approaches that focus on curricular or economic aspects. Al Barwani et al.’s book Leading Change in Teacher Education (2019) focuses on ‘innovative leaders and teacher educators around the globe guiding the transformation of teacher education in multiple aspects and settings’ (p. 5),

Fields of teacher education  15 yet the focus on ‘school culture’ is limited to educational leaders’ roles in the institution. The book argue for solutions that reappraise what is otherwise depicted as somewhat inefficient (Al Barwani et al., 2019, p. 148) and thus ‘­incompetent’ teacher education. Gorlewski and Tuck’s edited book Who Decides Who Becomes a Teacher? (2019) positions schools and teacher education institutions as sites of resistance against systems that construct racial inequalities and racism, yet do so in a Western context and ignore how cultural universes of schooling, produced in these policies, frame and shape actors’ experiences and lifeworlds. Welch and Areepattamannil’s book Dispositions in Teacher Education (2016) includes chapters on North Africa and the Middle East but focuses on dispositions such as values, commitments and professional ethics (Peterson, 2016, p. 3) rather than on context. The work of Macpherson et al. (2014a) about ‘Education, Privatisation and Social Justice’ is one of few books focusing solely on teacher education in the South, referring to studies from Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia; however, the emphasis is primarily on curricula, parental backgrounds and structural differences between private, public and governmental teacher education, hence paying less attention to implicit learning and sociocultural learning processes. WyattSmith and Adie’s edited book Innovation and Accountability in Teacher Education (2018) argues for ‘the complex ecologies of teacher education’ (p. 13), yet the themes in the book are diverse and somewhat scattered, focusing on teacher preparation, perception, identity formation and belonging in different settings in the North, with a single study from South Africa. Du Plessis’s book Professional Support beyond Initial Teacher Education (2019) reports from an Australian context about ‘context-conscious theoretical framing’, yet the notion of organisational culture is reduced to addressing the role of leaders and leadership in schools, thus ignoring the wider sociocultural context. Bashiruddin’s book Teacher Development and Teacher Education in Developing Countries (2018) explores 150 teacher narratives in six regions in the South, including Kenya, offering detailed accounts of teachers’ stories across continents and in different regions of the world. However, there is no analysis of regional or local variations or the wider contextual framing of teacher education. Townsend and Bates’s (2007a) comprehensive Handbook of Teacher Education reports from different countries around the world, focusing on a wide range of topics; however, chapter headings promise a transformative agenda through universal knowledge claims, thereby subjugating other forms of knowledge and their producers (cf. Rose, 1997, p. 307). In contrast to these studies, this book aims to contribute to an understanding of how institutions are shaped by and shape particular ways of becoming and being. Although reporting from a single educational context in the South, i.e. Kenya, by exploring the link between person and context, the discussions and analyses presented are relevant to understanding education institutions in other contexts. The book presents novel ways to explore cultures of education institutions, in this case teacher education, by examining detailed ethnographies of the institution. The account here will offer an insight into invisible and subversive, yet highly influential, paths

16  Fields of teacher education to professionalism in a particular context, rather than a broad superficial account of a range of contexts, countries and topics. There are, to my knowledge, no monographs among the literature on teacher education employing a coherent and emic approach to explore how cultures of teacher education influence and shape student teachers. This pertains to literature stemming from and reporting on both Northern and Southern teacher education. Contextualising teacher education in Kenya This section specifically focuses on Kenyan teacher education in a historical and contextual view, drawing on national, regional and international literature about teachers and teacher education in Kenya to include knowledge and voices about Kenyan teacher education produced in/from different settings and positions. Raewyn Connell (2007) argues that literature and research produced in Southern contexts may be equal in intellectual rigour and of greater political relevance to the changing world than theory and literature arising in the North. The purpose, however, is not to exclude literature written by scholars outside the South, but to reflect upon a more varied body of literature by drawing on multiple sources engaging with teacher education in a Kenyan context. Teacher education in Kenya, as elsewhere in East Africa, was initiated by Christian missionaries who controlled education up to 1911, when the British colonial government stepped in (Eshiwani, 1993). In 1920, Kenya became a British Crown Colony. Africans, according to the missionaries, ‘were to be enlightened so that they could read the Bible and assist in spreading Christianity and Western civilisation to fellow Africans’ (Eshiwani, 1993, p. 17). In the literature written by educationalists, who specialise in regions of Africa, education and schooling in Africa have been described as ‘tools for colonial powers to educate and civilise the savage black population to become a submissive local workforce’ (Sifuna and Otiende, 2006, p. 192). By the beginning of the 1920s, teacher education was carried out as ‘training on the job’ (Sifuna and Otiende, 2006) by the Christian Church. In 1924, the Phelps-Stoke Commission visited East Africa and recommended a uniform education system with adequate teacher training centres focused on training in agriculture and industry to meet local needs. Scholars have argued that many colonisers in Africa did not initially invest in ‘teaching the indigenous population until this became critical to boosting skilled labour’ and spreading their respective languages and cultures in order to ‘bolster colonial expansion’ (Alexander, 1989, cited in De Kock et al., 2018, p. 2). However, in 1952 the Binns Commission, sent by the British Empire to Kenya, expressed concern about the ‘lack of dignity in the teaching profession’ (Sifuna and Otiende, 2006, p. 225). In 1956, the missionaries in the Christian Council of Kenya initiated a plan to reorganise teacher education. Still, when Kenya gained independence in 1963, there were too few teachers, and the majority of them were untrained (Eshiwani, 1993; UNESCO, 1968). In 1964, the independent Kenyan government embarked on the ­process of c­ onsolidating the teacher education system into the ­eighteen

Fields of teacher education  17

Photo 1.3  Student teachers in Kenya anno 1960.

government-run public teacher training centres, each with a total capacity of about 600 students (Sifuna and Otiende, 2006, p. 226; Dahl, 2014b). Up until the time of writing, teacher education in Kenya had been a twoyear course, where students lived at the college until they obtained a primary teacher education (PTE) certificate based on a final exam prepared by the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC). Although the Kenyan government had prepared to launch a new and longer three-year teacher education programme leading to a diploma in primary education, the situation at the time of writing is unclear. However, the potential launch of a new diploma programme is in line with the Kenya Education Sector Support Programme (KESSP) for 2010–2015, which aimed to qualify primary teacher education as a three-year diploma degree equivalent to an educational bachelor’s degree, with less emphasis on practical training and more on academic skills and knowledge (personal communication, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology). As part of the same process, the TTCs are to be upgraded to university colleges, which – based on American and European experiences with similar developments in the field of teacher education – will transition teacher education away from vocational and on-the-job training. Up until the time of writing, the PTE exam consisted of eighteen different subjects, most of which were subject to examination during the students’ second and final year at college. Most PTE examinations were conducted as written, multiple-choice exams, emphasising subject trivia questions. As experienced in other Eastern African countries (Barrett, 2005), the political and administrative situation led Kenyan teachers to experience a drastic deterioration in their sociocultural status, negatively influencing the public perception of them as civil servants. At the time of writing, Kenya has about seventy-five TTCs; seventeen of these are governmental and almost sixty are private TTCs (personal

18  Fields of teacher education communication from the Ministry of Education, MOE, Kenya). Previously, however, the number of private TTCs in Kenya had mushroomed to more than 100 during the first decade of the 2000s when the Kenyan government opened up for the privatisation of teacher education (personal communication from MOE, Kenya), leading to a steep increase in the number of teachers. Kenya is one of the countries in the region that has experienced the greatest progress in education since independence in 1963, measured in enrolment rates, literacy and number of education institutions at all levels (Rono, 2002, p. 91). The introduction of Free Primary Education in 2003 furthered progress in enrolment rates, but SAP also led to the freezing of appointments within the public sector, including fewer teachers, and thus to an overall decline in the quality of education (Rono, 2002). Launched in 1981, the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) had a short-term stabilising effect on the Kenyan economy but led to the erosion of social services and further marginalisation of the poor, especially in the distribution of health and education services (Rono, 2002, p. 84). The cultural heritage of the colonial era can still be traced in today’s Kenyan teacher education institutions: In some public teacher education institutions, framed, glass-covered photos of young black male adults in shorts lined up next to white priests of European ethnic descent are situated strategically next to classroom entrances, signalling the close relation between teacher education as a training, colonialism, and Christianity. But what role does the cultural heritage of colonialism play in today’s teacher education in Kenya? Today, private teacher education institutions produce many more teacher candidates compared to governmental teacher education institutions. Some of the private colleges specifically favour explicit religious affiliation – many descending from Christian denominations – while others seemingly work according to purely liberal market values. According to the national aims for teacher education, upon completion of the PTE course, student teachers should be able to ‘foster nationalism, and promote national and individual development, sound moral and religious values, social equality and responsibility, respect for and development of Kenya’s rich and varied culture, international consciousness, positive attitudes towards other nations, good health, and environmental protection’ (MOEST, 2004, pp. vi–viii). I wondered how this programme worked in the everyday lives of colleges; how colleges understood and worked with this political agenda; and what effect the agenda had on student teachers’ professionalisation. While these national aims are impressive and ambitious, they can also be viewed as stubborn, unclear, ambiguous and dogged with Western influences, similar to political agendas of education in other parts of the world (cf. Dyson, 1999). Overall, Kenyan TTCs were regulated through the Education Act, an eighty-three-page document from 1980, setting out the general framework for the education system, including the field of PTE (Republic of Kenya, 2012). At the time of writing, there is no specific act or policy paper about PTE, but the area is regulated by a locally appointed board of governors (BOG) and practices based on unwritten traditions; for instance, forcing

Fields of teacher education  19 pregnant female students to take a year of maternity leave. A BOG consists of thirteen people who are elected from one or more groups, including people with ‘special interests’, such as those with relevant professional competencies; people from the community surrounding the specific TTC; ‘sponsors’, many of whom represent religious bodies; and ‘co-options’, who theoretically could be anyone but in reality are members of the college administration (personal communication, principal at TTC). BOGs are elected for periods of three to six years and are legitimised as direct representatives of the Minister of Education. As long as BOGs fulfil the main criteria outlined in the Education Act, their decision-making power remains mostly unquestioned since BOGs are given full legislative power according to the Education Act. This led me to wonder how exclusive power and local management affects diversity in teacher education institutions, which have different and local power compositions. Historically, teachers were addressed by the respectful Kiswahili title Mwalimu (teacher) in the same way medical doctors were addressed Daktari (doctor). The teaching profession was considered sacred, surrounded by status and prestige, but had also gained societal authority over certain tasks and areas of knowledge. Kenyan teachers were not considered full professionals (Hjort and Weber, 2004), with full legitimacy over their profession. They did not constitute a ‘minor profession’ (Schön, 1987, p. 9) but were regarded on the same level as, for instance, medical doctors, lawyers, and priests. Since the last decades, however, this began to change. Other forms of knowledge became necessary, and teachers’ knowledge was challenged as students gained access to the internet and an ever-growing array of (global) media. In Kenya, this was probably instigated by increased access in the new millennium to media, including for poor people in rural areas, globalisation, the creation of a new economic elite, and the hollowing out of teachers’ salaries and working conditions, which challenged the status of the teaching profession. In addition, many teachers were employed during the 1970s who had not completed the teacher education course in college due to the government’s political reforms introducing free universal primary education. Entry requirements for TTCs decreased, and some people found that even teachers who were thought of as having ‘immoral characters’ could obtain a primary teacher certificate and be employed in primary schools as teachers (personal communication from primary school teachers in Kenya in 2011). With many primary school graduates, i.e. pupils, ending up as ‘educational failures’ (Serpell, 1993, p. 15), working in the maize fields and cultivating the land, people felt that teachers and schools did not live up to the promise of providing better life prospects. A questionnaire (see Appendix), which I conducted among 3,145 student teachers in seventy-six classes at five TTCs in Central and Eastern Kenya, indicated that the vast majority of students came from rural areas, with parents whose participation in formal schooling was limited or non-existent, and that the colleges admitted more women than men. Thus, teacher education seemingly had developed into a path for people with fewer economic and symbolic means – people who either could not afford or could not meet the entry requirements for university

20  Fields of teacher education education. For some, teaching represented a stepping-stone to a more lucrative career. All of this reduced the symbolic value of a career in teacher education and cast a shadow over the teaching profession. As a result, teachers were no longer seen as gatekeepers promoting social mobility, welfare, and modernity. But who were the student teachers? Overall, the data from the questionnaire (see Appendix for all tables and data in the following section.) demonstrates that the surveyed student teachers in many ways shared similar sociocultural, economic and educational backgrounds. Breaking down the numbers, the data showed that the vast majority of students came from rural areas (66%) or smaller towns with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants (17%). A smaller number of students were from larger towns, cities, district capitals, or the capital city (in all, 17%; Table A.1). There were slightly more female than male students (54% female students, 46% male students; Table A.2), indicating a shift in female representation in a profession that only one generation ago was dominated by men. The mean age of the students was 22.9 years and the majority did not have any children (77%; Table A.3). Almost one in five students were married (18.8%; Table A.4). More than nine out of ten students (90.9%) had an upper secondary school certificate as their highest level of education, but some students (nearly 8%) additionally held other higher education certificates or diplomas (Table A.5). The educational background of students’ parents was less uniform. The majority of the students’ fathers (64.6%) and mothers (82.2%) had either not completed any formal schooling, or had completed primary or lower secondary school as their highest level of education (Table A.7). However, less than one third (30.1%) of students’ fathers and less than one seventh (13.5%) of students’ mothers held a college certificate or diploma. Few students had parents with a university degree (3.8% of the fathers; 0.8% of the mothers; Table A.7). This indicated that teaching remained an option for many relatively young people many of these coming from rural areas, but one seemingly characterised by sociodemographic inequality. Students from rural areas were more likely to have parents with college certificates or diplomas compared to other young people in the rural areas, despite the fact that there are fewer job opportunities for formally trained professionals in rural areas. Drawing on Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), the data suggest that parental education, socioeconomic background and a general decline in the status of the teaching profession played a role in student teachers’ orientation towards primary teaching as a career option, linking perceived opportunities to economic and sociocultural background. The data on the employment situation and educational background of parents presented in Tables A.5–A.8 suggest that the educational choices of students who come from homes with little economic capital but some educational capital were impacted by their parents’ educational background. Many students’ parents were unemployed, did manual labour such as farming and fishing, or worked in their own smallscale businesses along the roadside, while others were skilled workers (Table A.8). This suggests that students had little economic latitude but displayed

Fields of teacher education  21 positive attitudes towards higher education; however, it also indicates that access to education at levels beyond TTCs was often limited, restricting them to a relatively low-cost education such as that provided by a TTC. Parental income and the geographical position of TTCs in rural areas contributed to a reproduction of socioeconomic inequality.

Person, profession, politics and pedagogy This section of the book explores and discusses an analytical framework that rethinks the cultural universes of the education institution as spaces offering possibilities and shaping individuals and explores teacher education in a way that avoids limited skills-, didactic- or pedagogy-based approaches, and instead focuses on professional becoming as something that is embedded in and initiated by the institutional context. The central analytical focus in this book is on how Kenyan TTCs constitute institutional arenas for becoming and subjectification and how ‘school cultures’ at TTCs shape student teachers both individually and collectively, as someone and as somebody; in other words, how the becoming of the student self is personally and professionally situated in the institutional space. This means that becoming is connected to relations and practice, and situated in contexts and situations. Which college cultures emerge, and how do these cultures shape particular ways of becoming and being? How do different sites of college culture foreground different pathways to professionalism and shape professional selves? The analyses in this book draw on multiple theoretical perspectives matching the complexity of the social processes they examine. This theoretical diversity makes it possible to explore how individual values and virtues operate in an institutional context, and how institutional processes affect students’ professional pathways. Taken as a whole, the theories applied and the analytical framework employ a decentred approach (Dreier, 2008), meaning that the analysis is based on the assumption that people’s lives and actions are related to opportunities and limitations manifested in and across contexts. The study will therefore address student teachers as subjects and explore their possibilities for participation and action in various social contexts and communities – and these contexts and communities are also objects of analysis (Dreier, 2008, cited in Lagermann, 2013, p. 75). This breaks with dominant individualised approaches to understanding processes of learning and becoming, in which people are either blamed or victimised (Crawford, 1977) for problems beyond their reach. It also means that people are seen as participants in personal trajectories related to structural arrangements of social practice. This approach can lead to a ‘richer and worldlier psychology’ (Dreier, 2009, p. 193), since it grounds psychological theories of subjects in relation to structures of social practice. Drawing on different theories and concepts within social and critical psychology, anthropology and education, I explore how institutional processes and everyday life shape Kenyan student teachers’ personal and professional becoming. The analytical framework is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, viewing

22  Fields of teacher education TTCs as social fields in which subjects occupy different social, cultural and economic positions, and where the position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field and the subjects’ habitus (e.g., their contextualised personality structure) and their capital (that is, assets and potentials for human practice) (see, for instance, Bourdieu, 1977, 1984, 1986). But the work is also inspired by a poststructural perspective, which can help us to see how institutional norms become objectified and normalised as inner-driven experience when students encounter power technologies. Power technology is a concept proposed by Michel Foucault (1977) to explain, for instance, how institutions exercise power through surveillance and authority over individuals, who unconsciously internalise these external power technologies, which thereby becomes a principle for their own subjectification. By combining a poststructuralist perspective with everyday life and psychodynamic perspectives that focus on internal dynamics and social processes, we can explore what happens to people who are subjected to invisible and embedded processes of normalisation and discipline. This can be done by focusing on how institutionalisation, social positioning, and categorisation and differentiation with regard to processes of human becoming in TTCs and what this means for the positioned and categorised persons. On the other hand, there is a need to acknowledge that people do not always act in the way they are meant to. Davies and Harré (1990, p. 46) argue for a poststructuralist view that acknowledges the ‘constitutive force of discourse, and in particular discursive practices, and at the same time recognises that people are capable of exercising choice in relation to those practices’. This means acknowledging that technologies of power are not simply monolithic and unifying forms of discipline, resulting in submission, nor are human beings omnipotent or undisturbed by technologies (cf. Staunæs, 2007, p. 262). The point is not to take subjects’ words for granted, but to doubt the somewhat deterministic analysis of power as unidirectional, standardised and somewhat predictably disciplining. Enforcing a somewhat deterministic (exemplified by Foucault’s conceptualisations of power technology and subjectification) and generalised view (exemplified by Bourdieu’s conceptualisations of capital and the field) potentially leaves little analytical space for understanding subjects’ ‘messy’, complex, and often unpredictable handling of their social realities – in this case in institutions. We need to understand persons from and in their positions, while also critically reflecting upon what is happening to them and around them. The overall focus of the book is on becoming in relation to institutional processes, since the concept of ‘becoming’ offers the possibility of rethinking organisational learning. Following Deleuze (Clegg et al., 2005, p. 159), learning is often thought of as an interplay of de- and reconstruction; i.e. as the difference between then and now. But becoming emerges from a process of ‘mutual de- and re-territorialisation’ (Clegg et al., 2005, p. 159), which is to be understood as the movement from then to now. This means that considering the analytical concept of ‘becoming’ instead of ‘learning’ means focusing on movement/s rather than that which is being moved. Similarly,

Fields of teacher education  23 Prout and James (1997) argue for a focus on persons as ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’, since this implies an understanding of the person as multiple, changeable and contextually dependant. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, cited in Clegg et al., 2005, p. 160), ‘becoming’ implies a possible transgression of the boundaries of a system, since ‘a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination … A line of becoming has only a middle … [that] is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement’. A line of flight is described as a ‘pure movement of change’ (Woodward, 2007, cited in Lagermann, 2015, p. 578) that is open-ended; lines of flight are created as possibilities for change in smooth spaces, in opposition to striated spaces, which organise by drawing strict boundaries. This view can inspire us to study institutional becoming not as a stable oscillation between points or positions, nor as unrestricted trajectories, since institutions are something which transform and which entail boundaries, possibilities and conditions. Processes of becoming are ‘folding and unfolding of lines, the knotting and netting of different materials and organs that mutually de- and reterritorialise each other in order to become something different’ (Clegg et al., 2005, p. 160), for instance from earlier ways of becoming. Together with a view of learning as situated and taking place in communities of practice, this means that the study of institutional becoming focuses on processes connecting in and between persons, materials, organisational structures, norms and moralities about professional values, power and politics. In the following discussion, I explore how four analytical themes of ‘person’, ‘profession’, ‘politics’ and ‘pedagogy’ can help to establish the dynamic interplay between people and the contexts in which they operate and become in the multilayered field of TTCs, which cannot be grasped with more conventional approaches to studying professional learning. Professional development, or rather professional becoming, is not solely teaching processes in classrooms, communication of subjects and academic material, or didactical concerns related to curricula, syllabi and examination. Professionalisation is also tied to institutional processes, such as informal learning and processes of subjectification, normalisation and discipline originating from the institutional level. It is construction of meaning, significance and values in new sociocultures and other social communities of students and tutors; it is peer-learning, resistance, compliance, and construction of identity and self among students in ways that thwart institutional norms and construct new personal and professional versions of being a teacher (see also Dahl, 2014b, 2015b, 2020a); and it is becoming rendered as Other in the institutional optic, yet belonging and desiring to be part of another youth community than that provided by the institution. From which state of mind do students begin the process of becoming ‘someone’? Where do they go, and how do they move through college, hopeful and troubled? How do they become ‘someone’ and ‘somebody’ together with others, and how can we grasp this becoming without relying on stereotypical categories of resistance and oppression – for instance, towards and by authorities and institutional power? Without relying on hope rooted in somewhat romantic categories of

24  Fields of teacher education empowerment, for instance in relation to oppressive political agendas? And without applying a deterministic approach that focuses on repression and denial, as for instance reflected in a psychoanalytic approach? Instead, we must look for less deterministic and less optimistic ‘forces’ and spaces, and for untidier, shabbier and possibly more chaotic dynamics in fields and with subjects that never stop changing. This is done by synthesising different theoretical perspectives, which can turn our gaze from the obvious story. The analytical themes of person, profession, politics and pedagogy can make it possible to include more of the context (Jackson, 1989) and thereby compare the institutional contexts of TTC. It can make us see the TTC as a discursive field with multiple social communities of practice that are mutually intertwined, at the same time acknowledging teacher education as a contested field that calls for more critical, analytical approaches starting with using empirical data to understand how and with what effects TTCs cultivate the professional self in students. Person The ‘person’, or personhood, taken as an analytical theme, employs a ­microperspective on subjects and their lives. Who are the subjects? What characterises their lives? What is important to them? How do they live, construct meaning and significance? How do they become someone and somebody, as individual persons and as groups? The theme of person can turn the attention to the level of the subjects and acknowledge that a teacher’s personal development is tied to professionalism as something connected to personal characteristics and competencies, as well as academic and institutional ones (Korthagen, 2004). By taking the participants’ perspective, the focus is on ‘lived life’ and experience (i.e., the phenomenological lifeworld): the subject is in the centre. As Schutz and Luckmann (1973, p. 3) argue, ‘the world of everyday life is … man’s fundamental and paramount reality’, meaning that everyday life is the basic structure to which people attach meaning and find relevance in their daily activities. Everyday life is ‘a province of reality in which man continuously participates in ways which are at once inevitable and patterned’ (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973, p. 3), meaning that everyday life at the same time has its own, distinct logic. Less generalised terms and more emic, sensitive, analytical concepts can grasp distinctions, differences, variations, and nuances. How do students live, learn, reason, embody, decide, develop and embed their daily lives in the specific pedagogic reality of Kenyan teacher education? Self, role, personality, identity, culture and lifestyle are some of the more theoretical concepts possibly included in the personhood theme, which draw on a cross-disciplinary approach combining psychology, anthropology and sociology. However, by linking individuals to their contexts and processes of becoming, the dialectical relation between individual and context comes to the fore. By understanding persons as participants, rather than as merely subjects, we can ask what they are a part of and in what manner they participate in their social context (Dreier, 2009, p. 195).

Fields of teacher education  25

Photo 1.4  Fetching water in a TTC.

Morality is an analytical term that can deepen our understanding of human agency and learning as motivational, processual and contextual (see Dahl, 2014b, 2015b) and break with static, dyadic and individualised approaches to understanding human becoming. Kleinman (1992) has proposed the concept of ‘local moral worlds’, which are contexts of shared experience that mediate macrosocial forces and shape specific local effects. Morality, being and learning are indivisible (Kleinman, 1992; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Meinert, 2009), and moral worlds are particular, intersubjective and constitutive of the lived flow of experiences in the microcontexts of daily life (Kleinman, 1992, pp. 171–172). Morality raises questions about how general ideas about teaching and education are related to what is considered good in specific contexts (Kleinman, 1992; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Students’ learning is comprised of processes that are not only intellectual but also social, cultural, personal and tied to meaning-making. Morality acquires different meanings and significance depending on how it is contextually situated. Morality is therefore an important aspect of learning, since human beings recognise underlying principles of ethics and morals. Public communication, such as health campaigns, often fails since it does not appreciate and make use of moralities and other local values and virtues (Dahl, 2014b; LeVine and White, 1986; Meinert, 2009). Approaching institutions as contexts of local moral worlds can help us to comprehend how teacher education produces layered, complex experiences of shared emotions, values and virtues, and enhances our experience of how competence, identity, the self and professionalism emerge, develop and become cultivated in persons in the field of teacher education. The concept of habitus can help to ‘uncover the deeply buried structures of the social world, as well as the ‘mechanisms’ that tend to ensure their

26  Fields of teacher education production or transformation’ (Reay, 2004, p. 431) in TTCs. According to Bourdieu (1990a), habitus is an inner human asset that produces practices and representations and thereby defines the person. It is a form of socialisation and can bring into focus the social and unconscious patterns of action and agency which Bourdieu (1977, p. 89; 1990a) calls practice-logic, and which are incorporated through participation in a specific field, such as a TTC. This can help us to understand how the interpretation of student teachers’ taste, style, thoughts and choices are representations of how students experience and act in the world of the TTC. The use of habitus can therefore acknowledge that professionalism not only is the transfer of information during classes but also is embedded in the psychosocial and cultural structures and processes of the institution. According to Bourdieu, human actions and strategies are manifested as ‘position taking’ (Bourdieu, 1993a) in a field of forces, for instance teacher education. ‘Strategy’ is a result of the network of objective relations between positions that agents or institutions occupy in the field (Naidoo, 2004). Bourdieu’s view, combined with critical educational theory and the conceptualisation of local moral worlds, can therefore deepen our understanding of how students reason, learn and act, based on their personal and collective moralities in the discursive field of TTC.

Photo 1.5  Women’s dormitory.

Personal and professional identities evolve in places through time, space and tense. Identity, taken as an analytical theme, can inspire us to see how being and becoming is also identity work. Wenger (1998, p. 151) conceptualises identity as negotiated experience of self and a way of being in the world. This connects Wenger to more classical theory about identity (Erikson, 1968), where identity is viewed as an ongoing process between

Fields of teacher education  27 self, others and context. A Foucauldian view on subjectification (Foucault, 1977) can reveal how the fluidity of emerging teacher identities stems from participation in the powerful discursive field of TTCs, which influences subjects at a more fundamental level. This view recognises identity as multiple and contradictory, not permanent or fixed (Phillips and Carr, 2009), and as a dimension of human complexity. Subjectivity is the poststructural concept for a person’s sense of self and can be used to grasp, for instance, stability, as well as change and rupture (Staunæs, 2003, p. 103). A person may thus be understood as a subject who has been categorised and positioned (by others), and therefore transformed. Subject position (Davies and Harré, 1990) refers to the positions that people take up and make their own, for instance in discursive fields. In a country like Kenya, with more than 340 ethnic minorities, the issue of ethnicity might produce important and different subject positions for students living side by side in politically legitimised multi-ethnic TTCs. Religious and moral categorisation stemming from Kenya’s Christian colonial past might also play a part in the positioning of students. Positioning works in verbal and nonverbal ways and is an ongoing process. Its elaboration depends on actual and comprehensible discourses, practices, and distributions of power, as well as the composition of actors (Staunæs, 2003). It helps focus attention on dynamic aspects of, for instance, human and material encounters in contrast to one’s ‘role’ – a term that serves to highlight static, formal and ritualistic aspects (Davies and Harré, 1990, p. 43). Categories are made in the daily interactions between persons and in relation to normative conceptions of what is regarded as good, valuable and appropriate. This perspective makes it possible to discuss how race, gender, class, ethnicity, generation and sexuality, for instance, are normative conceptions of what is regarded normal and appropriate in the specific field of teacher education; that categories of students for instance are not the cause, but rather the effect of certain behaviours, and that categories are not something one is, but something which is done to a person. A poststructuralist perspective will make it possible to explore how categories of ‘good students’, ‘good teachers’ and ‘good teaching’ (see Dahl, 2014b), for instance, work as subjectification categories in the discursive field of the TTC, by the way these categories shape and constitute students and their life at college. An intersectional approach can in addition inspire to see how the social categories of gender, class, ethnicity, race, and norms are co-constructed and mutually reinforcing in the particular contexts of different TTCs (see Crenshaw, 1991; Phoenix, 2006). Despite its usefulness in putting power on the research agenda, Foucauldian poststructuralism tells us little about what happens to people at an inner level. How do persons become subjects and ‘someone’ when confronted with different institutional settings? Combining psychodynamic theory (Bowlby, 1989; Kohut, 1977; Millon, 1996; Stern, 1977) and critical psychology (Hundeide, 2005) permits us to look further into the connection between institutional ‘psyche’ and individual subjectification and becoming

28  Fields of teacher education by exploring the possibilities, barriers and disruptions in the cyclicality of everyday institutional life (Holzkamp, 1998). This theoretical perspective is detailed further in Chapter 5. Again, the ambition is to transcend the obvious, visible and predictable, and instead turn to multifaceted, and sometimes messy and disordered, lives at TTCs: to hear the voices of the people and acknowledge them as capable, decisive and active, yet operating within the frames they are provided. Profession The second analytical theme of ‘profession’ helps us comprehend how the personal and collective processes of becoming in TTCs compare to the professional demands and tasks that students face. There is no common understanding among scholars regarding what constitutes teacher professionalism despite extensive research within the field (see Molander and Terum, 2010). Among the elements highlighted in definitions of teacher professionalism are professional, skills-based and subject-related knowledge and qualifications, proven high standards, confidence, attitudes and values in complex undertakings, lifelong commitment, norms, identities, dispositions to move in the field, capacities for collaborating with colleagues and teachers’ expectations of themselves and others.

Photo 1.6  First-year students.

However, few studies have sought to explore what professionalism is and how it emerges in different contexts, such as various institutional, sociocultural and material settings and places, and what this means for the professional person/s who inhabit/s these contexts. In addition, virtually nothing has been written about what distinguishes teacher professionalism

Fields of teacher education  29 in a Southern Hemisphere context from professionalism in, for instance, Western contexts. While Western literature (for instance, Hammerness et al., 2005; Ladson-Billing, 2006; Molander and Terum, 2010) does not define teacher professionalism in ways that speak directly to the Southern, it does provide analytical lenses for exploring teacher professionalism in this part of the world. A profession can be defined as a discipline in which one must be authorised to practise, thus conveying legitimacy to certain tasks and assignments (Grimen and Molander, 2008, p. 179). At the time of writing, teachers in Kenya could be licensed to teach in primary schools only if they had completed the PTE exam and obtained the P1 teacher education certificate, the most common certificate to become a primary school teacher. Yet, as mentioned earlier, the frictions between education, new forms of knowledge, and the construction of ‘citizens’ in colonial and postcolonial contexts led to a decline in the Kenyan teaching profession’s legitimacy. Teachers were in some ways regarded as semi-professionals, raising new questions. For instance, how do teachers strive for recognition? How do teachers become committed to the relatively low-prestige task of teaching? And, how do the ways they think about the task of teaching influence their practice and ways they come to understand themselves as teaching professionals?

Photo 1.7  Three students dressed for home science class.

A profession is practised by persons in specific institutional and societal contexts. It constructs a certain kind of rationality or morality among its members, which becomes a collective ‘profession identity’ and, drawing on Wenger (1998), may be understood as a particular way of being in the world as a professional. Exploring professional identity from the perspective of morality can provide important insight into how teachers come

30  Fields of teacher education to think, reason and act as a professional group and as individual professionals during their years at TTC and as new teachers. Martin (2006) writes about Ugandan nursing as a profession that is not only anchored in the institution but also culturally embedded. There are specific similarities between teacher education in the North and the South: teacher education takes place in institutions and it has practice periods, pedagogical textbooks, lesson plans, exams and a final working place, the primary school. But becoming a teacher in the South is very different compared to becoming one in the North. Teacher education is therefore not exclusively an institutional phenomenon. Its borders with the rest of society are blurred (Martin, 2006), using Geertz’s (2000) concept of ‘blurred genres’. Society and environment influence institutional processes and structures, yet institutions have their own agendas, in which individuals become professionals, who again act and react in and against the institutional frames. To explore issues of context, such as the institutional context of teacher education, will allow us to explore becoming and being as encompassed in and related to a specific institutional context. Politics ‘Politics’, the third analytical theme, refers here to norms, values and institutional practices and logics – in other words college moralities and institutional logics, with which students are disciplined and brought into normality. Politics is closely connected to the theme of profession, since it directly influences the overall framing of institutions that shape professionals. Educational politics may provide a hint about the political visions for teacher education in Kenya but does not explain or analyse the state of affairs. For instance, one formal aim of Kenyan teacher education is that student teachers develop ‘commitment and competence’ during their studies to ‘develop the child’s ability in critical and imaginative thinking in problem solving and self/expression’ (MOEST, 2004, p. ix). As such, students should become motivated for and skilled in using child-centred and consciousness-raising classroom practices. But formal aims and policies do not explain why practice develops as it does. So how are we to understand what ‘politics’ is and how it influences the institutional organisation of TTCs? How can the link between place and person be conceptualised? And how do organisational cultures provide different spaces of becoming for the persons that inhabit them? This book moves away from traditional organisational analysis, which often focuses on human resources and management and results in an overly universalistic approach. Such an approach gives the impression that a ‘win– win’ situation can be established, with no losers, and that institutions are organisms in which the different parts of the body work together in harmony (e.g., Schein, 2010). Worst of all is the implication that social situations are unaffected by power relations.

Fields of teacher education  31

Photo 1.8  In a dean’s office.

Lipsky’s (1980) theory about street-level bureaucrats provides a window into how public education policies are performed and manifested in organisations. National policies are enacted by public workers, in this case, tutors, deans, principals and secretaries, and potentially also prefects, students, etc. According to Lipsky, street-level bureaucrats ‘have wide discretion over the dispensation of benefits or the allocations of public sanctions’ (Lipsky, 1980, p. xi). Street-level bureaucrats establish and invent devices, decisions and routines to cope with the uncertainties and pressures of work, which in effect become the public policies they enact. Following Lipsky, it therefore makes less sense to explore public policy, such as policies regarding teacher education developed ‘in legislatures or top-floor suites of high-ranking administrators’ (1980, p. xiii), since policy is remodelled in the crowded offices and daily encounters of street-level workers. Turning to the people and subjects who implement education policies in the messy and disordered contexts of everyday life can therefore provide a more realistic understanding of how practice is constructed in the daily negotiations between bureaucrats, such as deans and principals, and maybe also tutors, and their clients/citizens, the students. Following Lipsky (1980), the theory of street-level bureaucracy can help us to identify which features of institutional processes and processes of becoming are common, and which are unique to the various occupational milieux, such as TTCs, in which they arise. A central analytical point in this book is that institutions, like people, develop a significant form of habitus over time that is constructed in specific, social patterns of agency (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 89). Institutions also develop a distinct habitus. ‘Institutional habitus’ is a Bourdieu-inspired concept

32  Fields of teacher education constituted from individual dispositions; coupling Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to the institution involves combining the agency of students, tutors and other subjects with the structure and processes of the institution. Institutional habitus thus refers to ‘the impact of a cultural group or social class on individual behaviour as it is mediated through an organization’ (McDonough 1996, cited in Tarabini et al., 2017, p. 1178). This concept allows us to go beyond the perceptions and actions of individual students by introducing an analysis of institutional culture from a collective perspective. It is also possible to go beyond organisational analysis exploring what institutions do by incorporating expressive and cultural elements to focus on how and why they do it. It is therefore not solely a matter of observing whether institutions are organised in one way or another, but above all of exploring the inherent logic or rationale; ‘the micro-dynamics by which they [logics or rationales] are configured and specified in different schools [education institutions]’ (Tarabini et al., 2017, p. 1179). Focusing on institutional logic can unmask a structure through which practice can be explained, or at least understood. Barth (1994) proposes that institutions must be understood as social organisations, whose activities are organised in the interplay between human encounters and the tasks and occasions that lead to these encounters. These are all invisible processes that are produced and reproduced in the daily encounters between people, and which secure the continued life of the central structures, functions and forms of logic – with seemingly broad acceptance from the involved parties, even those whose privileges are curtailed (Douglas, 1986, p. 123). Institutional logics cannot be studied (Gulløv, 2004, p. 55) but must be analysed based on evidence found in the empirical material.

Photo 1.9  Students studying in the college library.

Fields of teacher education  33 TTCs are therefore not just buildings with tutors, students and specific functions. They are also places arranged according to common universes of meaning, characterised by specific moralities and institutional logics that are constantly expressed, constructed, de- and reconstructed, and negotiated in and between structures, encounters and agents. TTCs must be seen as social fields with their own dispositions and institutional habitus linked to both individual agents’ worlds and to larger ‘educational cultures’ in society. The work of Foucault (1977, 1994, 1997) helps us to see how being and becoming are products of power and of entanglement in specific sociocultures, where people come to think, act and reason in specific ways. Individual consciousness is socially determined, but society exists only insofar as individuals are conscious of it, as Berger and Luckmann showed (1966). Power, according to Foucault (1994), is not something that is automatically ‘there’ in institutional structures, but is something that is constantly processed in social formations. Power is a force stemming from the education institution and its leaders and practices, which in turn leads to new forms of power. Inspired by Willis (1977), students and staff are therefore not passive recipients, but active users who construct their own history. Reay et al. (2011, p. 44) may be right in conceptualising institutional habitus as ‘a sense of place’; that is, lived experience and sense emerging in self of a specific institutional site. But how does institutional politics – or perhaps, rather, institutional culture – provide space for becoming? The concepts of a ‘space of possibles’ (Bourdieu, 1983) and of ‘conditions of possibility’ (Foucault, 2005; Foucault and Gordon, 1980) can inspire looking for free rooms, ­ambiguities and escape from the institution, which, based on norms, meaning and ­values, are potential spaces for the individual to develop professionalism and become somebody. This means that students could find social and cultural spaces, in which they could grow up not being disciplined and controlled, so they could direct their searches for other professional identities than what the institution provided them with. According to Bourdieu (1983, p. 313), the field, as a field of possible forces, presents itself to each agent as a space of possibles which is defined in the relationship between the structure of average chances of access to the different positions … and the dispositions of each agent, the subjective basis of the perception and appreciation of the objective chances. Bourdieu (1983), through his concept of the space of possibles, argued that people’s perceptions and appreciations play a central part in how the probabilities of change or development become operative. In a related way, Andersen and Kjær’s (1996) concept of the ‘space of possibility’, which draws on the conceptualisation of Foucault’s ‘conditions of possibility’, makes certain ways of thinking and acting possible while excluding others through forces in a given field, for instance the institutional field of TTC. The concept is interesting as it opens another possibility for counteractions, for instance by drawing on other discourses within this space (see Cort, 2009). With ‘space

34  Fields of teacher education of possibility’, we may explore how professional education, such as that provided at teacher education institutions, provides space for students’ professional becoming as something that is not necessarily written in the formal curriculum (Dahl, 2021). Spaces of possibilities are also spaces for possibilities, but there is no unequivocal or linear connection between being provided with a space and inhabiting it and making it part of one’s life journey, learning or professional becoming. The point is that institutions may provide spaces of possibilities, but many factors will determine how persons change and use these spaces and possibilities. Nevertheless, ‘space of possibility’ is an analytical concept that can help us to understand institutional becoming as something that emerges within a space that is not predetermined and which may or may not influence and shape the person/s in it.

Photo 1.10  Outside corridor in front of first-year students’ classrooms.

According to Gulløv (2004), many institutions suffer from inherent conservatism and a need for social control, which makes them resistant to change. But if organisational space, culture and institutional logics are produced in the everyday encounters between actors, the institution and the daily arrangement of practice, and if actors and practices change over time, then institutions are to some degree also fluid and open-ended. Hundeide (2005) has proposed the concept ‘opportunity situation’, which refers to individual actors’ perceptions of possible life opportunities for acting or changing their life trajectory in a way that is metaphorical and perspectival, since it refers to the limitations involved in being in a certain existential position. Though an opportunity situation is existential and personal, it highlights the importance of the social world and context and can be used to identify processes and insights into how individual agency in life trajectories and life paths evolve in different learning settings. This perspective might inform us about how individual life unfolds, is supported and is controlled in specific institutional spaces.

Fields of teacher education  35

Photo 1.11  In tutors’ staffroom.

Pedagogy ‘Pedagogy’, the fourth analytical theme, is the missing link between person, profession, politics and organisational structures. Pedagogy allows us to explore how students’ learning, participation and becoming emerge and are shaped in particular institutional contexts, and what this means for the shaping of the professional self. Roger Hart (1992) distinguishes between two forms of participation: token and genuine participation. Tokenism is a form of non-participation, which refers to instances in which participants seem to be given a voice but in fact have little or no choice about the subject or how to communicate it, and are given little opportunity to formulate their own opinions. Genuine participation, meanwhile, implies being involved in decisions, understanding one’s role, finding it meaningful, and getting a sense of being a volunteer. It is a kind of learning-in-context, where learning involves deeper consideration of the interaction between cognition, context and practice; hence, the unit of analysis is not the individual, but the dynamic integration of individual and social environment (Simovska, 2005, p. 176). Cultural psychologists and anthropologists understand competence as a capability inscribed in and dependent upon a specific cultural context (Jenkins, 1998; Nygren, 2004). When coupled with conceptualisations of learning as participation, we may understand how different contexts, for instance institutional arrangements, provide different forms of participation, and hence learning. The concept of action competence, as proposed by Nygren (2004), allows us to analytically grasp professional competencies as situated in specific professional practices. Competence is therefore not an absolute value that can be distinguished as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather as ‘better’ or ‘worse’, depending on the context in which it operates.

36  Fields of teacher education In critical educational theory, schools and other educational institutions are seen as learning sites of hope, resistance and democratic possibility (for instance, Freire, 1973), and action competence as requiring the ability and will to act democratically to transform oppressive structures (Jensen and Schnack, 1997). In addition to a sociocultural perspective on learning, critical education and action competence might offer a more complex interpretation of empirical data on learning, rather than simply examining learning as a matter of translating knowledge, attitudes, practices and beliefs into appropriate behaviour, the so-called KAPB gap proposed by Ajzen (1991). But knowledge and attitudes seldom translate directly into practice as envisioned by educational planners (Meinert, 2009). Action competence may therefore provide a more holistic interpretation of what learning is, since the theory also addresses personal commitment, contextual resources, power and social recognition as similarly important factors in learning processes, and, as such, more accurately reflects what human learning is and how it occurs. Social learning theory’s conceptualisations of communities of practice and ‘legitimate, peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) can shed light on how learning and becoming are social and situated in specific social communities, thereby breaking with essentialist, individualised and decontextualised concepts of competence. ‘Capital’ is Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of human assets and potentials for human practice and can strengthen the missing link between person and context, since capital becomes visible in social fields, which are also human fields of practice. Capital can be used to understand what participants bring with them into the field of the TTC and how these capitals/competencies evolve as participants move between different social fields and fields of learning at a TTC.

Photo 1.12  A student teacher doing physical education with pupils.

The analyses will therefore focus on informal as well as formal learning processes; on seeing students as both persons and subjects in social structures of power and conflict, which transform them in different ways; on learning

Fields of teacher education  37 as both social and generated by power, and therefore not only cognitive, individual and conscious; on becoming as both personal and collective transformation in the different social groups and morality systems that students belong to; and on learning and becoming as changeable over time, since social fields are not fixed entities.

Fieldwork At the core of this work is sixteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2011 at three different teacher education institutions (TTCs) in the Central and Eastern provinces of Kenya. Additional material was compiled at three other TTCs in the same areas. The material included both private and public TTCs, located across urban, suburban and rural contexts, to reflect the diversity of students and tutors at these colleges. A case study approach was employed, viewing TTCs as complete and inclusive environments for learning and becoming. The TTC settings were purposefully selected after visiting a larger number of TTCs in and around Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, to ensure variety in the material and social contexts. As such, the TTCs differed geographically, socioeconomically, historically and in terms of students and tutors’ sociodemographic characteristics. The account presented here is primarily based on my observations, interviews and conversations with student teachers and staff at the three TTCs, but I also draw upon data collected more systematically and data from (relatively) structured questionnaires, as well as documents collected at the participating TTCs. The material includes interviews and discussions with state policymakers, planners, international development agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Settling in the area with my family, including my two children, provided opportunities for everyday interactions with subjects and for employing participant observation as a way of gaining insight by being part of the social field while at the same time critically distancing oneself. According to Roger Sanjek (1990), ethnography gains its validity through a description of the methodological steps and ‘paths’ taken during fieldwork, which on one hand may provide an impression of the conditions under which the fieldwork was conducted, while on the other hand allowing transparency and offering an opportunity for the reader to critically evaluate the work. To explore and represent student teachers’ worlds, this chapter therefore presents an account of the paths and choices I took, those I abandoned and those leading to dead ends, and of the people I encountered during the fieldwork who changed my paths and choices. However, the representation of student teachers’ experiences goes beyond descriptions of words and actions to include a reflexive focus on voices, methods, subjectivity and positionality – to explore who gets to represent whom and about what. I listened to many voices, drew on a variety of empirical material and continually reflected on my own subjectivity – how it changed during fieldwork and how it influenced the generation and analysis of the material. The large amount of often contradictory information provided by the observations and informal conversations frozen in the field notes, transcripts from interviews and group discussions with many different actors,

38  Fields of teacher education and the different accounts provided by field assistants, documents and other sources made me realise that reality cannot be understood through things in themselves, but only through their representations. Glaser and Strauss (1967) proposed Grounded Theory as an analytical approach to understanding life from ‘below’ through systematic and detailed analysis and description of the observed sphere of life and actions, providing transparency for outsiders. Yet Grounded Theory does not account for how positionality and subjectivity in the research process make some outcomes more likely than others. No matter how objectively a researcher approaches a study, there will always be certain underlying interests and curiosities; a certain ‘impulse behind all research’ (Stenhouse, 1979, cited in Jones, 2001, p. 3). The ideal of objectivity and neutrality must be rejected and replaced by a subtle realism, since there is no such thing as objective knowledge; there are simply ‘knowledges’ from different perspectives that are likely to be in conflict (Hammersley, 2000, p. 27). This chapter therefore aims to provide an insight into how my fieldwork was inscribed into an ongoing practice, combining research design, fieldwork, and various methods of inquiry to produce representations of human lives that were historically, socioculturally and personally situated. I reflect upon how information and data collected during fieldwork were transformed into a written form – rather than simply understanding the material as a production of new information or research data (cf. Tedlock, 2000). I begin this section by exploring positionality and subjectivity in the fieldwork in TTCs and what this meant for representation. I then reflect on how participation and Geertz’s (1998) notion of ‘deep hanging out’ in fieldwork provided a multifaceted lens, but also narrowed the research focus as fieldwork progressed. Finally, I explore the problem of representation as one of comparing meanings and ways of constructing relationships between objects, persons and situations (Melhuus, 2002), inspired by Geertz’s ideas (1983) about experience as both ‘near and distant’.

Photo 1.13  On fieldwork.

Fields of teacher education  39 Positionality, subjectivity and representation Coming from Denmark in the distant North as a white, female, European researcher to conduct research in Kenya in sub-Saharan Africa poses questions about who gets to represent whom, whose knowledge is used to understand the experience of the ‘other’ in this ‘other’ context, and how to understand being and becoming in this other Kenyan world, culture and cosmology of teacher education. As mentioned by Jones (2001, p. 3), educational research is concerned with human beings and their behaviour; it involves a great number of players, ‘each of which bring to the research process a wide range of perspectives and “truth”, including the researcher’s own’. This necessitates not only reflections about what this means for the knowledge and insight produced during the fieldwork, but also a reflexive approach that includes appreciating that more than one ‘truth’ shapes the story that is to be told. I brought personal filters, produced in the light of my own experiences, with me into the fieldwork, but so did the informants, assistants and other people whom I worked with and met on my path. Yet it was not issues of skin colour, race or ethnicity that proved problematic; even if a researcher is from the South, then class, educational differences and unequal exchanges and dialogues in the research process may ‘remain trenchant markers of difference’ (Sultana, 2007, p. 375), regardless of whether challenges concerning, for instance, access to the field and relational aspects are addressed. Having stayed several years in a small rural village in Western Kenya prior to the fieldwork in TTCs, part of me felt like a local, and I felt accustomed to many of the local codes of social conduct, in spite of my physical differences. During my many years in Kenya, in different fields and institutional settings – first in a small rural village in Western Kenya, where I conducted fieldwork among teachers in primary schools, and later at teacher training colleges in the capital, Nairobi, and adjacent rural areas – I realised that, although my physical appearance was different from the local population, I had in some ways developed a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 61), although my presence certainly was always noticed and was constantly negotiated among people. My hair, clothing, body shape and behaviour were continually discussed among students and local residents. People stared at my shoes and sunglasses, which differed from the standard ways of dressing, which included plastic flip-flops and no glasses. Others admired my car – an old four-wheel drive – and secretly touched my long, light-coloured, straight hair, which stood out among the black curly hair, braided extensions and wigs. Initially, such differences were a source of mutual interest that provided access to the field, but also taught me about the naturalised acceptance of my presence and the collective positioning of me as a foreigner entering the field with seemingly ‘good intentions’. In spite of warm welcomes, I constantly had to juggle issues of my private and professional presence to establish a rapport: not becoming overly familiar while at the same time avoiding being seen as a haughty representative of the authorities, an ignorant foreigner or a ‘good Samaritan’, which were some of the roles that were sometimes attached to my person. People had a lot of experiences with white people, whom they

40  Fields of teacher education constantly encountered to in the media, through locally active NGOs and at missionary stations. Students, tutors and principals approached me with questions and attitudes that suggested they thought of me in a range of ways. Asking for money and compensation positioned me as a rich white researcher and a missionary ‘doing good’. Keeping their distance, avoiding me on campus or telling me positive ‘stories’ of what it was like to be a student or a tutor at that specific TTC positioned me as someone official or a ministerial spy with the power and authority to sanction. Although I had to actively negotiate the many researcher roles that were attached to me, they also illustrated the conditions of people’s everyday lives and the conflicts and challenges they faced. Different TTCs would respond differently to the presence of myself and the field assistants: at one TTC, we were immediately offered tea in the staffroom and engaged in free and unsurveilled conversations with tutors and staff; at another TTC, we had to wait outside the principal’s office for lengthy periods of time or body searched at the entrance. This suggests different accounts of the research team’s participation and positioning. I wished to position myself outside the various roles that were offered to me, at the same time had to try and ‘fit in’. This involved a continuous negotiation of positionality, such as downplaying my (Western) appearance but without fully abandoning my background, which would also have been viewed with suspicion. I constantly reflected upon everyday acts such as dressing in long sleeves and skirts, paying attention to how I addressed and greeted people, often taking field notes in secluded places, placing myself on low chairs next to students, etc. Furthermore, activities such as participating in funerals, moving people and things in the project vehicle (i.e. the vehicle acquired for use in the project) and providing money for medical assistance to students and their sick family members were part of the everyday struggle to negotiate power relations and establish rapport. As others experienced before me (Sultana, 2007), these acts may seem insignificant, but they had a great influence on the processes of my ‘fitting in’ and establishing power relations and a researcher identity while remaining attentive to the ethical and political aspects involved in processes of ‘fitting in’. When speaking with officials such as deans, principals and ministerial officials, the tables were turned: in such cases, I had to politely listen to and engage in lengthy conversations that often involved flattery and praise, interrogation and sometimes overt demands for monetary compensation or certain actions on my behalf, as I delicately tried to steer the conversation back to the research questions. Nearly everyone I encountered was more than willing to speak to me, and I was overwhelmed by the hospitality provided to me, even in the poorest homes and from the busiest students and tutors. Nevertheless, occasionally tutors, leaders and government officials practised various evasive strategies: some left me waiting in their office for hours while attending to urgent matters; others gave ‘politically correct’ answers, toeing the party line found in official documents. I became positioned in particular understandings of what I represented in a patriarchal setting, and dealing with power relations was therefore a necessary condition of the fieldwork,

Fields of teacher education  41 among efforts to establish rapport and participate on an everyday basis in people’s lives. I occasionally participated in burials and other ceremonies; here, I was often placed in a prominent position – in front of a coffin or on a high chair next to the speakers. Although this made me uncomfortable and raised questions about my positioning, which was more visible than I had hoped, it also taught me that showing one’s respect and honouring the dead and those present, for instance by making a short speech, was a way of being a more enculturated participant in the social field. It was a role that, in some senses, was expected of ‘someone like me’ – someone who could afford to employ people, drive a vehicle and live in a self-contained house in Nairobi. I was simultaneously an insider, outsider, both and neither (Gilbert, 1994). My Kenyan colleagues from the two universities with which I was affiliated were likewise not naturally situated in spite of visual and physical signs of similarities with informants. As members of the educated elite, power relations between them and students and tutors living and working in less-privileged conditions meant that they were not positioned as natural participants in the social setting of the TTCs either. A TTC is a highly differential, bureaucratic institution with a wide array of actors occupying different roles, levels of authority, and responsibilities. Questions of positionality and subjectivity were critical and crucial concerns in the fieldwork, requiring more than everyday juggling with my own everyday acts. The question of positionality was always present, and power relations were constantly negotiated. Engaging with one social group at the TTCs, for instance principals, deans and other administrative staff, would inevitably lead to questions from other social groups, such as tutors and students, regarding my ‘real’ intentions. Occasionally, this provoked fear among some informants that I would reveal information from our interactions to other sources, which might lead to sanctions or the curtailing of their freedom and power. At the beginning of the fieldwork, tutors often avoided participating in interviews, fearful of possible repercussions. Meanwhile, deans and principals formulated ‘politically correct’ answers and avoided any criticism of the institution. I had to learn to deal with the many different perceptions of my role in the fieldwork and renegotiate my identity as a researcher. Students and tutors constantly disputed my doings at college. But such fears and suspicion faded as the fieldwork progressed, with tutors realising that their conversations with the research team did not result in sanctions from the administration. Spending time establishing relationships with people in the field helped to build trust, leading people to open up more during fieldwork. In other words, field assistants’ and my own choices of positioning in the social field inevitably had effects in terms of who engaged in the fieldwork and how; in a wider sense, these choices thereby influenced the quality of the study’s data. Speaking with a student in a position of authority, such as a prefect, in the public spaces of one TTC initially prevented me from gaining access to interviews with first-year students, some of whom were unsure of my motives and feared I would relay confidential information to the powerful student leader or the principal. I had to be strategic when considering

42  Fields of teacher education with whom to engage and appear with in public spaces, such as the corridors and staffroom at the TTCs, to ensure that students did not think I was affiliated with a particular group that could potentially harm them.

Photo 1.14  Field assistants at work.

The study includes data generated by and with field assistants, and thus not all data are primary data. Returning to Kenya for a second period of fieldwork allowed me to benefit from my familiarity with a number of research assistants that I had worked with during my PhD study in the rural schools of Lwak in Western Kenya a decade earlier (see Dahl, 2012b). Jacqueline and Emily, both Kenyan women in their twenties, had completed upper secondary school certificates and walked with me along the paths of Lwak’s rural schools. Once again, sharing fieldwork settings with them proved beneficial since we had already established a mutual framework for discussing field notes and interviews. Ken, a Kenyan man in his late twenties, was fresh out of university having completed a bachelor’s degree in social science. Although he had only limited experience with fieldwork, he was born and had lived the majority of his life in a rural area and was therefore familiar with the everyday problems and customs related to student teachers, the majority of whom likewise came from rural areas. Field assistants played important roles, helping to build trust and a rapport with students and tutors. Generally, people had many experiences with Mzungus – white people – through the media, tourism and developmental workers. Moving around TTCs with two black female assistants, both in their twenties and therefore similar in age to most of the student teachers, helped generate data in areas that were ‘hidden’ to me or to which I, for various reasons, was excluded access. However, it also conveyed a sense of familiarity and social acceptance to appear at the TTCs with the assistants.

Fields of teacher education  43 One field assistant told me that ‘They [students and tutors] think you are OK when you walk with one of us’. The presence of the assistants helped establish a sense of familiarity with actors, especially with female students, who were less inclined to talk to me. Unsurprisingly, some informants provided more detailed explanations when talking to me, a white, female researcher from a distant land, than they presumably would have done with a compatriot, but certain knowledge remained off limits. Kenya is a very hierarchical and patriarchal society, and my female gender often proved beneficial when talking to female students and tutors. The three field assistants were, as mentioned, Kenyans of a similar age to many of the informants, two female and one male, which stimulated and shaped the process of inquiry in different ways. The young male student teachers ‘hung out’ in groups with the male research assistant, Ken, who was single and with a similar lifestyle to many of them, in various spaces both in- and outside the TTCs. Ken engaged with male informants during his free time and in situations that were not accessible to either the two female assistants or me. Different ethnographers evoke qualitatively different stories (cf. Angrosino and de Pérez, 2000), so the ambition in this book has been not to rinse the material of normative connotations, but to integrate them in the ongoing process of inquiry, analysis and reporting. Kenyan TTCs are institutions that distribute education and thus life chances to as select few in somewhat economically and politically deprived contexts. As such, they represent windows of hope, fear and emotions: the students and families I met hoped for better futures through education, they feared being expelled or not passing the exams, and rising school fees were a daily struggle. Moving into a TTC therefore potentially posed many issues related to the negotiation of the various emotions that arose due to our presence. Through many hours of meetings and conversations conducted during afternoons in the project office and in the project vehicle as we drove to, from and between TTCs, we discussed and reflected upon our field notes to find a common understanding. For my part, this involved being attentive to field assistants’ explanations and logics of why an incident or a story looked the way it did, while at the same time filling the role as a university teacher and employee with prior (theoretical and practical) understandings. Juggling these dual and sometimes conflicting roles meant that I often had to put aside my own interpretations and instead listen to the voices from the field. Soon I found myself partially in a resocialisation role as an outsider (Hylland Eriksen, 1998, p. 342) and had to develop many new practical, cultural and social competences as others had done before me (Riesman, 1992, p. xvii). I constantly had to negotiate and relate to the opinions and understanding of my requests and pursuits that people around me constructed, and had to learn to see the world through the personal filters of the people involved in the research (cf. Jones, 2001, p. 3). Spending many hours every day at TTCs as local field sites and in the office at the project’s home base with the field assistants, we – the assistants and I – came to realise that interpretations of an incident, experience or interaction could be very different depending on

44  Fields of teacher education which of us reported from the field and our different backgrounds and life worlds (cf. Milner, 2007, p. 396). I therefore had to reflect not only on my own perceptions of what I observed, but also on the views of the field assistants, which, like my own perspective, were also ‘views from somewhere’ and expressions of data that were re/interpreted through personal filters in light of their own experiences (Jones, 2001). The answer to this was constant reflexivity – not only in formulating possible explanation(s) of the material, but also in the way fieldwork, theory, informants and all other aspects were approached. This included shared reflections among the field assistants and me and understanding each other’s views from somewhere – i.e. exploring our positionality. Constantly negotiating and reflecting on the data and possible interpretations, my many discussions about data and material with the assistants helped to explore multiple possible analyses of what initially seemed to be many incoherent pieces of information. Afternoon meetings with the field assistants were important spaces for negotiating what the empirical material was trying to tell us, and served as a kind of ‘peer debriefing’ (Spall, 1998). Two or three times each week, data were thoroughly discussed and explored in terms of how personal perspectives and values might affect the findings. Together with the field assistants, I found myself undertaking a kind of detective work, trying to piece together various kinds of material stemming from multiple sources, which sometimes told different stories. Being in the field on a long-term basis proved useful, since it became possible to return to the field, to informants and their stories, in ‘an ongoing attempt to place specific encounters, events, and understandings into a fuller, more meaningful context’ (Tedlock, 2000, p. 455). Participation and observation The fieldwork comprised a large number of methods and approaches, many of which were continuously developed as the fieldwork progressed. This allowed the next step in the fieldwork to be more focused, but also emphasised that participation was not an objective process, but rather represented a series of choices on a path that was not always clear-cut. Occasionally, I found myself in blind alleys and dead ends and had to pursue other paths than first anticipated. New students emerged as others fell sick and dropped out or were sent home due to unpaid school fees or violations of college regulations; principals and deans tried to arrange the social scene in particular ways to shape my impressions of their college; and funerals, deaths, traffic jams and roads that were washed away by storms meant that fieldwork often could not be planned in advance and was subject to constant change. In one instance, I had asked a secretary at a TTC about a specific student who had been accused of violating college rules. While I was in the principal’s office, a field assistant observed the secretary sneak out through a back entrance to the administration building, heading towards the dormitory where the student in question lived, possibly to instruct the student not to speak to me. I later observed how this student avoided me when I arrived at the college,

Fields of teacher education  45 possibly fearing repercussions from the college administration if revealing details about the incident to me. This example illustrated that the path to insight was never clear-cut, that many actors were involved in constructing the ever-changing social scene, and that my mode of participation was never indifferent. I started by hanging out at the colleges for three months, accompanied by field assistants and equipped with a notebook, in order to become acquainted with the places, the people, and the daily routines. I listened to informal conversations between students, observed how students and tutors reacted to and behaved towards each other, and noted students’ reactions to being students at a TTC, which provided an insight into spontaneous responses in specific contexts. Observations were also conducted in staffrooms and offices, as well as during morning assemblies with tutors and administrators. In addition, I observed a number of ‘guidance and counselling’ sessions, often led by older, female tutors or high-ranking administrative personnel, who provided guidance on and corrections to students’ social conduct at the college. Although these sessions often represented spaces for inspecting, moralising and punishing students, in many ways they also represented moments of truth, since students and their counsellors often showed emotive responses to each other during these sessions. I adapted to the cultural setting by avoiding taking notes in public, and memoed the information using the ‘verbatim principle’ (Spradley, 1979, p. 73), i.e. noting phrases, words and formulations as they were conveyed by the participants, assuming that subjects’ words held a key to cultural meaning and significance. The field material collected during the sixteen months of fieldwork was extensive and reflected multiple voices and methods. Apart from daily observations, more than 100 in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews and focus group discussions were also completed with students, tutors and administrative and managerial staff. Many shorter informal interviews and conversations conducted with students, tutors and other relevant figures were also included in the body of interview material. The research process represented a diverse account in terms of voices, density and approaches; the compiled material was so extensive and ‘robust’ that it could not be subjected to any arbitrary interpretation (see Lave and Wenger, 2003, p. 196), such as my subjective favoured interpretation. Bourdieu’s theory of the logic of practice (1977) and Malinowski’s notion of participant observation (1922) offered ways of learning about the complex, social and often unconscious patterns of logic that were part of social life at the TTCs. One ambition was to explore life from within, while at the same time maintaining a critical distance; in Bourdieu’s optic, to objectify my own objects and myself as a member of the local community in order to make explicit the meanings and values people experienced. Participating in everyday life at the TTCs, engaging in informal conversations with informants, positioning ourselves and learning through participation, by doing, observing and talking, taught me what Melhuus (2002) calls the nitty-gritty of daily life in TTCs. ‘Deep hanging out’ (Geertz,

46  Fields of teacher education 1998) in staffrooms, classrooms, corridors, sports fields and dormitories gave me a sense of the rhythm and the rules of the game. I wished to generate ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1994, p. 215) that allowed acting and being to be linked to surroundings, situations and context; participating in the daily life of the TTCs allowed me to gradually gain a deeper insight in the lived lives. The dual process of observation and participation sought to capture Geertz’s (1983) idea of experience as something both ‘near and distant’, i.e. recognising people’s own interpretations and experiences while at the same time acknowledging more formal, theoretical or, in the literature, conveyed descriptions and understandings of the phenomenon. But formal descriptions and terms are also formulated from positions ‘somewhere’ and are therefore not objective accounts of the truth. Like others before me, I realised that I had to move from ‘participant observation’ as a main methodological strategy to the ‘observation of participation’ (cf. Tedlock, 2000). Participant observation is a well-known approach in ethnographic studies, yet it implies a paradoxical combination of both involvement and objective detachment. It has often been argued that we cannot study the world without being part of it, but participation is not tied to objectivity, neutrality and distance (Tedlock, 2000, p. 466), as mentioned earlier. Researchers’, assistants’ and participants’ voices, perspectives, narratives and counter-narratives are all represented in the interpretations and findings of a study (Milner, 2007, p. 396). Ultimately, this means that no single voice or narrative is privileged over another. Yet, when writing up our field notes and compiling material, some approaches were privileged over others. Potentially, the material could be used to tell many stories and subjected to a multitude of analyses. Cultural meaning is not a stable, objective and universal essence, but constructed and negotiated in the context of the research situation. It is, in other words, contextualised, since ‘people come into interactions by assuming situational identities that enhance their own self-conceptions or serve their own needs, which may be context specific rather than socially or culturally normative’ (Angrosino and de Pérez, 2000, p. 689). In writing up field notes for the final analysis, I chose one path as a possible representation of the voices that emerged during the fieldwork, and I did so well aware that other stories could also have found their way into this book, while other stories remained buried in the field notes. Issues of comparison Evans-Pritchard presumably once said that ‘There is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method – and that is impossible!’ (Melhuus, 2002, p. 80; Peacock, 2002, p. 44). There is little agreement regarding what might constitute the comparative method in anthropology and the many variables involved in making comparisons (Moore, 2005, pp. 2–3). Nevertheless, this book takes on the impossible task of comparing three diverse cultures of teacher education and what they meant for student

Fields of teacher education  47 teachers’ socio-psycho-cultural becoming. The broader purpose is to explore how schooling at teacher education institutions influences student teachers implicitly through institutional processes of becoming and in a wider sense outside the realms of a teacher education setting in the Global South. In the analysis, I grappled with the anthropological analytical device of making ‘the strange familiar and the familiar strange’ (Melhuus, 2002, p. 73). Located in a particular position in the social field, I tried to keep a critical distance, yet at the same time empathetically participate in people’s social lives (Malinowski, 1922). Comparative consciousness implies a sense of both global unity and local distinctions; this means rejecting the idea of universalised teacher education, and instead reflecting upon the cultural variety. The questions that remained were: Which perspectives, units, or contexts were to be analysed, and what would be the better measure of comparison? How could Western-inspired perspectives on teacher education, professionalism, institutional culture and becoming inform this study, with its focus on understanding the cultural variety of sociality in teacher education in a world with different epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies (see Melhuus, 2002, p. 82) that have limited reference to Western traditions? Processes, becomings and performances operate in less fixed ways than many theories presume. Modernity, for instance, ‘turned out to be less a fixed destination than a vast and inconsistent field of warring possibilities, possibilities neither simultaneously reachable nor systematically connected, neither well defined nor unequivocally attractive’ (Geertz, 1995, cited in Moore, 2005, p. 4). Instead of comparing essences, Melhuus (2002) suggests focusing on ‘issues of relevance’ in cross-cultural comparison. In other words, people, objects and essences are not units of comparison, but rather meanings, such as ways of constructing relationships between objects, persons and situations (Melhuus, 2002). The emphasis is on how these meanings create systems or coherence (Melhuus, 2002, p. 82), on signification and making distinctions, and on how these distinctions are perceived. To this end, Melhuus suggests conserving ethnographic richness; that is, the context of the cultural beliefs and behaviours that we study. The issue of relevance here involves comparing the variety of meaningful universes for the students at the three TTCs and establishing how this comparison can shed light on their professional development. Through this, we can then discuss what this means for the study of teacher education and professionalisation on a larger scale. Sense derives from context, according to Strathern (1987), and viewing the TTC as a social field, where students become positioned and their professional becoming is negotiated in landscapes of power and hierarchy, necessitates a deliberate exploration of context. The emphasis when writing up material was therefore placed on making the context for the interpretation visible and available (cf. Melhuus, 2002, p. 87). Apart from closely examining the relation between the material and the setting in which it occurred and was compared, I also turned to multiple sources of information additional to the many interviews, conversations and observations. The fieldwork generated more than 1,200 pages of field notes, including observations and informal

48  Fields of teacher education conversations, 2,500 pages of transcripts from interviews and group discussions and more than 150 kilograms of other documents, including questionnaires, surveys, diaries, assistants’ notes, photos, posters, action plans and written regulations (see Dahl, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b). The quality of data was multifaceted, complex and not always clear-cut. This led to an appreciation that reality must be comprehended through its representation, not through the spoken words and actions in themselves. Statements and incidents included in the field notes represent a subjective, experienced reality, from informants, from the field assistants and from me. The context was ’doubly constructed’ (Melhuus, 2002, p. 87): first by informants, then by assistants, then in the common space of interpretation between field assistants and myself, and finally by me. By paying attention to details and contradictions, to exceptions and patterns, and by exploring the relations between categories, I tried to identify the most plausible of the possible interpretations, well aware that other stories could also have been told. I had to acknowledge that all knowledge is situated, as Donna Haraway told us (1992). Producing knowledge in the space in and between the grids and groups of the social field with many actors and assistants was therefore a condition that led to the final product and the story which is told here. To deny that all knowledge is marked by its origin, for instance by the conditions of the fieldwork, is to claim universally applicable knowledge. Knowledge produced during fieldwork must therefore be seen as limited, specific and partial; yet, constantly and persistently striving in every possible way to apply a reflexive approach to fieldwork and analysis increased the probability that the findings would be applicable to other settings beyond the realm of the specific TTCs included in this study, for instance in other Global Southern or Global Northern contexts. For this study, this means that I let people speak and share their thoughts, ideas and concerns. But I take a position by actively constructing the reasoning. Malinowski (1922) introduced participant observation as a way of pursuing insight into the mindsets and understandings of the world among informants – for the ethnographer to walk a mile in the shoes of others. But Clifford Geertz’s (1983) idea of experience as something which, as mentioned, is simultaneously ‘near and distant’ goes one step further, suggesting the ethnographer takes different positions in relation to the empirical material; for instance, not only letting people’s voices be represented in the analysis, but engaging with literature and different and possible alternative interpretations. ‘Near’ implies engaging with informants’ definitions of themselves as persons and their thoughts, feelings and beliefs about the world, while ‘distant’ implies conceptualisations and formal descriptions of a given phenomenon. The belief that there is no essential core we can observe and ‘map’, and that the world is only partially visible and can be understood only from particular positions implies that fieldwork pays greater attention to processes of negotiating what findings represent. What I offer is a glimpse into life in three different teacher education institutions in a non-Western context, and a glimpse into the contextualised lives of individual students.

Fields of teacher education  49 The analysis offered here will be neither theory-driven nor atheoretical, neutral and essentialist, but driven by a desire to understand differences, categories and meanings that would otherwise be invisible. I therefore turn to constructionism, comparison, fieldwork and thick descriptions to generate a plausible picture of how the process of becoming a teacher can be understood in the context of Kenyan TTCs, both professionally and personally.

Structure of the book Apart from this introduction, the book contains five substantive chapters and a conclusion. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 focus on different cultures in institutions of teacher education, each exploring a particular college or ‘site’. These three chapters each illustrate different sites that foreground different pathways to professionalism. They visit and explore chains of interrelated themes emerging in the local college cultures, and inform us about individual and collective processes of becoming and subjectification in each place. Each chapter does five things: it reviews the contextual site by looking at local history, geography, materiality and economy to provide a relative ground for the exploration of life, socioculture and the meaningful universe; it explores the managerial, disciplinary and administrative system and arrangements, and how these become reconstituted and orchestrated in action in everyday life; it travels into student and school cultures to grasp how life is experienced and arranged from the point of view of students and staff; it turns to pedagogy and finally to institutional rationality to provide an examining frame for understanding mechanisms of subjectivity and becoming. In Chapter 5, the link between institutional socioculture and personal and professional becoming is explored, concluding with analytical perspectives about individual becoming in context and institutional becoming as a collective process. Through the life stories of five students, we get one step closer to understanding how institutions shape and produce particular persons and professionals in ways whereby the development of personal and professional self is imbricated in place, meaning that several processes of becoming take place simultaneously and these processes are intertwined and mutually constitutive. Chapter 6 discusses what socioculture, discipline, normalisation and the everyday lives of students at TTCs mean for the becoming of schools and teachers in Kenya, as well as outside the realms of the Global South.

2 ‘No time for us’ Struggling for success to become professional, urban middle class

The fortress: a stronghold of history and tradition Half an hour’s drive outside Nairobi, Lexington TTC rises as a fortress at the end of a dusty road, situated on a broad hill and surrounded by high walls with barbed wire on top. The guards only reluctantly permit us to enter the gate. Seriously, they note the vehicle number and my passport and Kenyan identity number in a small black notebook. The two guards look suspiciously at me and ask what I want to see the principal for. One of them says, ‘Some people come here and pretend to see the principal, yet they are here to see the students and bring them outside the college.’ Little could I know that students are not permitted to leave the compound during weekdays. Their whereabouts within the college are strictly under surveillance by a hierarchy of prefects. Students can be expelled for a number of ‘offences’. For now, I just answer the many questions and hope to be let through the narrow pass to the college. He sternly informs me that if my papers are not signed by the principal, he will not let me out of the gate. He greets me with an official salute, holding up his right hand to his forehead for a few seconds as he straightens his back and looks to the horizon. This welcoming incident at Lexington provided a glimpse into the cultural universe of this college: history and tradition coupled with a strong hierarchical structure consisting of deputies, deans, heads of departments, tutors, prefects, assisting staff, second-year and finally first-year students picked by the principal, who was the dominant figure in the institution. It was a physically immense college situated on about 75 acres with several sports grounds, a double-storey resource centre and, in addition to the usual college facilities such as classroom buildings, an administration block, toilets and dormitories, facilities such as a private restaurant, beauty parlour, dispensary and kiosk. At the time, the college had its own magazine, the Lexington College Star, which was published thrice yearly under the auspices of the administration. Here students could read about the college’s latest performance in national tests, sports days or the purchase of a new college bus. The college was a ‘town in the town’, as people from the surrounding area told me. There was little interaction between the college and its surrounding area. Very few people ever visited the college apart from ministerial staff from Nairobi. People

‘No time for us’  51 from outside entered the college only if they were employed as workers, and students left the compound only during daytime when they had a legitimate excuse, such as short periods of teaching practice at some of the primary schools around the college. The staff included seventy-seven tutors and fifty-nine subordinate staff, around one-third of whom – mostly tutors and the principal, deans, matrons and college nurse – were accommodated in staff quarters in two- and three-bedroom buildings at the far rear of the compound. Lexington TTC was one of the eighteen governmental TTCs in Kenya at the time of the fieldwork, and is one of Kenya’s oldest teacher colleges, constructed in 1949 by British missionaries in Central Province, the richer and more fertile area of the country. The college, like many other governmental TTCs, was sponsored by the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), which also dominated the college’s BOG. In 2010, a total of 622 students were enrolled in the college. Being close to the capital city, this college was a sought-after place to be posted as a lecturer, especially for older female university candidates whose husbands were employed by the government in Nairobi. In addition, the workload placed on tutors was smaller in Lexington compared to other TTCs. At the time, students could not choose between colleges, but were assigned to one by the central administration. Yet, many students told me that coming to Lexington seemed a dream come true, since many preferred not to be posted in TTCs situated in rural areas. Lexington had running water, food and facilities, and it was close to town. Members of the Kenyan nobility had studied teaching at Lexington, and this had improved its reputation as a distinctive college. The impressive history of Lexington made many students initially think positively of the college. This perception changed, however, for many students during their stay: MALE STUDENT  Before

I came here, rumours told me that this college Lexington is one of the best colleges in Kenya. So, what I expected in terms of buildings, teachers, teaching … it was not met. Some people said that [anonymised] learnt here. So, I was expecting a very big building somehow. If we generalise the administration, I think it is extreme. Because we heard it from our seniors, some of them say that even if a window is broken, you complain about that, the next time you’ll be at home going there for either two weeks, or you’ll be going for good. So, we just keep quiet. (Interview, 22-year-old first-year male student)

At the beginning of their stay, many students were impressed with the college’s position in the top three on a list compiled by the national examination council which ranked the TTCs according to the students academic performances. The college held a restricted good, which in students’ perceptions might lead to higher exam grades and better future employment for the educated elite. It was a college with a constant flow of exams and tests and many co-curricular activities, such as seminars, sports activities and student groups. This signalled a TTC that favoured not solely the academic but also

52  ‘No time for us’ social and cultural aspects, which were considered necessary in shaping a ‘complete’ teacher: MR BANDU  Our

pupils [students] are very exposed! You see, a teacher is supposed to be an all-round person. Because when he goes to teach in a primary school, he is supposed to expose those children to all those areas. Now, a teacher who has not been exposed to all that, he will be lacking something. Let us look at things like clubs and societies. You may go to another [private] college, you find the attention might not be the same … A private institution will only associate himself with those who have passed. The only thing private institutions have is just academics. You are not a complete teacher without those other aspects. (Interview, deputy principal)

The deputy Mr Bandu’s explanation of the differences between the private and governmental colleges in many ways reflected how the social field of TTCs was a stratified and hierarchical space, in which Lexington thought of itself as a dominant actor: a leading, national teacher education institution in the field of other, less prestigious and dominant teacher education institutions, using Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of the field as social and in which agents occupy different positions. The idea of quality teacher education is summed up in the institution’s written motto, which was displayed on a large eight-by-ten-metre wall painting on the administration building. It depicted happy young male and female students playing basketball and listening to tutors’ lectures with slogans inscribed in large letters, such as ‘Providing Holistic Training’, producing ‘Quality Teachers’. The happy and determined information communicated on the wall sharply contrasted with students’ experiences of college life. So, how did street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980) render these lofty visions into the conflict-ridden and hierarchical everyday practice that could be witnessed at the place? Lexington was a place dominated by a single person, the principal, and the deferential posture and attitude of the staff and students bore witness to an institution ruled by power, hierarchy and discipline. Lexington was a place where many students arrived with high expectations, only to be disappointed by their experience at the college. In spite of broken expectations, the college still enjoyed a reputation as performing well academically. Many students considered that the place could garner them an advantage over students from other TTCs in their future careers: MIKE  When

people outside there realise you are from Lexington Teachers Training College, they tend to expect a lot from you than from students in other teacher training colleges. RESEARCHER  Why is that so? CHARLES  People outside there believe we perform well and that we are disciplined. There are cases where the private primary schools come and book final-year students before completing their course.

‘No time for us’  53 RESEARCHER  Why do you think that you are that in demand? CHARLES  Because we have good teachers [tutors], and people

know that we are disciplined. Our tutors are the best. They teach well and never miss classes. They don’t frustrate us. (Informal conversation, students)

Students at Lexington rarely complained about the place; instead, they spoke about it in rationalised and intellectualised ways, praising Lexington’s seemingly high status and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986): MALE STUDENT:  We

are privileged that most of the very crucial events that are attained in institutions, maybe training institutions, are normally given priority to Lexington. You find that such chances help our teacher’s training, to interact with very many higher-ranked gentlemen within the country, who at least in one time will try to assist or help in a different way. (Interview, 23-year-old second-year male student)

Students were dissatisfied with the place but never rebelled against the structures openly. Rather, they subordinated themselves to discipline, study and social restraint. During the daytime, the school was totally deserted apart from classrooms, where students sat silently bent over their desks and copied notes from the tutors’ lectures. Not a sound was heard. Often I could see the assistant dean of students standing in the outdoor corridor in the office building with his legs apart, a straight back and folded arms. From this vantage point he could overlook all the first-year classrooms. During most of my visits to the school, tutors were either in class lecturing or silently occupied at their desks in the staff room. As mentioned, very few people from the local community had ever visited Lexington. People from the community were, unlike other colleges, hardly ever invited inside the walls. The college administration told me that this was because ‘things could get lost’; for instance cattle and other goods could be stolen. Local people living in the community around the college explained that crime and violence had recently escalated due to a local crime syndicate, Mungiki, which operated in semirural areas and had relocated from the busy downtown areas of Nairobi, where security and police controls were more frequent. There were less police in the semirural areas but still much money in circulation, and Mungiki could operate relatively undisturbed and ask for protection money from private transportation and local shopkeepers. Rumours in the media, calling Mungiki ‘the biggest and most dangerous gang in the world, a thuggish army terrorising Kenya with extortion rackets and gruesome punishments’ (Goffard, 2011), probably contributed to the ‘closedness’ of the college and made Lexington develop into a distinct cultural universe having little interaction with the surrounding community. I spent one and a half years hanging out in classrooms, dormitories, corridors, the dining hall and staff room, and could observe how students were nearly always engaged in academic schoolwork or in an obligatory, noncurricular activity. They had very little free time. Tuition started at eight a.m.

54  ‘No time for us’ and finished at four p.m., when the co-curricular activities such as sports and clubs (journalism, choir, etc.) started. Dinner was served at six p.m. Shortly after, ‘evening preps’, in which students were supposed to work unsupervised in classes, started, which in many instances lasted until nine p.m. In other instances, evening activities such as obligatory song contests and ethnic dances continued until midnight. At Lexington, like most other governmental TTCs, there were rules for nearly everything: eating and sleeping hours, dress, appropriate behaviour, class attendance, use of dormitories, duties and so on. Yet the difference between this and other colleges was that it made a great effort to actually put the rules into practice and make students obey them. Lights were turned off in the closely packed dormitories at ten p.m. A hierarchy of prefects, who were students specially appointed by the administration, occupied better rooms and took care to enforce ‘orderly manners’. They inspected uniforms to make sure they were clean and not full of holes; ensured that students attended their daily cleaning duties; and kept watch to ensure that female and male students did not visit each other in the dormitories or have bodily contact. Students were permitted to leave the college only a few hours each week during weekends. Breaking the rules resulted in punishment ranging from extra cleaning duties to dismissal and expulsion. Pregnant students were sent home on forced ‘maternity leave’ for one year. Students caught in ‘befriending’ – extramarital sexual relations – were sanctioned with dismissal for several months. Many of these students did not return as they had to repay tuition fees and their family support often disappeared, assuming the student had behaved badly. The academic demands were perceived by many students as extremely demanding: After the first year, students sat exams in eighteen subjects ranging from science and languages to social science. In the months before the exam weeks, students studied nearly all the time. Preparation for the exams went on twenty-four hours a day, interrupted only by two hours of sleep from midnight to two a.m. The exam regulations demanded that if students failed one exam, they would be required to sit again the following year for all subjects. This meant in practice a full year’s extra studies. Students, who passed their exams after the first year were classified in an academic hierarchy as A-, B-, and C-students, depending on their exam scores. This score decided in which subjects they could specialise. A-students specialised in science, and the less lucky students had to settle for the less prestigious social or humanistic science subjects, which meant less chance of employment after TTC. As the fieldwork progressed, I observed how many students appeared tired and exhausted, second-year students even more so than first years. When Lexington students spoke about their education, many were unenthusiastic about the present and worried for the future. The differing structural and cultural environments at private and governmental TTCs caused significant differences in the learning and working conditions. At private TTCs, many students complained about the lack of resources, since these colleges were run as business enterprises. At Lexington,

‘No time for us’  55 the students’ complaints were mostly about the academic workload, which was perceived as exhausting and left students with very little free time. The extensive syllabus and lesson plans necessitated that tutors speed through the material. In addition, school days were longer. The adolescence of these college students could be considered stolen, similar to what Boyden (1997) calls ‘stolen childhoods’.

Apparatus When the architects designed the TTCs in Kenya, they must have thought about how surveillance of students could be enhanced. Most of the governmental TTCs are designed with a parking lot in front of the college administration building, where an open corridor leads you to the staff room on one side and the administration’s offices on the other. Classrooms surrounding an open square could easily be overseen, as in Foucault’s notion of panopticon (1977). Deans and their deputies could monitor the compound and student movements from their offices. It was not by chance that preppies and freshmen, first-year students, were situated in classes closer to the deans’ offices. The design implied that these students seemingly needed more surveillance than second-year students, who were assumed to have learned the appropriate behaviour and therefore could be situated further from the office building. Female and male student dormitories were situated as far as possible from each other on the compound. Students were supposed to abstain from relationships with the opposite sex, especially intimate relationships. At the far end of the campus, and hidden behind a lush green forest, were tutors’ quarters: about 30 two- to four-room houses offered as free housing to instructors. The principal actively used the housing issue to reward those tutors who had academically high-performing students and strong class attendance. Housing in the area was costly, and getting a free house within the compound provided financial savings and a needed measure of security. At the beginning of the 2010s, when the fieldwork commenced, the restructionist era was well underway. The restructuring agenda was, similar to what other educational institutions experienced (cf. Wexler, 1992, p. 13), about restoring respect for the authorities and reviving the moral power of the bureaucratic leaders of the institutions. It was a reaction to the public opinion that primary school teachers had lost their sense of professional pride and nobility, leading to a decrease in status and prestige of the teaching profession. This changing perception of primary school teachers had begun fifteen years before, just after the turn of the century, as Kenyans felt that primary school teachers were producing ‘educational failures’ (Serpell, 1993) – that is, school candidates who, after eight years of primary schooling, were returning to farming and not succeeding in more lucrative employment or advanced education. The qualifying grades for admission at a TTC had also dropped significantly. Becoming a teacher was now a ‘common thing’, not a good worth striving for. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the issue of moral values was a major concern in Kenyan teacher education. The restoration of moral cultural values in

56  ‘No time for us’ teacher education at Lexington was seen as a necessary thing among staff and administrators. Sitting on a bench near the principal’s office, I overheard a conversation between an upset father and a first-year female student who had been caught socialising intimately with a male student. The upset father, speaking loudly, told his daughter: ‘I sent you to college and all you do is prostitution around’ (cited from Dahl, 2014b, p. 646). Moral transgressions were disciplined especially severely by the college. Consequently, students felt their freedom was curtailed: ANGELA  They

treat us like children, like we don’t know what we are doing, as if we go out there, we should not sleep outside, like if we can’t take care of ourselves. LIZ  Weekends are supposed to be free time, but it is not. When you want to go out on your own, you have to go to ask for that permission to sleep outside, of which is not easy as it seems. So I don’t see if we have any free time, because even on Saturday you have to be here by five. If you miss at that time, there is a punishment for you. (FGD, second-year female students) The issue of being disciplined for engaging in intimate relations with the opposite sex was a recurrent theme when students spoke about their life at college. The moral decay was of great concern to the institution and something students experienced as limiting their interactions: JOYCE  At

times it forces you to go to the bushes [with your boyfriend] because here we have hosts and hostels, and they make sure that you don’t step to boys hosts when you are a lady, and them too, they don’t come to ours. Like in universities, they are given freedom, people can go anywhere. So, that is why it forces people to go to such places [in the bushes]. EDNA  It is not only at night. Let’s say today is a weekend, I have my boyfriend within the college, we can go and sit in the shade somewhere within the compound. But then, you’ll find a tutor coming close. He’ll usually pretend to be doing exercise but he’ll supervise you. And he’ll come up with something that maybe was not happening. Maybe you are sitting close. He’ll come up with that you’re messing up, and you’re behaving like children. And now the dean of students will have his eyes on you. They’ll ever been on wanting to know what is she or what are they now doing. (FGD, second-year female students) At the college, there were rules for nearly everything: When to get up and when go to bed, how to queue in the line in the dining hall, how to do cleaning duties and homework, how and when to sit in class, how to behave during breaks. The assistant dean could most often be observed standing in front of the administration building under the outdoor roof with arms crossed over his chest, firmly watching the students during breaks. To avoid this control, many students stayed in class and studied instead of having

‘No time for us’  57 their breaks outside. At this college, students ran to and from the toilet in order not to waste time on private issues. Subsequently, they waited in front of the classroom until the tutor signed them in and allowed them to re-enter the class. Breaking the rules was handled swiftly and harshly without discussion. In one incident, two students, a male and a female student, had been physically fighting over space in a physical education class during their teaching practice. The female student was admitted to hospital because of injuries from the fight, but when she came back to college, she was suspended without being permitted to tell her version of the story: ‘I came back from hospital and found my suspension letter ready. The mayor brought the letter to me immediately after I entered the dormitory. So I just packed and left.’ Criticising or objecting to the system seemed pointless. The single most important feature of a neoliberal government is, as Davies and Bansel inform us (2010, p. 5), ‘that it systematically dismantles the will to critique, thus potentially shifting the very nature of what a university is and the ways in which academics understand their work’. The market becomes the singular discourse through which individual and institutional acceptability will be recognised (Davies and Bansel, 2010, p. 5), the market in this case being the audit technologies that ‘standardise and regularise expert knowledge so that they can be used to classify and diagnose populations of workers’ (Davies and Bansel, 2010, p. 7), such as students and tutors, according to how they deliver academic performative standards in the form of exam grades and pass percentages. Fighting, drunkenness, theft, falling pregnant and – according to the administration – quarrelling with a tutor, or worse, arguing with a tutor in public in front of a class, were considered the most serious cases and punished with dismissal and expulsion. The mayor was a 28-year-old male second-year student who was appointed by the administration and was responsible for handling students’ cases. His job, according to him, was to ‘maintain the highest level of discipline’. At any given time, there would be at least twenty students expelled or dismissed from the college. Students were even punished for ‘offences’ committed outside the college compound. When students came back from weekend leave, their breath would be checked for alcohol or cigarette consumption. Offending this rule was punished with suspension from TTC for several weeks or being required to wash the whole administration block from the inside – a fairly big punishment considering the size of the task. The college placed much emphasis on students being disciplined and acting in a self-controlled manner, instilling discipline in submissive subjects. For instance, the female matron, who was responsible for the female students’ dormitories, told me that ‘it is very hard to find a student being punished because they are very disciplined.’ Seen through the lens of Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, the hidden forms violence takes when overt expression is impossible (1977, p. 196). In this case, the institution exercised symbolic violence and students exercised self-suppression. Students were maintained in certain social and bodily positions in order

58  ‘No time for us’ to comply with the unwritten norms and rules at TTC. Discipline was not often spoken about at Lexington; rather, it was present in a silent version embedded in the structures of the college, operating as a way of legitimising the increased control that was exercised by the college administration. The institution was a class and racial system of social organisation that built on ‘the matrix of domination’, which, according to Collins (1998), is a coherent system of different oppressive and discriminatory systems. The Lexington dominant matrix favoured whiteness, science, sexual abstinence and puerile behaviour in intimate relationships (Dahl, 2014b) in a system built upon Western, Christian, male domination. It victimised the non-academic, non-Christian, non-male and students who engaged in a youth life that differed from heterosexual family values. Since virtually all students at Lexington secretly had boyfriends and girlfriends and engaged in intimate, premarital relations, nearly all students became ‘Other’ (Collins, 1998) in relation to the dominant matrix, and therefore illegitimate, abnormal and inappropriate. Yet the social hierarchy at Lexington could be maintained without overt violence. Students seemed to have internalised the dominant matrix and discipline as bodily expressions, which could be seen during class hours. Here they would automatically shift from one academic subject to another when the bell indicated that a new class had commenced. At other colleges there would be doors opening, chairs scrambling, loud talk, and going to the toilet when the bell rang. But not at Lexington. Here students would automatically close their books from the previous class and open the book for the next class or course at the signal of the bell, and start reading, regardless of whether the tutor had arrived in class. Their bodies and minds seemingly had become self-governing entities. Though, as discussed in the following, power was still externalised in many ways, to some extent, the controlled became the source of their own control (Foucault, 1977). The principal at Lexington was a powerful woman in her late forties who was feared and envied for her power to, among other things, as she put it, ‘shuffle’ tutors. Shuffling meant demoting or promoting, giving or taking away free housing and other goods. When the fieldwork for this book commenced, the principal had just been appointed. One year later she got rid of and replaced the ‘soft’ deputy principal. The new deputy soon became known among students as ‘the Bulldog’: someone who would carry out unpopular decisions without hesitation. The power in the college tightly governed tutors’ and students’ actions; however, in this sense external regulation was an adjunct to self-governance (Foucault, 1977), where personal humiliation and bodily punishment were enacted in public performance. Tutors and students acted on behalf of the responses of the institution that they received for their actions. The power was totalitarian, but it to some degree remained external since it was directed towards outer, visible, bodily entities, not the inner spiritual life. Tutors and students did not live in a social vacuum. They always got immediate responses to their actions, even though these reactions were mostly negative. This meant that they could preserve their self-understandings, even though they were genuinely disciplined (see also Chapter 5).

‘No time for us’  59 Lexington was, as mentioned, a large institution in physical terms, such as the number of employees, buildings, and material resources, but also in its political agendas and ambitions to be marked as an elite TTC. It was a bureaucratic institution with many social hierarchies, strict roles and obligations for the social actors. Yet, below the surface another social order and power structure had emerged parallel to the official one. At Lexington, the student council occupied a central role. It was easy to recognise a student from the student council by their white plastic-covered name badges and the fact that they often wore grey suits with black ties. To make the control more efficient, many of the student complaints, disciplinary measures and other issues related to students were handled by an official governing body formally called ‘the student council of discipline’, hereafter ‘the student council,’ which had grown considerably in size during the year preceding the fieldwork. It was a hierarchically organised structure including the previously mentioned mayor, who was a male student, and his two deputies, to be of different gender, followed by a large number of seniors – the local terminology for prefects. The student council was responsible for a wide variety of college activities, including sports, entertainment, environment, games, and other dimensions of life in the dormitories, the dining hall and the larger campus, and each had a complicated, inbuilt system of seniors and prefects. Members of the student council were highly regarded by the administration and feared by the common students. Formally, the student council at Lexington was an extension of the administration. But it had become a ‘system within the system’: a subgrouping that operated relatively undisturbed by the formal administration. One of the first things the mayor, who resided in two small rooms situated in the middle of the classroom buildings, told the research assistant upon one of our first visits to the college, was: ‘We [the mayor and the two assistant mayors] run this college. The administration just follows up.’ The student council at Lexington had grown considerably in size and therefore challenged the formal power system. This had resulted in power struggles and intelligent manoeuvres to maintain and enhance power between the subgroupings, which was reflected in the mayor’s account of the principal’s operations in the field of power at college: MAYOR  Personally, I think that lady [the principal] has a problem. You know,

even when we go for the board meetings, I am able to request things she can’t request for. All she does is to sit there and say ‘yes’ to everything, everything. That is why when she sometimes addresses the students and she says ‘dear students’, I ask myself a lot of questions. First and foremost, she was not supposed to be the principal here. The principal in Lexington should be a representative of the PCEA church, and that is why the PCEA doesn’t recognise her as the principal. Even some tutors and some subordinate staff don’t. But she is a very clever woman. She has started attending the PCEA church and their functions and even attended with the choir members, a function that was held by the PCEA.

60  ‘No time for us’ She also attends their church services and talks good about the PCEA in every address to the students. She has also tried to get me in her coat but has found it very hard. She wants me to give her the necessary support all the time. (Informal conversation, second-year male student) The principal was under pressure from strong forces in the BOG. The unkind remarks about the principal by the mayor illustrated the power struggles between the students’ board and the administration, and how the student council – personified by the mayor – seemingly had achieved a strong power position within the institution. Power at Lexington was characterised by a landscape of different subgroups, but the mayor’s power was – like the principal’s – not built on genuine participation by its members, the other students. For instance, when the students passed by the mayor in the outside corridors at the college, I observed them do so at a safe distance of several metres in order to minimise risk of eye or bodily contact with the mayor. The mayor was a powerful individual exerting power over his fellow students, who silently and without obstruction submitted to being constantly monitored, disciplined and categorised according to their ability to subordinate themselves to the dominant agents, such as the mayor. The following scene was recorded during fieldwork, which shows how the mayor was able to use other students: The mayor opens the door to the office and a male student, who has been waiting outside the office, enters. The mayor turns to the male student: ‘Go and buy for me some bread. Just try to hurry please, okay?’ The male student silently leaves the office in a hurry and after two minutes another female student appears in the doorway with a thermos flask of tea. The mayor then says to the female student: ‘Thank you very much, Jane. Come back after around ten minutes.’ The female student looks down, nods, and leaves the mayor’s office without talking. Shortly after the male student comes back with the bread, which he hands over to the mayor, who does not look at the student nor talk to him. The student leaves the room without a word. The mayor calls on his cell phone, ‘Jane, kwani huko wapi? Tumemaliza. [Kiswahili meaning: Jane, where are you? We are through.]’ After a few minutes the female student appears in the doorway. The mayor looks at her. ‘Jane, you went for good?’ The female student looks down and takes the empty cups. Before she reaches the door, she receives new instructions: ‘Just bring the cups to me in the evening because I won’t be in the office until four o’clock!’ … The mayor then turns to the field assistant: ‘You know I don’t feel like becoming just a mere teacher. I need to be a headmaster. I can manage teachers, with all the experiences that I have gained here. You know managing over 600 students is hard, but I can do it.’ (Observation, mayor’s office)

‘No time for us’  61 The silent bodily attitudes of the two students, assisting with tea, bread and secretarial work, and their lack of objections to the mayor’s commands signified the power attributed to his position. The mayor stayed in his office and delegated unpaid work to other students as secretaries, clerks, serving personnel, etc. Students seemingly accepted this authority and adhered to the mayor’s new rules out of a fear of being punished. At this college, the mayor passed sentences on students without permission from the administration, which seemingly ignored the mayor’s incidental use – what some students referred to as ‘misuse’ – of his position. Formally, the student council was subjected to rules set by the administration and the principal, but occasionally there were examples of how they could overrule the principal and, in some cases, the administration. At Lexington, like other TTCs, pregnant students were to be sent home for a forced maternity leave of one year once a pregnancy was discovered. In many cases students did not return to college because they had to repay their tuition fees, which many could not afford. Rumour had it that the administration initially wanted to send home two pregnant students shortly before their final PTE exam, but the student council objected to the dismissal, and the two students were finally left to finish their studies, even if they were pregnant. The incident illustrated that the institutional power was not univocal, and the student agenda occasionally could be raised against the administrative power. Power was constantly negotiated between the different subgroupings. As an example of the practice of shuffling mentioned earlier, after a few months in office the principal demoted Mr Bandu, an older tutor who had been appointed as deputy principal, back to being a tutor, giving his former position to an unpopular female tutor, who, as mentioned, became known among the students as ‘the Bulldog’. Mr Bandu had a reputation for being an easy-going and tolerant deputy principal who avoided confrontation and did not make unpopular decisions. Shortly after the new deputy’s entry, however, the scene changed dramatically: Students were sent home for even smaller offences, and all requests from students to the principal had to pass through the deputy’s office. The shuffling was a kind of categorical positioning, which often was based on ethnicity and personal preferences: MAYOR  The

principal is a Luhya [ethnic group stemming from western Kenya]. That is why Matt [the assistant dean of curriculum (DoC) who is also a Luhya] is her right hand. You know, I sometimes think that the principal is responsible for the disappearance of the DoC. Before the DoC left, he had a bitter exchange with the principal. You know the DoC was liberal, and the students like a person who is liberal. After the bitter exchange, the DoC disappeared. We only hear that he is sick, sometimes that he is studying. The principal never talks about him. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Ideally, the student council was supposed to be a value-free entity, elected in a democratic way by the students themselves. Yet as the aforementioned

62  ‘No time for us’ incident illustrates, ethnic categorisation resulted in differential treatment on the part of the institution towards those staff who shared the ethnic background of the principal and therefore were appointed to powerful positions as student council members. Following Staunæs (2003), intersecting categories of ethnicity constituted power. The assistant DoC, Mr Matt, was responsible for the election procedure and single­handedly shortlisted candidates from among the students, most often those with a similar ethnic background as himself and the principal. Sam, a 22-year-old male student, had applied to become mayor. In spite of being well liked and seen by other students as ‘respectable’ (i.e., who did not engage in drug or substance abuse, who was never late for classes and who did not engage in other forbidden practices), he was not shortlisted for the position. The position for membership of the student council had already been determined by the administration. The current mayor seemed the perfect match: He was feared by the students, ruled mostly in favour of the administration and did so swiftly and without challenging the administration. The mayor was a student, yet his ambitions reached beyond primary school teaching. Being a mayor provided a career track that seemed to lead to powerful and lucrative future employment. The deputy mayor bowed his head for the mayor and expressed that ‘There are no major problems between the administration and the student council, except for some small conflicts here and there.’ The question is, was the lack of open conflict the result of a contented student population, or were students normalised into being docile subjects? We will come back to that later and in Chapter 5. As mentioned, the student council occupied a central position in the college as the regulatory mechanism between students and the administration. All problems were to be first addressed to the student council, which then decided where to address the problem – in the student council or the administration: MAYOR  We

[the mayor and the deputy mayors] carry out all the disciplinary measures in the college. I have a disciplinary committee, which is chaired by me, and made up of the two deputy mayors and other officials. The executive committee looks at the mistake and decides on what punishment to give to the student. The mayor has the final decision on this. The only issues that relate to discipline that we don’t handle are things like pregnancy and fighting. These are referred to the dean of students, because they need no interrogation, but a suspension letter. When the problems are too serious that we can’t handle as a committee, then the matter is referred to the executive committee of the tutors, which is headed by the principal and of which the mayor is also the member. But there are very few such cases that get transferred in the college to the executive committee. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

In deciding on the allocation of resources to handle a wide array of problems, the student council in reality had nearly full power over student

‘No time for us’  63 discipline. The body contained the trinity of the judicial, legislative and executive powers, powers that in civil, democratic societies are normally segregated. The institution had a clear yet unwritten catalogue of sentencing for offences, such as pregnancy and fighting. Seemingly, no interrogation or investigation was necessary when students committed these offences. The college management conveniently left the sentencing to the student council, and was in this way excused from being involved. This made it impossible for students to address the problems directly at the top. Not being permitted to address themselves directly to the principal, students had to visit the Bulldog’s office in advance, and before that address a problem through the student council. Many students were dissatisfied by this. In addition, students were not permitted to enter the staff room if they needed to see a tutor, so they waited in long queues in front of the staff room for tutors to leave for classes. Students seemed aware of their subject positioning (Davies and Harré, 1990) as the lowest in terms of power and authority in the hierarchical system. Interaction with the administration could only pass through the student council, on which the students felt too dependent: STUDENT  Here

when a student does a mistake, the student will first be referred to the mayor’s office for interrogation. Then after the interrogation, if you are found guilty of committing that mistake, then the mayor decides what punishment to give you. The punishment ranges from cleaning the school compound, expulsion or suspension. This is why people vote along ethnic lines here. Because it will give them credit when they do a mistake. If you vote one of your tribesmen there, he can save you. But if you find other tribesmen they will definitely have to punish you. So people prefer voting one of their own, so that they can at least help you when faced with a problem. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

The quotation also illustrates that students experienced how ethnicity as a social category might work as a positive resource when being positioned next to ethnic prefects, and experience differential, positive treatment. Yet most of the time students experienced that their ethnic background worked as a social category that hindered their everyday lives and made them subject to unjust discipline, as an effect of being constituted as a student or an ethnic subject, for instance, rather than a person. Ethnicity played a significant role in the question of establishing the power and discipline system of students. Students actively struggled to constitute and influence what should be the social, dominant category by ‘voting one of their own’; that is, voting to elect those of a similar ethnic background for powerful positions in the hierarchy. Many people thought of ethnicity as a dominant category for how social life was shaped and constituted. ‘Politics in Kenya is all ethnicised’, as the research assistant commented. ‘Ethnicisation’ has come to be used to refer to the socially constructed nature of ethnicity, says Phoenix (2008, p. 22). I wondered, though, if politics at Lexington really was ethnicised,

64  ‘No time for us’ or whether ethnicity was just another category working in the composite institutional power struggles. Possibly, such positioning and categorisation of ethnicity and other social categories was strengthened by a system characterised by power struggles and deep divisions.

Management Most of the students and tutors at Lexington demonstrated fear of the principal in their verbal and nonverbal communication. For instance, on the rare occasions that the principal would appear in the outside corridors or in the staff room, all talk would stop. Tutors (and students) would turn towards the principal, waiting for her to give instructions with submissive attitudes that included smiling, nodding, silence, inclining faces and bodies, embodying how the college – drawing on Bourdieu (1984) – had apparently managed to internalise the social and cultural concepts communicated from the institution about ‘good employee habitus’ in tutors and students. Tutors never talked about this, but students felt the pressure in the way their freedom was curtailed in the institution: MALE STUDENT  There is no freedom in the college. Even in weekends you have your time limit. You are limited to that you are supposed to come and report back. Also in vetting, I think they [the administration] don’t have faith in the pupils, ooh sorry, I mean in the students they are admitting. They don’t develop that this is a person who wants to be a teacher, and he must … You know teachers are known to be good leaders, but here they [the administration] don’t give that freedom. It’s like they choose for you, and they believe that ‘This person will not do it the right way, so we have to give them the right way. We have to select for them, because they are not able to select for themselves.’ So, it is somehow challenging. (FGD, second-year male student) Students felt that most of their action space was already decided for them and they had only limited influence on how their time at Lexington was spent. The way the student in the previous quote referred, perhaps by mistake, to other students as ‘pupils’ bears witness to how institutional discipline had had an effect on the students’ self-understanding. But the deputy also referred to students as pupils. When students talked about the institution, they often centred on their experiences of how power was accumulated by particular individuals who misused that power to enhance private agendas: MALE STUDENT We

like some of the tutors, but not the administrators. There are cases of tutors who are given administrative positions and overuse their powers. They tend to create a gap between the students and themselves. They create a big rift. I think the reason behind their behaviour is because they feel they have a new higher status and tend to feel more powerful. (Interview, second-year male student)

‘No time for us’  65 Lexington had a reputation of being an institution with strict rules about the behaviour of tutors and students. The principal was in the superior position, controlling and regulating the work of tutors and students. Punishment was exercised bodily and mentally. Tutors were punished in nearly infantile ways. Mr Bandu explained how a former principal used to punish the wrongdoings of tutors by confining them to a desk in her office during working hours as a kind of grounding. Here they could be better supervised and observed than if they stayed in the staff room. It was a humiliating, eye-foran-eye kind of punishment: MR BANDU  She

was strict but she was good. When it came to the side of the lecturers, she made sure we were here, that we were teaching. She was disciplining the tutors. For instance, if somebody [a tutor] missed classes, someone had to explain why. If you get the second one [a warning], that is supposed to be an interdiction. Not many teachers were interdicted during her time. What she was doing was that she could remove you from the timetable. She made sure that we were here and attended classes without missing. KARI  How could she do that? MR BANDU  She never recommended people for promotion, so they just had to stay here [at the college, and not move to another and better position]. She also punished. For example, if she found that you were not working very well, she could remove you from the timetable, so you are not going to class, you are not transferred, you are coming! You see, that is also harassment. KARI  She was harassing them? MR BANDU  Yes, just going to college and you are not going to class? That is enough punishment! Because you don’t know what is going to happen next. The other option was you are coming to college and you work from her office. Entering marks, recording marks from her office. You sit there, and when a visitor comes, you go out [of the office]. That is punishment. (Interview, deputy principal) Though the current principal enjoyed a reputation of slightly easing up on discipline and control compared to the former principal, many of the tutors still feared her. One of the field assistants recounted witnessing an interaction from the bench outside the principal’s office that demonstrates how Lexington tutors lived in a thoroughly regulated and disciplined space: The principal had called an older, male tutor into her office whose students did not perform well in the midcourse exam, which students take midway after their first year of education. The following dialogue could be heard:

66  ‘No time for us’ PRINCIPAL  Mr

Wawu! You have seen how you have lacked behind? You are the weakest subject! MR WAWU  Mwalimu [Kiswahili meaning: teacher], the problem is not with me. The problem is with the students, because I taught my lessons and the exam was just set with what I had taught. PRINCIPAL  Kumi, kumi [Kiswahili meaning: ten, ten (shillings), an epithet for an inexpensive locally produced alcohol] is really disturbing you. You don’t meet the required grades. MR WAWU (WITH A RAISED VOICE IN KISWAHILI)  That one you are getting in with my own affairs. This is not a matter with the subject I am teaching. I started drinking even before I came to this college. PRINCIPAL (IN ENGLISH)  You have eleven lessons per week, but you have only attended seven of them. What about the four remaining? MR WAWU (IN ENGLISH)  Madam, have you asked the class what I always do? Check on them. You’ll find for the other four I always give them assignments. PRINCIPAL  Four good hours? That is too much for students. Second years’ are just revising what they did in first year. What the ministry has portrayed shows a bad picture on your subject because of the comments they have written on your subject. I hope you will do something Mr Wawu. Try to occupy yourself with the students. Okay? Mr Wawu comes out of the office with his head lowered, sweating and squeezing his hands together. He doesn’t even return the field assistant’s greeting, but leaves the administration building and goes to the outside corridor in front of the staff room. Here he meets another tutor, who asks him, ‘Why are you sweating?’ Mr Wawu answers, ‘Si huyu mwanamke [Kiswahili meaning: this woman]. This woman is calling me because of the performance of the students.’ He pauses, then continues, ‘I will still go for my kumi, kumi I am used to.’ The other teacher looks, points at the administration building and half shouts, ‘She’s coming!’ The principal comes out of the office. Both teachers turn immediately to the staff room and try to get in at the same time. The door, however, is too narrow, so the older and slower Mr Wawu remains in the corridor. (Observation, principal’s office and public space) In this episode, the tutor who was disciplined had been employed for many years at Lexington and was considered experienced by his colleagues. Nevertheless, the principal did not leave space for discussion and used personal matters like alcohol abuse to intimidate him, resulting in the tutor leaving the office sweating and with his head lowered. His attempt to escape into the staff room when he saw the principal appear in the doorway demonstrates how he and the other tutors feared her. They, in turn, reacted by calling the principal insulting nicknames such as mwanamke (woman). In

‘No time for us’  67 a context where much importance is attached to titles and positions, such a term is considered inappropriate. Barad (2007, cited in Lagermann, 2015, p. 580) clarifies how distinct entities or agencies do not exist prior to, but rather emerge through, their encounters, which is referred to as ‘intra-action’. Further, distinct agencies exist only in a relational way; they do not exist as individual elements. In other words, certain spaces hail certain subjects to certain positions, which the subject can accept, bargain with and even reject, thereby providing the condition of a somewhat open future (Barad, 2007, cited in Lagermann, 2015, p. 581). In relation to the Lexington socioculture, students and tutors were constrained through the positions they were hailed into by the tutors and the management, respectively. Still, subjectification was not completely causally determined but also subject to acceptance or rejection. It was in their encounters that agents were fixated in certain marginalised or changed ways, some more than others. Being positioned as an academically performing and well-behaved student or tutor, for instance, meant access to a more open and less restricted future with better possibilities of a ‘viable life’ (Butler, 2004, p. 225). As an example, once a year the sixteen academically best-performing students and their tutors were offered a free luncheon in the college’s grand hall. The luncheon was an event that the invited tutors looked forward to, whereas those who were not in the group of high-performing tutors would be left in the staff room to buy their own lunch and gossip about the principal and her administration. For students, being invited to the luncheon meant positive attention from tutors, better chances of good grades and less chance of punishment. These students were hailed into better positions and from there offered better possibilities for gaining viable lives. When the principal inaugurated the Bulldog, one of her first acts was to create the ‘list of shame’, a nickname for an infamous poster that was attached in an eye-catching position on the large noticeboard in front of the administration building. If students did not pay their fees or failed an exam or a test, their names and the amount of money to be paid or the exam grades would be published there. Even small offences like fee balances of two shillings [at the time of fieldwork, USD 0.02] would be listed next to the student’s full name. All incidents were known by the institution. Nobody was spared. Several other restrictions were initiated under the unpopular and feared Bulldog. For instance, in cases of intimate relations between students and tutors, students would be punished with dismissal or expulsion while the tutor’s offence would, in most cases, be ignored. Though oppressed, controlled and sanctioned, on at least one occasion the students’ frustrations outgrew their fear of punishment. At one morning assembly, students collectively resisted the Bulldog with open objections: The deputy principal, ‘the Bulldog’, appears at the assembly, goes directly to the dean of students, Mr Matt, who is in the middle of inform-

68  ‘No time for us’ ing students about the results of an exam. The deputy principal points at the dean’s face with her office keys and says loudly, ‘Why are you insulting students with the performance? You don’t need to tell them the results. Are they not pinned on the notice board?’ Mr Matt leaves the assembly ground immediately without speaking further to the students or the deputy principal. The other tutors disappear into the staff room. The students start mumbling to each other, ‘What is wrong with this woman?’ The deputy, who is now the only college employee left at the assembly, shouts, ‘Shut up!’ She then tones down her voice and says, ‘Good morning!’ There is total silence among the students. The deputy repeats ‘Good morning’ a second and a third time. Still there is no reply from the students. She then says, ‘You have also been insulted not to speak?’ The deputy then dissolves the assembly with a ‘disperse to classes’. Students start walking towards the classrooms, but some of them say in loud voices: ‘That can’t happen, that can’t happen. We have to take a step forward to that.’ Some of them start singing Haki Yetu, Kiswahili meaning ‘our rights, our rights’. Other students pick up field markers and wooden sticks, which they wave as they sing. Some of them enter the first-year classes, interrupt tutors, and ask the first years to come to the field. After fifteen minutes, the whole student community is gathered on the sports field, singing ‘our rights, our rights’. Some of the male students have removed their shirts and tightened them around their waists. They are violating school rules, which says that school uniforms must be worn at all times in college. Suddenly a larger assembly of school officials, the administrative police, and a black priest arrives. The principal is in her office, anxiously watching from behind the curtain. The tutors, who have followed the incident at a safe distance from the staff room windows, rush to their cars and leave the compound, afraid that the students will start setting fire to the vehicles. The students start shouting, ‘We want the deputy principal, or else we are going to fetch her in her office!’ The DoC rushes to the administration block, and comes back with the deputy principal. Horace, a second-year student, steps on the small podium in front of the other students, and says loudly, ‘We students, we want you, deputy principal, to clarify to us, what you meant by that Mr Matt insults us? We also need you to apologise to Mr Matt.’ There is a full silence for some minutes. The deputy then says, ‘We apologise and we know we are wrong’, without looking sorry. Students interrupt her and shout, ‘No, you need to say “I”.’ Horace says, ‘Please, madam, you need to say “I”, because you are the one who said about insult.’ The deputy looks angrily from Horace to the crowd, and then says, ‘Okay, I’ll do as you want me to phrase it.’ She then says, ‘There was something wrong, I did. I think I had a slip of tongue. And I think we’ll solve it in the office.’ Horace says, ‘Then shake hands with Mr Matt.’ The deputy principal stretches out her hand towards Mr Matt, but at the same time

‘No time for us’  69 turns her face away, looking angrily at the crowd. Mr Matt looks at the deputy principal and returns the handshake without a smile. Horace stretches his hands towards the deputy principal, but she ignores the hand; instead, she whispers in an angry tone of voice to Horace, ‘Try very hard that no mistakes brings you to my office, because you’ll find it rough.’ (Observation, sports field) The episode was one of the few times I observed students at this college rebel against the disciplinary environment. Though the deputy was ‘obsessed with power’ according to students, power remained external as an eye-foran-eye punishment and was not completely internalised as a self technology. As students got a response to their actions, albeit a negative response in the form of punishments, they did not live in a social vacuum. They could in some ways maintain their identity and self-integrity even if the college leader and her administrative staff represented a superior power, because punishment was directed towards their outer actions, not their inner, mental life. In the episode with the deputy principal, they vented frustration. This illustrates how students, through mobilising their collective force, could become a power body, making it impossible to categorise all of them as marginalised individuals. By revolting, they increased their lines of flight (Lagermann, 2015), a line of flight being a pure movement of change; that is, they opened up to the possibility for change and more viable lives. ­Rebelling in public increased their self-assertion and enlarged their possibilities to become and act in other and more differentiated ways within the college, thus adding to their possibilities to transcend the subordinate and excluded position in college, which the majority of them maintained. Power struggles in the administration, ethnic preferences, traditions, corruption and a strong bureaucracy dominated life at Lexington. Instead of a smoothly running bureaucracy (Weber, 1978), which lacked social and human values, Lexington was a socioculture with constant power struggles at all levels. Principals came and left; deans were outmanoeuvred by colleagues; administrative staff formed alliances and pressed themselves into new positions; the sponsors from the Christian Church in the BOG exercised moralism; and the student council lived its own life, dominated by single students with much power. Students, who ranked lowest in the hierarchy, experienced this in the daily life at college, where they felt there was little possibility to express themselves: MALE STUDENT  There

is no democracy in this college and no freedom of speech. You realise that in most institutions there is always an open forum where all the students usually sit together; they discuss some matters pertaining to their staying in the institution. But here in our college, I’ve never witnessed such a thing. And you can realise that maybe a student or a group of students are having problems, and they should know where they can be given that opportunity to express their

70  ‘No time for us’ feelings. I think this one is maybe creating more problems to the learners, and make them to realise that maybe that freedom they expected to be in the college, is not what they are meeting. (FGD, second-year male student) Students felt under constant emotional pressure to avoid being found at fault, and they felt anxiety about being punished for offences, some of which they were not even aware of having committed. Yet, situated in a seemingly punitive and insensitive environment, students still managed to object against the authorities – even if these objections took place in silence. Students were not subjectified as self-governing subjects who had tacitly internalised institutional discipline, but rather managed to keep their feelings and self-judgements intact, as illustrated by this student’s revelation: CHRIS  I’m

not comfortable with the council because there are some of the things that they tell us not to do but yet if you try to … I always try to move around and check if what they tell us they are also implementing, but when I move around I find that they are doing the opposite. So they try to preach water and they drink wine; so it is not really making me comfortable. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Summing up, students experienced that street-level bureaucrats, such as the feared principal, the hated deputy and, as we shall see next, the ­statusand prestige-seeking tutors, responded to their needs in unempathetic ways. Street-level bureaucrats had invented benign modes of mass processing that more or less permitted them to deal with the public – here, the student teachers – in ways giving in to favouritism, stereotyping and routinising, all of which served private or agency purposes, to paraphrase Lipsky (1980, p. xii).

Tutors The staff room at Lexington is a large chamber organised as a classroom. Instead of a blackboard is a noticeboard, and in front of this a long desk with a ‘teacher’s chair’ preserved for an administrative person. Desks are arranged in long rows facing the noticeboard. The noticeboard is a kind of blackboard with an imaginary teacher, though one who is never present. Each tutor has one desk, but there is no communication between them. One gets the impression of being in a room with many individual offices, and the interaction among the tutors follows this pattern. The room is made for work, not conversation, collaboration or mutual supervision. Unlike staff rooms at other TTCs, there are no arrangements of sofas or low coffee tables, only rows of desks lined up behind each other. Conversation between desks is impeded. Whispering and gossiping in low voices fills the room. Superiors have their own office or share with other superiors, but the common tutors at Lexington are confined to the staff room. The average tutor at Lexington

‘No time for us’  71 is a woman in her mid-forties wearing a wig, a decent skirt that falls below the knee, and a colourful polyester shirt. The vast majority of the tutors are women. Wicked tongues whisper that this is because their husbands are employed in the ministries in Nairobi, in white-collar offices. They can therefore influence their wives’ stay of duty, for instance initiating a transfer to the prestigious and sought-after college of Lexington, which is close to urban facilities such as better schools, hospitals, housing, security, water and food. I spent around a year hanging around in the staff room and could observe how tutors were not the uniform happy staff that the principal initially led me to believe. Rather, the staff was made up of individuals with lowered moods, who used a considerable amount of their time in the staff room making negative complaints about their salaries, students and job conditions: Three female tutors are watching television, and one says: ‘If Muranga TTC [another Kenyan TTC] is being considered a hardship area, what about us?’ ‘Yes’, another tutor complains, ‘the government is going to give out the hardship allowance to someone who is not worthy of it.’ The female tutors continue watching TV and discussing the hardship allowance, which is an allowance for civil servants who are working in government sections in various degrees of hardship. The level of allowance will follow the conditions according to various categories, such as semi-arid in the northeastern part of the country and islands. (Observation, staff room) When tutors discussed their students, the focus was on academic performance, not pedagogy or social issues: MRS KAMAU  Oh

my colleagues, I am not very amused with what I have seen in my class, which I have just attended. This is a class of art which doesn’t have no students of mine. And when I asked the question of whom did I teach in first year, to my surprise the class says: ‘Nobody, nobody indeed. That means mwalimu you taught very well and they passed maths. They are all in class 2A. They are math teachers [students].’ MRS WAMBUI  I have also experienced the same in 2F. No students of mine are in that class. They are also trying to complain about the selection, that they are also excellent in doing the other subjects, but they have not been chosen [for mathematics]. So I told the class, ‘You are also good in arts. You are the best indeed, so just be proud of the subject you are holding.’ Even the students were replying me back: ‘But, mwalimu, it is not even examinable in KCPE [Kenya Certificate of Primary Education], so it can’t help us.’ I answered them by telling them: ‘But you are still capable of teaching the other subjects [for instance mathematics and science], but you are more of good quality of arts than the rest of the subjects. Just be proud.’ (Observation, staff room)

72  ‘No time for us’ The conversation between these female tutors illustrates how tutors competed with each other, but also evaluated some kinds of teaching professionalism in front of one another. They distinguished between students depending on which subjects students had been streamed to after their first year of study. Better-performing students continued in the science stream, and less high-performing students were confined to continue in the arts stream. Arts contained subjects like home crafts and business education, which were not examinable in primary schools and therefore not regarded as valuable and prestigious like science subjects. By telling that none of their students from the previous year were in art classes, both tutors manage to position themselves as high-performing and ‘good tutors’, in whose classes all students pass and are selected for the prestigious science stream. At Lexington, natural science was seen as a superior academic discipline to the humanities and social sciences, similar to what has been termed an ‘ascendance of science in teacher education as the presumed solution to most educational problems’ (Cochran-Smith, 2004, pp. 6–7). Following Bourdieu (1986), the arts had lost their symbolic value to science. Lexington tutors had seemingly managed to position themselves as hard-working, competitive and diligently committed to their work. The hectic school life was perceived as a natural continuation of tutors’ ambitions for their students, as recounted by the deputy mayor: DEPUTY MAYOR  We are known for the best tutors, hard-working ones. These

tutors sacrifice themselves. For example, when we are rehearsing for the drama festival, you’ll find that a drama tutor only sleeps for two hours. We practise the whole night with the tutor, then during the day she is class teaching. When it comes to academics, there is no tutor missing the class without a reason. This because there is a high level of competition among the tutors. Every tutor wants to be the best in terms of his or her class performance. They therefore work very hard, some even come and teach at break time without being paid. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Though the deputy mayor had a close relationship with the administration and therefore would not speak ill of the institution, his statement illustrates how tutors seemingly laid a lot of emphasis on the prestige of pursuing academic success and good grades; not because of the students’ welfare and success, but to enjoy respect among the other tutors and the administration, and to be positioned as hard-working and committed. Following Lipsky (1980), the very nature of street-level bureaucrats’ work prevents them from coming even close to the ideal conception of their jobs. Furthermore, the inadequate resources and the unpredictability of their ‘clients’, here students, defeat their aspirations as service workers. But tutors and the administration were not overworked, and they did not burn out or drop out early due to stress and feeling inadequate; instead, they had developed carefully scrutinised techniques to ‘salvage service and decision-making

‘No time for us’  73 values within the limits imposed upon them by the structure of the work’ (cf. Lipsky, 1980, p. xv). They believed they did the best they could under the adverse circumstances, but made large compromises. Their work became that of gaining terrain in front of other tutors in terms of students’ grades. They had lost their commitment to respond to the needs of the individual student. Paraphrasing Lipsky (1980, p. 141), tutors mentally discounted their students to reduce the tension resulting from their inability to enact the ideal service model: the vision of providing holistic teacher education. They reduced the strain between capabilities and goals and thereby made their jobs psychologically easier to manage.

Pedagogy: mock exams, distinctions and professional formation Today is a special occasion at the college. The principal makes a short speech for the students and invited guests: ‘In Lexington, we do not only produce teachers but also thespians [artists]. Some of our former students are now working for Citizen TV Baraka FM [local radio and TV stations].’ As a governmental educational institution, Lexington, by ministerial regulation, should provide an all-inclusive education focusing on every aspect of human development; however, it was difficult to identify the service ideals of all-inclusiveness in the institution. Classes at Lexington seemed similar to what was observed in other TTCs. During most lessons tutors were found in front of the classroom lecturing students in one-way monologues. Students remained silent and busy, writing notes in their exercise books. Questions were never asked during lectures. All means were employed to enhance students’ academic performances. At a staff meeting, the administration declared that ‘the new strategy’ was being enforced on tutors. This meant that lessons now were to last one hour instead of two. Consequently, a school day would now consist of twice as many lessons as before. By diminishing the duration of the lessons, tutors would be forced to arrive on time for classes and teach for the whole sixty minutes. The underlying agenda was to restrain the tutors from using the first and last fifteen minutes of a lesson to leave the class before the bell rang. The new strategy was one more attempt to drill tutors and students, to keep their attention on academic work; however, in some classes it left an imprint that influenced not only the duration of the lesson: It is a physical education lesson and students arrive on the sports field dressed in sports kits: green suits with yellow stripes on the sides and sports shoes. The tutor has not arrived yet, but students start jogging around the field. The tutor arrives in a vehicle and parks on the field. From the car, loud music blares out from the open door. The tutor is dressed in a white tracksuit and white rubber shoes, and has a hockey stick in his hand. Ten metres before he reaches the group, he shouts: ‘Form a semicircle!’ The students line up. A student in the middle blows

74  ‘No time for us’ a whistle and the students start playing hockey. Meanwhile, as the students play, the tutor sits under a tree and watches the game, listening to music from his car. After forty-five minutes, the tutor gets up without saying a word, gets in the car, and drives away. The students continue to play for another hour and twenty minutes. A bell rings in the distance and students immediately stop to play and track towards their respective dormitories. (Observation, sports field) Students, the controlled, had become the source of their own control: They immediately started exercising, even when the tutor was not present, and stopped exercising exactly when the bell rang for the next class. It seemed like normal everyday life that the tutor arrived and shouted at the students while listening to loud pop music and left the lesson before if officially ended. The new strategy turned school life at Lexington into a constant examination drill and confrontation between tutors and students, who now experienced up to ten different subjects per day in classes lasting until midnight. This left little possibility for students to immerse themselves in subjects, as they were constantly interrupted by other classes and subjects. Mock exams were numerous and lengthy. Students felt tired and overworked, and used their free time to study: MALE STUDENT  No,

I can’t leave the college this weekend. I have a lot of assignments that are not finished. They keep on adding up. I won’t even be able to finish them up this weekend and during the week they will add up again. (Informal conversation, first-year male student)

Panic swept through Lexington students in the days after the new strategy was launched. Students feared the penalties forced on them by the administration if they did not keep up with their academic work. I asked a male student, whom I observed running from one class to another during the lunch break, why he was running. He responded: MALE STUDENT  The

principal announced at the assembly today that every student found outside the classroom will have to give an explanation about what he or she is doing outside the classroom. As second years we are very fragile now. We are almost completing our studies and we try to avoid any situation that can bring a problem between you and the administration. You might find yourself going home [i.e., being dismissed] for even small offences. She [the principal] told the mayor to watch the entertainment prefect closely during this African Cup of Nations [televised football matches between African countries] so the TV remains closed. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

The entertainment prefect operated the only television in the college to which the students had access. It was situated in the dining hall. His single

‘No time for us’  75 duty was to switch on and off the TV three times per week, and only so the students could watch news programmes. Now the TV remained off as part of the new strategy. The institution curtailed freedom and pleasure in the hope of encouraging student attention to academic matters (cf. Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Horowitz, 1987, pp. 11–12). In another incidence, all first-year students were transferred from their classrooms to a less attractive teaching room, the multipurpose hall: the large building used for assemblies, competitions and celebrations. Mr Matt told us that, ‘We have moved the first years in the multipurpose hall because the second years are doing their exams, and they need a quiet environment and some space while doing their exams, so they don’t get disturbed’. Mock exams – and any other exams – were given priority over everything else, even if it meant less favourable learning conditions for other students, in this case first-year students. Second-year students ranked higher than first-year students since they were closer to their final PTE exam, which would rank the college on the national performance list for TTCs. Silence during daytime was interrupted only by the tutors’ monologues from the blackboards. A few students would quickly glance out of the classroom window when I passed by, but then quickly return to their books. When tutors were not in classes, students were occupied with their books or

Photo 2.1  Display of college trophies.

76  ‘No time for us’ taking notes from a senior student who read aloud in front of the class. At other TTCs, students would engage in conversation, listen to music or read popular youth magazines when tutors were not in class. But not at Lexington. Here students would immediately change from one subject to the next when the bell indicated that a lesson was over by instantly closing their books from the previous lesson and opening the books for the coming lesson. This took place even when tutors were not in class. I took this as an indicator of how discipline seemingly had become installed in students as self-governing practices. Cultural institutional values had been embodied as silent body language and lowered heads (Bourdieu, 1984).

Photo 2.2  ‘2 D. Distinction’ – students’ graffiti on a door to a second-year classroom.

Students: struggling for success Most students at other TTCs divided their studies between both academic and obligatory non-academic issues, which they were forced to participate in but which many disliked, since it would not bring them better grades and thus formal employment as teachers. Education in the form of academic excellence was the sacred, public good and form of capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) that everybody strived for. As well as the daily lessons in class, it was mandatory for students to participate in one or more of the obligatory extracurricular activities such as sport, music or journalism, though these did not take up most of their free time. When not eating or sleeping, most students were in class, busy studying. Students at Lexington were ambitious with their grades. Many of them hoped for something better, such as diplomas instead of PTE certificates. One female student explained:

‘No time for us’  77 MAGGIE  Here

we only get a certificate. I find it so unfair ’cause in here I’m being over-tasked. You know, the certificate is the least thing you expect to get out of two years. You are coming here, you are doing a lot, and then you only are getting a certificate at the end of it all! That is why if it is a diploma we gain, we are going to get a diploma out of these two years, it would be better. (Interview, 23-year-old second-year female student)

Though disillusioned, Lexington students kept to the academic work, even when more joyful events took place. At the annual sports day, the Nairobi Zone Sports Competition, students from different TTCs competed against each other in different disciplines. This year, the event took place at Lexington. However, even though Lexington students were hosting the games, most of them stayed in classes, studying: On the sports field, students from other colleges, dressed in uniform of green and white sports shirts with logos of their respective TTCs on the front, dance and sing with banners and drums to cheer on their team. But Lexington students do not have a cheering squad. Tutors and officials from the other colleges have arrived in large numbers dressed in sports suits, but from Lexington only Mr Matt is present. He wears an official shirt and brown trousers, not sports clothes like staff from other colleges. He stands with his arms crossed on the side of the field with no facial expression about the football game that is currently being played. Most Lexington students are in class, studying. One of them says, ‘We have exams on Monday and there is just no time for going to the field. I don’t want to waste too much time there. I am fighting for a distinction.’ On the other side of the field, on the hockey pitch, students get ready for a new game. A group of twenty students from another college jump up and down as they sing, ‘Leo ni leo, lazima tunyonge mtu’ [Kiswahili meaning: ‘Today is today and we must strangle someone’]. A female student from Lexington then shouts: ‘These Global [another TTC] students are very indisciplined [sic]! They are still singing and dancing while the master of ceremony has asked for some quietness. That is indiscipline.’ On the opposite side of the field, four students in Lexington College uniforms sit with their heads turned away from where the hockey game is being played. Their grey college uniform sharply contrasts with the other students’ colourful sports suits. A voice from the loud speaker says, ‘Lexington students, please come and support your team because your team is just about to start playing.’ There is no reaction from the students, apart from a group of Lexington students that [stand] up just before the game ends and walk in the direction of the classrooms. (Observation, sports field)

78  ‘No time for us’ Lexington students’ conduct at the event profoundly contrasted with that of students from other colleges. While students from the other colleges cheered, danced and sang to support their teams, the few Lexington students present ignored the games and left before they ended. Academic activities were emphasised before sport and social activities. This was replayed in the way Lexington students devalued students from other colleges, who were referred to as ‘indisciplined’ (i.e., undisciplined subjects) when they demonstrated enthusiasm for the games. The management set the example of not wasting time on the sports day: The deputy principal of Lexington walks to the front and speaks in the microphone. ‘Let me take this opportunity to welcome the principal to deliver her speech.’ The Lexington principal walks to the front, takes the microphone and starts talking as the deputy leaves the field at a fast pace. ‘I want to say that I am happy because we have all been disciplined throughout the tournament and I urge our students to carry the same discipline when they go to represent Nairobi in Kericho. Otherwise I don’t have much to say.’ The principal walks to the podium, but she only stays for three minutes at the sports field and leaves long before the ceremony is over. (Observation, sports field) The seeming lack of interest in the sports day by the tutors, administrative staff and students, and the public reprimand by the Lexington students of students from other colleges, demonstrated how obedience and attention to academics were praised in Lexington. Lexington students sacrificed free time, social relations and moments of joy in order to maintain their attention on academic work. Student teachers normally were proud and felt honoured when they excelled in extracurricular disciplines. Official sports days with competitions and time for socialising with other colleges were thought of as days for partying and joy. Winning a trophy for sports achievements was a prestigious matter. But not at Lexington. Here students sacrificed it all to further academically excel.

Secret lives and pockets of freedom After hanging out at the college for six months, I realised that though students lived a thoroughly regulated everyday life within the institution, this life provided opportunities to escape the control and pressure to perform. Students were always in classes when lessons started, always holding a pencil, ready to take notes. Classroom activities involved only lectures from a tutor or self-study, and the lesson plan was followed minutely even when tutors were not in class. But students were not only passive consumers of the system in the way, for instance, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) describe educational systems reproducing class relations. They were active appropriators of the culture provided to them at Lexington. This meant that though they in some

‘No time for us’  79 ways understood and acted according to the structures of the institution, they simultaneously learned to navigate the structures to live what they considered a viable life (Butler, 2004). Lexington had an active, though less visible, student culture, which played out in secretive and less transparent ways than at other TTCs. The college paid much attention to preventing students from interacting with the outside world and each other. Nevertheless, students found different ways of avoiding institutional control. One of the best-kept secrets among the students, and which none of the tutors, administrative staff or the guards on the compound knew about, was ‘gate C’: a narrow hole in the steel wire fence at the far end of campus, where students could slip unnoticed through to the outside without passing the official gate. Students used ‘gate C’ to leave the compound to go to downtown Nairobi on Saturday evenings, engage in activities with boy- and girlfriends outside the college, or pick up a day or some hours of paid work, for instance manual labour in the small-scale businesses around the college. In spite of the hard punishment, students smoked cigarettes and consumed alcohol at the far end of the college compound, where tutors could not find them. Many students formed intimate relations with students of the opposite sex, and came up with imaginative ways of enhancing the time they could spend together. Though very risky, some female students disguised themselves as male students and snuck into the men’s dormitories at night. Many used the outdoor facilities and a small nearby forest to meet their boy- and girlfriends at night. Female students borrowed urine samples from each other, which they gave to the college nurse to avoid a positive result in the obligatory pregnancy tests. Food was limited and of low quality, and items such as meat were provided only once a week in teaspoon quantities. But some students managed to get extra portions of food. Mike, a 22-year-old student, explained how the practice of ‘going for addition’ was carried out: MIKE (POINTING AT A MALE STUDENT)  Do

you see that student there? He has changed his clothes and the plate. That is how the students who want to go for additional food in the dining hall do. When this male student gets into the dining hall, he will either inflate his cheeks or just put his face in a way that the seniors don’t recognise him. (Informal conversation in the dining hall, second-year male student)

Resisting and avoiding college authority also happened on a smaller scale. College rules demanded that on weekdays female students should wear skirts, not trousers, even if many students complained about the cold weather in the winter. Yet at weekends, when few tutors and prefects were around, many female students wore miniskirts and low-cut T-shirts. Miniskirts and tight jeans were regarded as improper, and were thus forbidden. At weekends, male and female students would talk openly in groups or pairs – something that was never observed on weekdays. A number of studies in Western settings have demonstrated how aspects of college students’ everyday lives, for

80  ‘No time for us’ instances romance, are affected by peer systems organised in opposition to the institutional curtailing of freedom and pleasure (Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Horowitz, 1987, pp. 11–12). Lexington students developed a counterculture to the institutional discipline via which they were critical of the institution. A counterculture is a social group’s active resistance towards what is perceived as an authoritative system, and the internal development of one’s own concepts and codes: a ‘culture’ that opposes the established system (Willis, 1977). In Willis’s study, a group of young schoolboys in England – the lads – developed a counterculture on the basis of their parents’ culture, which critically questioned the school and teachers as authorities. The lads’ strategies counteracted the school’s ideological emphasis on societal achievement (Willis, 1977, p. 232) in terms of academic performance. The lads developed their own rules, based on ‘working class rules’, just as students from Lexington actively rejected college discipline and developed secret lives, compatible with their ideas of rules for what a good student’s life was supposed to be. Lexington students seemingly did not reject being integrated into the communal system at college; however, to live a kind of secret life within the institution represented a way for students to exercise control over their own lives and resist control by the institution that marked them as guilty of violating college rules. Analysis of students’ statements from interviews and FGDs demonstrates that second-year students more than first years had developed and used strategies for avoiding institutional control, so they could continue exercising their own culture. Apparently, students learned flexibility and to construct an institutional life that could further their version of what a good everyday life was, alongside learning to adhere to institutional authority and demands. Until their very last day at college, students negotiated the college authority. But once control could no longer result in punishment or sanction, student life flourished enthusiastically: It is the last school day at college for the second-year students, who have finished their exams. On the blackboard in a classroom some students have been writing with capital letters: LEAVERS’ BASH. The students are preparing for a party. Some students collect money to buy sodas and food, others prepare the classrooms by hanging decorations, covering the bulbs with coloured tape and blinding the windows, so outsiders cannot see what is happening inside. Their request to leave the college compound to shop for the event was denied by the dean of students, but finally six students were permitted to leave the compound for one hour. Many more students, who have not been granted leave, sneak out. Chairs and desks are arranged in a ‘U’ shape. Loud Western and African music comes from a portable DVD player. On a table, a female and male student are picking rice as they talk and laugh. The male student says, ‘The mayor says that the party should

‘No time for us’  81 end at six [p.m.].’ The female student next to him laughs, ‘This college is full of grown-ups! It is at night that at least you get time to drink something. Let us all cook very slowly in each class to make sure we don’t finish cooking before eight [p.m.].’ The male student replies, ‘Today they [the administration] will know that we are clever!’ Both of them then say to the other students, who also prepare food, ‘Cut this meat in a slow motion. We want to party when it is dark!’ The other students laugh and are excited about the upcoming party, some start to dance. (Observation, classrooms) The episode demonstrates how students found alternative ways of dealing with the mayor’s instructions to remain in college and finish the party early. Male and female students were forbidden close, intimate contact, and more students than permitted slipped out of the official gate. ‘Slow cooking’ shows the students’ creativity in making the best of their stay at college, but it is also witness to how students experienced the decline of college authority towards the end of their stay. The singing, dancing, joking and outbursts of happiness and uncontrolled emotions at the Leavers’ Bash signalled the joy that students experienced about leaving what they perceived as a controlling and restrictive college. But it also bore witness to a peer culture in opposition to the official regulations that had been established: A male student says in a high voice, ‘I want to do an exercise so that I can be hungry, so that when the food is ready I will have the appetite to eat more.’ The male student takes one of the female students and carries her around the table. The other students cheer by shouting ‘Oooh’. The male student puts down the female student and laughs, ‘I am ready for that meat now!’ Another male student approaches two other female students, who are rolling dough for chapattis [thick pancakes made of maize flour], and says, ‘Which group has finished preparing chapatti? Then help me with one! I just want to take a photograph with a chapatti, please.’ The surrounding students laugh loudly, and a female student says, ‘Instead of taking a photo with a lady, you want to take a photo with chapatti, you Luhyas [ethnic group] with food? Remember, you won’t marry chapatti.’ (Observation, outdoor space) Students felt relieved about having terminated what they considered a demanding and problematic stay at college, yet they also gained a strong sense of belonging to the place through their friendships (see also Dahl, 2015a). Rather than feeling sad about leaving college and friends, they had endured and reached somewhere, taking something with them in their mental and professional luggage.

82  ‘No time for us’

Bureaucratic rationality Lexington TTC was run by a large and heavy bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are legitimised through transforming social actions into rationally organised actions and hierarchies of authority (Weber, 1978). In the bureaucracy of Lexington, hierarchies, roles and units were defined according to a natural scientific discourse that involved different categories of actors: students, tutors, the principal, administrative staff, prefects, watchmen, cooks, matrons and nurses (Dahl, 2014b). The bureaucratic structures provide different spaces for the production and legitimisation of the meaning of teaching, learning and professionalism, depending on contextual differences, similar to the way local moral worlds (Kleinman, 1992) in people’s everyday lives are ranked. In bureaucracies, practices, roles and spaces are defined in relation to a technological and time-regulated logic, which involves different categories of actors with specific well-defined areas of competencies that, based on administrative rules, set the scene for defining and exercising teacher education. In a bureaucracy, there is no place for disturbances of any kind, and students – and tutors – who could not comply with the administrative rules and logics were eliminated from the bureaucracy. Street-level bureaucrats, such as tutors and administrative personnel (Lipsky, 1980), violated the idealistic vision of ‘holistic education’ by thoroughly regulating a disciplinary space in which students evolved. Social understandings and personal relations were removed as irrelevant aspects of life in college, and apparently did not count as legitimate ground. The forced one-year maternity leave and long-term dismissal or expulsion of students for even small offences exemplified this practice. But social relations and status are significant aspects of social life in Kenya (Dahl, 2012b). At TTCs, and Lexington in particular, they were played out as a continuous positioning and negotiation of roles and responsibilities in relation to others. Positioning and authority led to unequal distribution of resources and space for learning in the bureaucratic layout of the institution. For instance, communicating scientific school knowledge was monopolised by tutors – the educated elite of TTCs – who due to their superior position in the bureaucratic system could naturalise their professional authority over students (cf. Andersen, 2004; Dahl, 2014b). The hierarchical organisation of competence at TTCs mirrored what was regarded as important and essential. Students would, per definition, rank as incompetent; their academic success would depend partly on their ability to adhere to bureaucratic structures. This ‘right attitude’ in the form of a behaviour that was perceived as ‘moralistically appropriate’ was crucial for students to gain access to knowledge and thus pass exams and become a teacher (see Dahl, 2014b). Students actively negotiated and succumbed to authority at the same time as they developed strategies to avoid institutional discipline. They found spaces for freedom, where they were less subjected to institutional control and therefore able, at least in some instances, to live a meaningful life. Douglas (1986, p. 9) states that institutions are constructed by the desires of individuals who attempt to compress each other’s and their own ideas into

‘No time for us’  83 a collective form in order to win legitimacy. Institutions construct frames around human ways of thinking, reasoning and acting. At Lexington, student agency was relatively diminished by a rational frame, which favoured science, hierarchy, competition and professional development in the form of academic performance. Students thus had an interest in getting good examination grades and achieving educational capital as high-performing students, which could provide status and prestige compared to students at other TTCs. But in the course of their education at Lexington, many of them developed a resistance against the bureaucratic system. First-year students had not yet learned to deal with the harsh learning environment and felt stressed, frustrated and worn out due to the amount of work and requirements loaded on them. Second-year students had more experience with the system compared to first years, and therefore dealt with institutional authority in more diverse ways, or rather, kept up with control while maintaining an inner life aimed at preserving personal autonomy. But up until the very last day of their schooling, they could not openly resist the institutional authority. Only on rare occasions could they, as a group, object in a juridically legitimate way to what they considered unjust and supressing structures. Students learned during their years at TTC that they could not be completely controlled, in spite of the ambition of the institutional structure to so. Discipline remained external, and students were not caught in a situation of power where they carried the power themselves, that is, characterised by self-suppression in Foucault’s sense (1977). They were members of an extremely repressive system with only few possibilities for exercising personal control, but they had in some ways maintained their personal integrity. Conditioning did not happen because sanctions targeted the body and not the personal or social inner life of the students. A dominant agent, according to Bourdieu, possesses the means to force other agents to see him or her as he or she wishes to be seen: ‘Everyone seeks to impose his subjective representation of himself as an objective representation’ (Bourdieu, 1993b, p. 58). But street-level bureaucrats such as tutors were not dominant agents, since they had not fully succeeded in imposing their subjective world views and the system on the students as objective representations. In spite of the many efforts of institutional authorities to create a space for academic excellence at the cost of social life, where students could be manipulated and manoeuvred into foreign behaviour, this did not fully happen. Students were not full participants in constructing the new orderliness at Lexington, but they were also suppressed. People often let the institutional logics decide for them, says Douglas (1986, p. 123), and to some extent, Lexington students accepted the governing logics, even if it meant becoming victims of these structures. The institutional skeleton was thus conserved and the status quo maintained.

3 ‘I have someone’ Community learning in social space

College life on the dry savannah In a desert-like corner of Kenya, in an eastern part of the country on the dry savannah, among scattered low bushes and grass-roofed huts, at the end of a dusty road with small wooden stalls, lies Wummit TTC. It is an area referred to by people as ‘remote’, far from town and modern, urban life. Two hours’ drive from the capital city and half an hour’s drive down a rough, sandy road stands a signpost indicating the way to the TTC, the only governmental institution in the area apart from primary schools. Wummit is located in one of the poorest and least fertile areas of Kenya. Subsistence farming is the main income source for the people in the area, but for the last twenty-five years the harvest has decreased due to lack of rain. Severe and returning droughts have led to famine in the area. Due to the tough living conditions, people in the area mainly rely on small roadside businesses such as selling homemade baskets, wood carvings and basic commodities. The college was built in 1958 by British Catholic missionaries and, rumours say, sixty-four female student teacher candidates were enrolled in the first year. Later they were joined by male students from a nearby TTC, which phased out its education of teachers. The story was that villagers in the area volunteered to submit their land to the college without being compensated. Afterwards, many of them moved to other, unoccupied land in the region, which in those days was free. The college today is scattered across a large compound of about seventy-three acres with low buildings covering an administration block, staff room, three rows of cemented classrooms, a double-storey resource building with a library, a dining hall and staff quarters occupied by about one-third of the tutors. By 2011, the college had an enrolment of 1,031 students with eighty-six tutors. Most tutors and students come from the area around the college. Tutors who are not accommodated within the college live in nearby Wummit, a small provincial town. Candidates applying for higher education are administered and distributed to TTCs from a central administrative organ in Kenya. In theory, a student teacher candidate can be allocated to a TTC anywhere in Kenya. An employee in the Ministry of Education told me that the vision is to mix ethnic groups to construct a multi-ethnic population at TTCs; however, TTCs in rural

‘I have someone’  85 areas are less attractive that their urban peers. Many teacher candidates who are admitted to Wummit TTC therefore choose not to register. With many vacant places after the first intake, the college is free to fill these places with students of their own choice. Consequently, young people from the local area who fulfil the admission requirements on the first day of college after the summer holidays rally there in large numbers. The majority of people in the neighbouring area belonged to the Akamba ethnic group, including the deputy principal, who was rumoured to show preferential treatment to second- and third-year incoming students from her own ethnic group. ‘Being close to the community’ was important for the college. Consequently, people from the area were occasionally invited to different events at the college. In one instance, community members were invited to an official sports day where the college offered a bull as a main prize. This prize attracted about 100 local people, who formed a team of six and competed against the students. The relatively easy access to the college was another example of this willingness to include the community around the college in the college’s daily life. Upon a visitor’s arrival at Wummit, there were no registers to be filled out, no identity cards or number plates to be checked. There was only one old watchman who would salute and let visitors through the gate: a broad gap in the low wire netting around the college. The college, especially tutors and the administration, felt deeply connected to the place, the people and the rural way of life. Ancient ethnographies of the area make it clear that deep meaning has always been attributed to the land: ‘[People] are strongly agricultural or at least that they have very strong attachment to agricultural ways of life, because land appears to mean more than generally assumed’ (Ocholla-Ayayo, 1976, p. 132). Wummit had a reputation for being an easy-going college with less discipline of students. Classes started at seven fifteen in the morning and continued until four in the afternoon, followed by obligatory co-curricular activities three times a week until six o’clock. Many students found this schedule doable and were compliant: MALE STUDENT  There

is no problem. They don’t start early and then they also end in good time. We are supposed to be in class at seven fifteen, then they end at four. I think the structuring is not that bad, unlike what used to happen in high school and other colleges where sometimes people are awakened at three or four. That one at least is not here. So I like it. (Interview, first-year male student)

The college ranked highly on the top-ten list for best-performing TTCs, but academic performance was not the only important issue emphasised at this college. Honesty, altruism, hard work and ‘good moral behaviour’ were highly ranked attributes. The principal told me that: PRINCIPAL  The

qualities that we value are one academic, two good disciplines, three honesty, and apart from that we also insist on hard work all

86  ‘I have someone’ the time … [But] it’s not only academics. We insist on good discipline; good virtues in life. Because somebody can be good in academics, but he is very poor in terms of discipline and character. So, we want them to build their character positively. (Interview, principal) Academic performance was, as in all TTCs, highly valued, but social, cultural and moral skills, values and virtues regarding what constitutes a good teacher were more so. Though emphasising academic achievement, the Wummit principal was not aware of Wummit’s exact position compared to the academic performance of other TTCs: PRINCIPAL  In

terms of academics, the college is doing well. We were … I don’t know which number last year. We were among the best in terms of quality grades. We had … was it five distinctions? Then we had other good grades like credits and so on. So we did very well, but on average, I guess we were among the top ten performing colleges. (Interview, principal)

The principal not being able to place the college exactly in terms of student academic performance signalled some kind of lack of interest in academics as a category to position students. At other TTCs, students’ academic performance was a serious issue that was often debated among colleges. At this college, however, academics played a minor role compared to human capital. Wummit was one of the three so-called inclusive TTCs – teacher training colleges – where physically impaired students could be admitted. Impaired students could be admitted with lower scores such as a ‘C-plain’ instead of the normally required ‘C-plus’. The disabled students were often deaf, mute or blind. Some were albinos who developed blindness in later life due to exposure to the strong sun. The college also employed several blind, deaf and mute tutors. Classrooms contained equipment for the impaired students such as Braille typewriters. Additional staff were allocated for the impaired students, such as sign-language teachers, who were often situated at the front of the class. The mix of impaired and nonimpaired people was a rare sight in a society where many impaired children are killed at birth or stigmatised later in life due to cultural beliefs. I became curious about how this more diverse student and tutor population influenced the college’s everyday life, and students in particular. One tutor argued that exposure to other realities positively influenced students’ sense of tolerance and diversity: TUTOR  In

the beginning, the other students just look a bit, but then they get used [to the impaired students]. They even get more … how should I say it? Relaxed and open to other people. (Interview, tutor)

Students reported that being subjected to physically less fortunate students also influenced their academic performance by increasing their motivation for their studies:

‘I have someone’  87 FEMALE STUDENT  This college took into consideration quite a lot. You know

this gives me quite a challenge. If that blind person can be in class on time, and you, who have eyes, can’t make it, [it] gives me something to think about. If they can do it, I can also. This [college] is one of the rare kinds. (Interview, second-year female student)

Seeing-impaired tutors was a normal sight in the staff room, where five of them occupied their own table. Physical impairments were integrated in everyday life interactions. On our first visit, the impaired tutors were busy discussing the day’s new broadcast by Kenya National Broadcast (KBC), which was airing on a television in one corner of the room. Other tutors would serve them tea and lunch and read the newspaper for them. Visitors were handled swiftly, personally and heartily, as we experienced during our first visit to the college: An office assistant in the administration building approaches us and asks, ‘Have you been helped?’ Shortly after, she tells us to enter the principal’s office, a small room packed with furniture, golden plastic cups, photos of former principals and a white missionary woman, and three to four wooden name plates scattered around the room with the principal’s name printed in golden letters. I ask to visit the compound. The principal gets up and shortly after the deputy principal takes us directly to the staff room. The talking stops as the deputy principal knocks with a bunch of keys on a large table: ‘Silence, we have visitors.’ She says my name while tutors at the far end of the room continue to talk. The deputy principal turns to the DoC: ‘Make sure you give them tea!’ She then goes to look for more cups in the white plastic bucket on top of the table with the steel cylinder of tea, and says, ‘Let me look for some tea cups.’ We sit on the armchairs in a long row. A seeing-impaired tutor, who is also an albino, comes over and starts talking to me, as he translates his talk into sign language. (Observation, principal’s office and staff room) The first impression of our visit was symptomatic of our stay at the college: a close and personal relation, supervised promptly at all times, but also with a friendly, welcoming feeling. Being far from the capital in a remote rural area meant that life was constructed based on different social and cultural aspects from those of town life. Life was seen not as an individual issue, but as a collective matter containing duties and responsibilities in a more mutual relationship than could be observed at other colleges. Life was led by moral values, and power functioned differently.

Structure Wummit had a large student community with a student council made up of forty-two students divided into eleven ‘offices’, many more offices than

88  ‘I have someone’ at other TTCs. There was an office for the overall chairman, for the vice chair, the general secretary, the welfare officer, the entertainment officer, the games officer, the finance officer, the chief dining hall officer, the senior class secretary, the clubs and the society secretary. There was an office of five commissioners who oversaw internal election processes and the constitution of the student body alongside ‘external overseers’, consisting of five tutors and administrative staff. This regulatory mechanism was not found in other colleges. Each of the twenty-two classes had a ‘class councillor’ and each of the ten dormitories a ‘dorm councillor’. Kenyan TTCs have almost total freedom to decide on the college’s organisation, including elections and how the student council is constructed. For instance, the welfare officer provided a function that did not exist in other TTCs. Wummit represented a fine-meshed net designed to further social relations and minimise social conflicts, but in a less steep and authoritarian way than many other colleges. For instance, power in the student council was divided between the different offices, which meant that no single person or office had full authority over the students unlike in other colleges, such as Lexington. This meant that, in reality, several independent student bodies interacted, resulting in a reduced centralisation of power. For example, the actions and decisions of the overall chairman – at other colleges called the mayor – was continuously overseen by the five commissioners, all of whom were students, who had the power to veto decisions by the chairman. In addition, each office had its own area of responsibility, which could not be influenced by, for instance, the overall chairman. The students had what they referred to as a constitution, which delimited the functions of each student council member by laying out their responsibilities and the boundaries of their powers. This meant that student councillors could only decide within their own area of legislation and not on the grounds of personal or preferential judgments. Each of the ‘subcouncils’ under the chairman thus operated relatively independently within their own area, where they could make decisions and not be obliged to listen to the mayor’s instructions. The chairman at Wummit had no powers to sanction other members of the student council. This power structure avoided a situation where a single person, for instance the overall chairman, was sovereign. Student council members were, unlike some other colleges, permitted only to visit ‘their’ offices during afternoon games time. But the student council was given a kind of sovereign power by the administration. For instance, they operated with a minimum of interference and direction from the administration. One example as evidence of this was how the college’s female deputy principal had tried but failed to control the student council, even though she occupied a powerful position as the right hand of the principal. A male student recounted that: MALE STUDENT The

deputy principal doesn’t like the current students’ council because there are not many Akamba students elected in it. You know, she is an Akamba herself. She even tried to nullify the elections, but she could not. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

‘I have someone’  89 Students, not the administration, oversaw the election procedures. The election procedure at Wummit taught the students about democracy. Written advertisements about the upcoming election of the student council were posted on one of the outdoor noticeboards, encouraging all students, regardless of their personal background, to apply for the positions. Every year, an office of five commissioners was formed to look into the election process. Generally, shortlisting of candidates at other colleges was a task for members of the administration, not students. Yet at this college, students were given exclusive power to oversee the election processes. Their principal task was to enlighten the students about their rights as voters and educate them on matters of leadership and democracy. During the election process, they interviewed and shortlisted candidates for the election on the grounds of what commissioners referred to as ability: Students had to be second years and possess leadership experience, such as having been a prefect in secondary school. The students who were elected to positions in the student council therefore also seemed to reflect the interests of the students, rather than those of the administration, tutors or other staff: MALE STUDENT  The

election of the students’ council went okay, in fact this time all the tribes were balanced even though the OC [overall chairman] is Akamba. But the people [students] here are funny, the candidate who was elected the secretary general is a drunkard. So, most of the students were saying that they have elected him so that those who are found drunk are not taken to the administration, because they will be drinking with him. He [secretary general] doesn’t even punish them or take them to the administration. And you know he is the one in charge of discipline issues! (Laughs) RESEARCH ASSISTANT  But what about the overall chairperson? MALE STUDENT  The OC is a member of my class. He likes girls so much that he doesn’t even concentrate in his work. All he wants all the time is to get the ladies’ attention. He tries to dress in suits and just allows girls in his office even when the students are supposed to be in the field. (Informal conversation, second-year male student) As this conversation shows, sometimes students who did not live up to the college’s general standards about ‘good behaviour’, for instance who had alcohol problems or a reputation for engaging in intimate relationships, could become elected to the student council. Still, these incidents show that students were given power in setting up the regulative structure, which secured them some degree of autonomy and less control and sanction compared to students at other colleges. Though many students had a feeling of fairness and democracy in the daily running of the college, critical voices from some students were also present: ‘These people [administration] are frustrating us. Imagine in the dining hall, you are holding a hot plate in your hand. The food is hot. The dining hall

90  ‘I have someone’ is hot and you are also standing’ (second-year male student). The student referred to the rule of not being allowed to bring food out of the dining hall, which, because of a lack of sitting places, meant sometimes being forced to eat the meal standing. In other colleges, it was customary that half of the students left the dining hall to go outdoors after having been served food. But not at Wummit. Here, prefects guarded the entrance to the dining hall during the meal breaks, so that no student could leave with food. Yet, many students seemed content with these restrictions and even argued in their favour. According to one student, ‘some [students] might drop food particles in the dormitories that might attract cockroaches’, so meals should be eaten in the dining hall. In practice, however, the student council had limited authority to sanction students, and it could not settle disputes and violations of the student regulations – either the overt or the tacit regulations. It was authorised only to guide and counsel students, and to hope for change. In reality, the vast majority of student cases were not taken to the administration, as they were solved by the student council before reaching it. Even in cases of serious offences, alternative means of solving the problems were applied. Social concerns played a major role: CHAIRMAN  The

students are rarely expelled or suspended. Even on serious issues of drug abuse and drug addiction, we try to accommodate them. These students are people who are grown-ups, some are parents, and others have stayed for a period of even ten years at home before coming here. So how would you expect such a person to come here and immediately stop smoking and drinking? It is not possible. (Interview, students’ overall chairman)

Contrary to some of the other colleges, discipline targeted the moral upbringing of students. This meant an emphasis on being a ‘good student’ (see Dahl, 2015a), that is, morally upright, but also fostering aspects of responsibility and feeling connected to other subjects and the teaching profession. Discipline was understood as a learning process focusing on modifying social values rather than being only a bodily process. It was a process targeting inclusion. No students were left out due to offences, and a kind of mutuality was ingrained in the negotiation between students and the college administration. The objective of the punishment was not to create docile subjects in the Foucauldian sense (1977) as ideals for new economics, politics and warfare in the modern industrial age, which could function in factories and ordered military classrooms. But students were constantly watched, judged and regulated for their moral behaviour. Their bodies were controlled and moulded (as we shall see in the next section). Punishment was not eye-for-an-eye, but rather served formative and educational purposes aimed at instilling values. The student council served an important function of preventing what was perceived as ‘misbehaviour’. Taking part in the daily routines and being role models to other students were important tasks for student council members.

‘I have someone’  91 Many student councillors felt that being a councillor shaped them in their personal and professional becoming. One female councillor explained it this way: ANETT  I

like it [being a student councillor]. It has changed me. Responsibilities … you learn from it. You have to earn respect. Someone has to look at you and know you are respectable. Other students, they respect us. The other students’ council last year was not doing what they were supposed to. Some of them went drinking, therefore their job became messy. Also, in my job, sometimes you have to go for what you think, not what the other students think. You have to be firm and true to yourself. You have to tell even your friends that they shall not overtake in the queue. (Interview, 24-year-old female student councillor)

As this quotation illustrates, student councillors experienced a sense of belonging to the position they had been appointed to, responsibility for negotiating student moral behaviour and being respected for this, and pride at being perceived as accountable, obliged and committed to the teaching profession. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, learning moral values has, historically, been associated with becoming a teacher; this was especially true in a culture like Wummit. The annual ceremony held to induct newly elected councillors into the student council was a grave matter that included laying hands on the Bible and taking an oath in the name of God in front of all students and tutors: ‘I [name of student] swear I will abide by the school regulations and be a good student councillor, so help me God.’ Since this social contract was based in Christian values, the Ten Commandments about forgiveness were taken seriously. Sinning students were forgiven and helped back on track when they, as the administration phrased it, ‘had lost the sight of where to go’. Foucault informs us how Christianity and pastoral work designate a very special form of power that ‘is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock … to ensure individual salvation in the next world’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 783). According to Foucault, the pastorate, as an institution, has lost the main part of its efficiency or function, but its function had spread and multiplied outside the ecclesiastical institution (1982, p. 783). This process of extension of the pastoral function was evidenced in Wummit, where part of the councillors’ function was salvific, to make oblations and to shape individuals in a new form under one condition, namely that they would submit to a set of specific patterns, in this case the moralisation of body, soul and behaviour. Instilling of values used the carrot rather that the whip. At this college there was seemingly less visible positioning and categorisation (Davies and Harré, 1990) of students, but a subjectification that built on subtle rearrangement and relied less on physical and more on verbal and nonverbal sanctions.

92  ‘I have someone’

Moralism and the termination of management Wummit had a flat structure in the ways in which administrative issues were raised, power was exerted and individuals and groups related to each other. Deans, deputies, tutors and the principal exerted power in more subtle ways, through two parallel tracks or discourses: One track was moralistic and involved asymmetrical caregiver relations, which worked on an individual level and targeted the students’ moral behaviour; and the other involved dialogue and networking, which targeted enhanced inclusion of students who were at risk of dropping out of college, for instance as a result of having violated college rules. Most often, students violated rules because they had difficult life circumstances and other complex problems, resulting in pregnancy, substance abuse, fighting and truancy. The principal had an egalitarian approach to managing students: he involved students in discussions and took into consideration their specific contexts when deciding about an offence. But the deputy principal valued moralism and value instalment. This divergence in style was a constant issue of discussion among students, but also taught them about different routes to obtaining their wants and aims. For instance, a student reported an incident where he had not cleared his teaching fees for the semester. He therefore went to the deputy principal, who told the student to go home until the fees were paid. The student then went to the principal, who said that he could stay at college and issued a letter about it. The deputy principal then overruled the principal by saying that ‘this is not right. The student has to go home.’ This incident demonstrated the informal leadership at college, to which the principal did not always object, maybe as a means of preserving the unity of the school and to avoid conflicts. The principal had a reputation among students as a forgiving and ‘soft’ leader who mostly talked to students when they broke college rules; however, the deputy principal had a reputation for firmness, which could not be easily influenced or changed. Students referred to the deputy as ‘harsh, but not over harsh’, ‘firm, but not over firm’ and ‘an iron lady that cannot be ashamed’. Students explained that ‘I like her, she has to put some pressure’, or ‘just don’t cross her ways then you’ll be OK’. In these comments, I saw acceptance of the deputy’s role as a moral guardian for college ethics in a gendered way, targeting particularly female students around sexual abstinence, bodily discipline, and avoiding puerile behaviour. These issues were constantly brought out in the public space at Wummit, for example when the deputy targeted female students at a Friday morning assembly: DEPUTY PRINCIPAL  The

ladies here are giving us a bad name. They hang around the road with men. I saw one yesterday, and I know you know yourself. I also wonder what the ladies want to do with taxi men on weekends. What is wrong with ladies and cars? I’ll make sure that we parade for you all the cars in the compound, so you can do whatever you want to do with them! I have told you several times that we don’t want passes [lowest passing grade], and we are going for credits [second-highest

‘I have someone’  93 grade level] and above. And if the ladies and some men just continue to hang around, then I wonder where we are headed. (Observation, morning assembly) Female sexual practices had the power to destabilise ideas about gender (cf. Butler, 2002). The deputy apparently felt terrorised by the thought that female students were ‘lost in immorality’ and losing their place in gender, or not knowing what they would become if they engaged in sex outside of matrimony. Female students engaging in premarital – assumedly heterosexual – sex were not described as students but received new identities as ‘prostitutes’, or were described as ‘issues’ and ‘cases’. Gender was used as a way of securing ‘normal’ sexuality, which, when becoming a teacher, was associated with anti-sexual behaviour. This bears similarities to MacKinnon’s formulation of how policing gender is sometimes used as a way of ­securing heterosexuality: ‘Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualisation of inequality between men and women’ (1987, cited in Butler, 2002, p. xii). Normative sexuality fortifies normative gender (Butler, 2002, p. xi), and through their sexual (mis)behaviour, female students were attributed as being problematic, unrealisable, unreal and illegitimate students. Their re-identification as ‘trouble’ was produced and consolidated through the sexual hierarchy, in which sexually active women were ‘harassing’, whereas sexually active men were just considered to be ‘hanging out’.

Photo 3.1  Guidance and counselling question box in front of the dining hall.

The deputy had no power to exert control over a student’s whereabouts outside college. The only possibility of restoring hegemony was to address the issue of sexuality and gender in the public space, for instance at morning assemblies. In one instance, a female student was publicly humiliated in front of the rest of the students:

94  ‘I have someone’ At the opening day of the school semester, the deputy principal meets a female student dressed in blue jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt in the administration building. Though the student has not yet formally reported back from holiday and is on her way to the dormitory, the deputy principal gives her a severe reprimand in front of the staff room, calls her ‘a prostitute’, and orders her to come to the next assembly wearing the same clothes. At the following assembly the students report in their grey uniforms except the female student, who arrives in her jeans and is placed in front of the other students. The deputy principal again calls the student a ‘prostitute’ and asks the around 250 students who are gathered for the assembly if they think this student really is smartly dressed? The crowd answers loudly ‘yes’, and the deputy looks surprised. She overhears the reaction from the crowd and asks the female student to excuse her clothing. The female student lowers her eyes and the answer cannot be heard in the crowd. The female student thereafter is referred to among the students as Miss Wummitco, the dubious name of a winner of an imaginary beauty contest at Wummit TTC. (Observation, assembly ground) Though students did not fully comply with the deputy’s effort to moralise the female student, a ‘sticky categorisation’ (Lagermann, 2015) became attached to her. From the moment of the assembly, she was perceived as promiscuous and as pursuing other aims at college than purely professional. She became an inappropriate and almost criminal subject. Students displaying similar behaviour were marked out as troublemakers by the institution and could only partly transcend their marginalisation and exclusion. Morality is an important element of culture and is inherent in all social settings. What people value and strive for, what they consider ‘good’ and worthy, influences how they act, feel and think. A particular morality that aims at purity, bodily discipline, nobility, respect for elders, obedience and being a role model for others (Dahl, 2014b) was evidenced at Wummit. ‘Moralistic health education’ (Jensen, 1997, p. 420) has been proposed to describe a value-laden and totalitarian approach to health communication that does not give space to students’ own thinking and decisions about concepts of health and what a healthy life is for them. Similarly, moralistic education in Kenyan TTCs discussed earlier is a subtle form of communication embedded in the teacher education institution (Dahl, 2014b), which provides only certain spaces for students to think about and feel what living and practising as a teacher might mean for them. In other words, the position of students and their understanding is available only through particular categories, outside of which they are not allowed to stray. Moralism in Kenyan teacher education can be traced, as mentioned, back to Kenya’s colonial past; moral values of teachers are still a major concern in Kenyan teacher education, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa (Lewin and Stuart, 2003, p. 52). Though Wummit students knew about this moralisation, they objected less to it than students at other TTCs. Students recognised that rules were

‘I have someone’  95 strict but also contributed to their development in a positive way. It made them feel emotionally connected to the attachment objects, the tutors: ERICK  The

rules are strict, but not harsh. The dressing code is very strict. And everybody else has got his own style, so you feel you are just down. Even the ladies, they can’t wear trousers. It’s like we are in the old grandmother’s traditions. It is not fair at all. But there are also some good sides now. This school is really shaping us to be role models. Some tutors are councillors. They are always available. You can go to them and they counsel you if there are something disturbing you. Then you’ll feel relieved. Then another good thing is that this school, they value God so much. There are a lot of prayers taking place in the school. Before we start learning, we pray. In the dorms before we sleep, we pray, and so on. And then the teachers are just friendly. They take us for their brothers and sisters. OTIEN  They have really helped me because one thing when I had not joined this college, I did not use to tuck my shirt in, but now it has become a routine and I have seen it is a good way. I have now started wearing decent clothes, which I used to despise. Really, it has helped me to accept those good behaviours. I never used to comb my hair and to [cut] short my hair before, but now I’ve come to like short hair. It has really made me to be smart. Others tell me I have really changed and a lot. I’ve really changed for a good reason. CHRIS  Majority of them [the rules] I can support them, because as a teacher they are shaping you. Maybe they are developing in you that culture of having respect for rules and as a teacher you are still going to be somebody who will be advocating for the implementation of rules back to the schools where you will be posted. So in order to be a good implementer of the rules, you must be a good follower of the rules. (FGD, second-year male students) From a phenomenological perspective, there is the issue of students actively negotiating the moralistic discourse provided for them by the college; being aware that their freedom was curtailed, but also being willing to sacrifice freedom and subject themselves to advice from elders to achieve a sense of community and attachment. From a poststructural view, students’ psychological realities were shaped and their free will was distorted by the subtle, treacherous mechanisms of subjectification that create docile subjects. This means that a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of a particular position, once it has been taken up as one’s own, and ‘in terms of the particular images, metaphors, story lines, and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned’ (Davies and Harré, 1990, p. 46). Both paths of becoming seemed present: on one side, the constitutive force of discursive practice could be recognised, while acknowledging that students were knowledgeable about the discursive

96  ‘I have someone’ practices forced on them and capable of exercising choice in relation to those practices (cf. Davies and Harré, 1990, p. 46). As at other colleges, the daily experience at Wummit was characterised by lack of medicine and medical assistance, congested dormitories and classrooms, lack of water and food, unhygienic toilet facilities, lack of privacy and a general lack of freedom to decide about private issues such as clothing, sleeping hours, moving around, leaving the college compound and talking to the opposite sex. Our fieldwork reflected how the Wummit students recognised and apparently accepted institutional discipline: CHRIS  I

think I can defend the college a bit. Over the weekends … who is bothered about what you do? You can leave the college at five or six a.m. on Saturday and come back at six p.m. on Sunday in the evening. During that time, l think you have time to do what you want to do. JOSHUA  For me, I think there is nothing bad, because I grew up in an environment where respect for authority was not an option. It was something that came up naturally. You are just told this and you just do it. You don’t have to disturb and bring in other things. I did not get a lot of difficulty in coming up to the standards here in terms of rules and regulations. So most of it is determined by how you grew up, because there are those who grew up in different lifestyles. Some are not used to so many things and that becomes a problem. But for me very few things are becoming a problem – maybe only the meals. (FGD, second-year male students) According to the principal, the main aim of the TTC was to ‘imprint values and virtues in the students’. Numerous initiatives were undertaken to emphasise moral education, especially during collective and individual ‘guidance and counselling’ sessions, in which tutors advised and directed students on sensitive issues, such as intimate contact with the opposite sex. For instance, the principal had ordered all lessons at Wummit to start with tutors guiding and counselling the class for two minutes. Tutors also thought of the guidance as crucial in the work with the students: FEMALE TUTOR  The

good thing about it is that we have a very strong guidance and counselling department and this is where we consult, when we have discipline cases. Obviously, in most cases, a discipline case is not always a bad one. It can just be a mistake. So a mistake can be remedied. Even behaviour can be unlearnt or relearnt. (Interview, 45-yearold female tutor)

As mentioned, the Wummit principal maintained a more forgiving and inclusive approach towards violations of college regulations than principals at some other TTCs. ‘Drunkardness’, for instance, was not regulated with dismissal or expulsion, but with dialogue:

‘I have someone’  97 PRINCIPAL  Last

month, a girl went to her brother’s home where there was a party. So somebody gave her some drinks and she drunk them for the first time. When she arrived here she was so drunk. She vomited in the dormitory. The issue was brought to us. We asked the girl what happened, then she became frank that ‘I was given some drinks by my brother. Then I drank. Then I became drunk.’ So I told her, ‘What you do, can you call your parents.’ So the parents came because I wanted the parent to know. We told her, ‘From now don’t attempt it again’, and we allowed her to stay in college. Actually, she is a second year so we looked at it and said, if we send this girl [home] for a year and she has only two terms [left in her studies], we are not fair to her and in any case it is something that has happened without any plans. So are the challenges we are facing, but I feel those are challenges of youths. (Interview, principal)

The principal apparently handled cases by taking into consideration the social and cultural background of the students, often ignoring college regulations: PRINCIPAL  One

of our students was a drug addict, so he became sick and [was] taken to hospital. He was rehabilitated and then he regained. So when I came here in 2007, he came to claim his vacancy here. I looked at it and the doctor had written this boy has improved so he can be allowed to continue with the course. Then I said ‘okay’, let him continue. He continued. The first year he was okay. The second year he was still taking medicine prescribed by the doctor. I don’t know the drug, but after some time this boy became violent, so every now and then we talked to him. I told the lecturers and students that whatever this boy does, let’s look at it and guide him and not to discipline him and condemn him. Then at one time he was also saying, ‘Now when I need a woman, I cannot sit here. I have to go and look for that lady.’ That is a very embarrassing thing [to say]. But we sympathised with him, because he was under the drugs. So we kept him in college until he completed, but unfortunately he did not pass the exams. He failed, which is unfortunate, but we gave him the opportunity to go through. (Interview, principal)

The incident just described was an everyday experience in all the colleges, but such behaviour normally resulted in expulsion or dismissal. At Wummit such incidents resulted in guidance and counselling that involved a specially designated tutor speaking with and advising the student. Intoxicated students, who displayed illegal behaviour in the public space, were still tolerated and forgiven: One afternoon, a male student about twenty-five years old enters a class. He wears a dirty brown sweater and faded black trousers from

98  ‘I have someone’ the college uniform, and he walks to the tutor’s desk. The tutor is not yet in class. All the students laugh loudly as the male student imitates a tutor: ‘Good morning, class!’ The male student walks to the back row, then back towards the entrance, staggering to the second row, where he extends his hands to a female student and walks, supported by her, towards the door. A male student comments on the incident: ‘This student rarely comes to class and he is always drunk. He was suspended for two weeks and then came back. He is under guidance and counselling now, but he still drinks. The administration says that they are giving him time to change.’ (Observation, classroom) The principal spent most of his time at college out of his office walking around the compound and talking to students and employees. This created a sense of being united and a feeling of being understood among the students. ‘If you want to see the principal or the deputy principal to talk on any issue you simply walk into the office and talk to them’, a male student told me. However, feeling united and living under the same conditions sometimes worked as an alternative way for the administration to exercise control, since it made complaints from students irrelevant: MIKE (LAUGHING)  We

are just wondering what kind of tutors we have here. You know, last week a student went to the DOS [dean of students] to complain about the food. We only get githeri [white maize cooked with beans], and sometimes the food is not even cooked. What is funny is that the food that students eat is the same food tutors eat. And the tutors, who have money, don’t complain. So we wonder, what is going on? BARAK  So, if you are complaining to the DOS, he simply dismisses you by telling you that ‘I also ate the same food, but I am not complaining’. So you wonder, ‘Where do you start from?’ (Informal conversation, male students) The issue of students and tutors eating the same food demonstrated equality. But it challenged social hierarchies between tutors and students and gave power to students, who held tutors up to ridicule by speculating and laughing about ‘which kind of tutors we have here’. The public option is seemingly that the tutors, who occupy a higher-status position than the students due to their greater capital in the college, should accept food equivalent to their social status. During the fieldwork, the deputy was transferred to another TTC and the social climate at Wummit changed. The transfer of the deputy was a welcome incident for many students: ‘Stress went away. The deputy is gone. She was the one bringing trouble in this college. Now, things are just okay’ (Informal conversation, male student). Management terminated her employment and dialogue started. Students felt relieved that the psychological pressure had disappeared. As one male student explained:

‘I have someone’  99 The deputy was like the ruler in this college, and she couldn’t agree with the principal on so many things. I think this is the issue of involving the students in decision. The going of the deputy has really helped a lot. At least people no longer live with fear in the college here. (Informal conversation, first-year male student)

MALE STUDENT 

At other instances, the management intermingled with the students in the public space, for instance in the dining hall: Mr Nido, the dean of students, sits in the students’ dining hall with a plate of githeri in front of him. He is surrounded by students eating and occasionally turns his head to the male student sitting next to him, talks and laughs. The other students at first turn their heads towards the dean, but after a short while ignore him as if his presence is not a new thing. The student sitting on the left side of the dean laughs and pats the dean on the back, and then continues to talk to the student sitting next to him. A male student later comments: ‘Sometimes he [the dean] comes to the dining hall and has lunch with the students. He is our friend. He sits down with us, eats with us and tells us stories.’ (Observation, dining hall) The relaxed attitude of the students, who paid little attention to the dean, was testament to the regularity of the dean’s visits in the students’ dining hall. Small pats on the back of his shoulder, the relaxed conversation and laughter demonstrated a friendly interaction between students and the dean, and an effort on the side of the administration to remove some of the fear that was often embedded in the relations between students and superiors: MALE STUDENT  Since

the deputy left, human relations between the students and the administration have improved. That fear of expulsion is no longer there. In fact, the issue of tribalism in this college is also not as serious as it used to be when the deputy was around. The administration is now doing guidance and counselling more than ever before. (Informal conversation, male student)

The principal undertook a number of new initiatives to involve the students in the daily running of the college. For instance, the students were asked their opinion of the college and their views about which issues they would like to change or improve in a questionnaire distributed in hard copies to all students. The questionnaire asked students their opinion about the strengths and challenges of the college, staffing, communication, administration, and suggestions for improvements. It seemed to involve students through more open and genuine forms of participation (cf. Hart, 1992). The will to include students seemed present. Subsequently, some of the students’ suggestions were implemented. For instance, students got a new TV in the dining hall and were permitted to watch sports, news and films. This

100  ‘I have someone’ created a feeling among students of being included in social processes and listened to, despite the fact that no real power shift had taken place: MALE STUDENT  It

just started this year. One change that we have realised now is that students are actively involved in decision-making. They [administration] give us questionnaires to fill out and our views are acted upon. Like the issue of TV and DVD, we just said that we want a TV and DVD and they were brought. At least the administration listens to us. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

The incident illustrates how even small, institutional changes might have an important impact on students’ feelings and sense of fairness, and allow them to become more action competent by exploring a problem, becoming conscious and raising their voices collectively. Studies document that awareness-raising and consciousness development, such as reflection, are key to teacher learning and professional development (Goodnough, 2010; Harnett, 2012; Dahl, 2014a, p. 161). Teacher reflection can, for instance, have a nuanced effect on how they hold power in the classroom (Montessori and Ponte, 2012). Paulo Freire’s (1973) approach of conscientization is pedagogically meant to integrate educational practice with small-scale theory, arising as a result of participant engagement with practice. It involves an empowering approach to problem-solving, including steps such as subjects’ own visions of how to change the status quo, investigating a problem, taking action and finally changing a situation (cf. Jensen, 1997). Investigating a problem, such as how to gain access to TV and news, developing visions for solving this problem, taking action such as making a collective request, receiving the TV and thereby extending/changing one’s action range, made students competent in a more contextual way, within the frames provided to them, than passively listening to class lectures. Students at all TTCs were punished for offences against formal and informal college regulations, but physical sentencing was less stern for Wummit students. For instance, some students had not cleaned their ‘cubes’, the small enclosures in the dormitory with bunk beds. For such an offence, students at other TTCs could be sentenced to cleaning the whole pavement in front of the administration block and a full classroom block during class hours. The punishment would be double, since students would lose valuable class time and thereby decrease their chance of passing exams. Students at Wummit, however, always paid their punishment during games time; therefore, punishment did not interfere with class lessons and was not retaliatory but included social considerations by placing the punishment at a more convenient time for the students.

Senses of belonging: social life and school life Students at Wummit felt they were listened to by the administration, liked by the tutors and punished less harshly than fellow students at

‘I have someone’  101 other colleges. They were encouraged to participate in social activities with other students. They enthusiastically engaged in co-curricular activities in student communities, used time in prayer and for religious events, watched hip-hop music videos and African football matches on the newly bought TV in the dining hall, and, in all, felt attached to the college in a devoted way. A group of students were so happy with their stay that they wrote a ‘praising poem’ to Mr Nido, the dean of students, and pinned it on the outdoor noticeboard on the administration building together with his photo: ‘Light of MATECO’ So understanding and patient You have accommodated all students Students with different needs You have catered for all the students Your advices have changed many lives Students are enjoying to be in MATECO Your Motto ‘JUSTICE AND FAIRNESS FOR ALL’ Has been confirmed by the students All corners of MATECO are full of praises Because of your work in the college God is going to reward you in your life Continue with your good work Mr DOS Signed: Charles Mc MATECO (Document, notice board on the administration building) The poem went on for four more verses and indicated students’ emotionalised and personalised relations to a member of the administration. They called the dean ‘a father’, indicating the rare relation between students and a superior. In another instance, a student took the initiative to write a twopage proposal for a project that could combine economic and environmental concerns, provide income and jobs and reduce environmental pollution at the college. The notice was signed by the student, pinned on the dining hall’s noticeboard and sent to the college administration. Generally, TTC administrations consider ‘good advice’ from students about college administration a critique of their work. The critical issue in the student’s proposal was, therefore, not his creative ideas about how the college could solve the eternal problem of money and resources, but rather that the student could raise issues feeling confident about not being perceived as an offender. In a subsequent interview, the student expressed that, ‘I want to leave the college better than I found it. Because at least it [the college] has made me someone. When I go back home I am now a teacher.’ His concern for the college’s welfare showed that an attachment to the place and a profound sense of belonging had developed.

102  ‘I have someone’

Photo 3.2  Afternoon preparation of homework in women’s dormitory.

When students, and even those who superficially knew us, met us in the outdoor corridors, they would always greet us and ask, ‘Eih, where were you? You were so lost!’ and ‘Don’t disappear without letting us know’. We rapidly became ‘known’ faces and students felt we were an indispensable part of the scenery. ‘All is data’, according to Glaser (2002, p. 1), so students’ representation of feeling socially attached to the field assistants and myself not only demonstrated how a rapport had been established that benefitted the fieldwork, but also that good social connections and relations were important values at Wummit, which were ingrained in students and tutors’ everyday lives. At Wummit, the basis for the tutors and the administration’s approach to students was personalised, and students’ behaviour was positively conditioned. As discussed earlier, rewards were offered instead of punishment for good behaviour. For instance, cleaning the dormitories was regulated through a prize-winning ceremony, where the cleanest dormitory received a trophy, a golden plastic cup, at a morning assembly. Yet, moral discipline was always present, as this observation of the deputy principal’s feelings about cleanliness, communicated to students at a morning assembly, shows: DEPUTY PRINCIPAL  First,

I have to say that I am disappointed this week with the level of cleanliness. How can you be dirty? And you are a teacher who wants to go and make change in the community? I am not impressed. Let us all try to maintain cleanliness in the dormitories and our environment. (Observation, morning assembly)

The deputy linked physical dirt to moral character by asking the students how they could be ‘dirty and still teachers’. Bodily discipline by the institution was highly valued. Earning respect, being morally upright, physically clean, and intellectually ‘pure’ were important attributes of being a Wummit

‘I have someone’  103 student in the institutional optic, and issues that both students and ­employees thought of as connected to being a teacher. Governmentality worked, and the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Dean, 2002, p. 19) had to some degree become invisible as internalised values in students’ bodies.

Students: class elders, teacher parents and ethnic prefects Students at Wummit respected their student councillors in different ways from their fellow students at other TTCs. At Lexington, for example, members of the student council in general were feared, hated and avoided, but at Wummit they were asked for advice, respected and an integral part of solving everyday conflicts. The instalment ceremony for student councillors at Wummit was a serious event, taking place with all students and staff present. Members of the student council were not called seniors, like at Lexington, but councillors. This signalled a less hierarchical relationship with mutual interdependency, which involved both duties and rights for all parties. Consequently, I was told by Anett – a second-year female student – that the councillor ‘has to be someone who is respected by the other students’. It was a tradition at Wummit that the overall councillor, vice councillor and the students in the position of class councillor were older and married students. Anett explained, ‘The students feel they need a married person to lead them’. The dominant matrix (Collins, 1998) in the form of traditional gender, age and position hierarchies seemed important, but traditions and the unwritten rules were beginning to break up. Anett indicated that in the year following our interview, ‘unmarried persons can apply for the positions, because otherwise it is unfair’. The issue of moral precept was, however, indispensable and an absolute rule when students were elected. This was held in high regard by both students and tutors. Anett explained: ANETT  You

see, first of all, before you are elected, tutors have to be sure that this someone is of good character, this someone who will be respected by the other students, because you can’t put someone there who is not respected by the other students. In fact they won’t listen to what you say. Mostly what we do, we are just a second help to the teachers. Maybe if a teacher is not there in some department they can say like that area is nobody in charge. (Interview, second-year female student)

Collins (1998, p. 63) argues that the family ideal constitutes a fundamental principle of social organisation and ideological construction. Institutions, for instance in the United States, are often constructed through family rhetoric, using ‘the family’ as a primary site of belonging to various groups. ‘Family values’ (Collins, 1998, p. 65) work to naturalise state hierarchies of gender, age and sexuality. For instance, the traditional family ideal assumes male headship that privileges and naturalises masculinity as a source of authority. Students at Wummit were also conceptualised according to imagined, institutional, ethnic segregated families. The dorm councillors and class councillors

104  ‘I have someone’ were involved in students’ social lives, and were referred to as ‘dorm elders’ and ‘class elders’. The ‘elder’ title signifies the traditional, hierarchical family-like relationship between prefects and students. Student elders were often the oldest and most experience students in a class, and were often married. Elders consisted of one student of each gender in a class and a dormitory, and were called ‘classroom fathers’ and ‘classroom mothers’. They were to solve student conflicts and social problems before they reached the student council. Socially, it was a safety net stretched under the students, intended to grasp problems before they started. Every week the dorm elder called for an obligatory meeting to discuss any kind of actual or imagined problems. These meetings always started with a prayer, followed by the following mandatory issues: problems in the dormitory, the most ‘stubborn’ student in the dormitory and identification and counselling of drug addicts. By officially sanctioning the body of student elders, the Wummit administration accepted that students had social problems that needed to be dealt with, not ignored like at other colleges. Most of the problems that students experienced at Wummit were related to substance and alcohol abuse, issues arising from being confronted with many students in a congested place, and for the first time in their lives being exposed to the opposite sex and engaging in intimate relationships. The close daily contact between students and college elders on an informal basis seemingly reduced the number of cases in the dean’s office. Fewer students were therefore expelled from this college compared to other colleges. The dean referred to this process as ‘filtration’: arising problems were handled before they developed into disciplinary cases. The ‘paramount reality’ (Schutz, 1973; Schutz and Luckmann, 1973) in students’ everyday lives was one of psychological attachment to important others, which gave students a sense of self and identity. But it also positioned them in hierarchical structures, where they were categorised as inexperienced and minor, lacking the competences of the adults that they would become (Prout and James, 1997). Students were not considered competent interpreters of the social world, nor possessors of a culture of their own, and therefore, in many instances, illegitimate persons. Like Lexington, Wummit also appeared to be highly ethnicised. Indeed, many daily life occurrences centred on groups of students with similar ethnic backgrounds. For instance, students arranged ‘ethnic meetings’, where students of the same ethnic origin gathered, listened to music from their own ethnic group and ate traditional food literally from the same plate to express the unity of the group. The institution authorised these meetings, perhaps since they replaced the traditional discos (with their dancing, soda and Western pop music), which, unlike other TTCs, were not present at Wummit. The end-of-term celebration at Wummit was organised via groups based on ethnicity, which cut across class, year and dormitory affiliation. At other TTCs, end-of-term celebrations were organised based on either class or academic year. The ethnic groupings at Wummit were referred to as ‘families’. A family provides shelter, emotional work, personal attachment and belonging, but

‘I have someone’  105 also parental control over dependent children, which reproduces age, gender and seniority as fundamental principles of social organisation (Collins, 1998, p. 65). These college families provided basic meaning and attachment for students during their stay at Wummit. The families held weekly meetings, which were about ‘how to survive in the college’. Popular topics at the family meetings were questions such as how to avoid suspension and discussions about the deputy principal, who was seen as tribalistic. These informal gatherings gave the students an opportunity to discuss unpleasant experiences and secrets. Families increased student inclusion, involvement and participation in groups along ethnic lines, yet at the same time induced splits and division between groups of different ethnic origin. Wummit was a governmental college and, according to the government (MOEST, 2004), was therefore supposed to mirror the ethnic and cultural diversity in the country. In practice, however, the culture of Wummit was constructed around ethnic categorisation, which meant an exclusive culture, where differentiation between students was the rule. ‘Ethnicisation’ has come to be used to refer to the socially constructed nature of ethnicity, says Phoenix (2008, p. 22). Students themselves took the initiative to ethnicise social events and groupings. This was openly legitimised by the institution, who always referred ‘problematic’ students to a member of the student council with the same ethnic background as the student in question. Similarly, students of the same ethnic background informally helped each other: HENRY  You

know the advantages of electing your fellow tribesmen into the council? If you elect one of your own, then if you want to spend special time with your girlfriend, then you just go to the senior’s office and relax there. But if you don’t have one [councillor] of your own [ethnic group] there, then you just meet at Mapenzi Street or Koinange Street [outdoor areas at the college, named after streets in the red-light district in the capital city, Nairobi], or make her come to the dormitory. But the disadvantage with that is that she can’t spend [the night] in the dormitory. So, you will have again to sneak her back to the female dormitory. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Even though opposite-sex students were not permitted to enter each other’s dormitories, they developed informal ways to establish intimate contact. Female students would disguise themselves as men in baggy jeans, big T-shirts and caps to cover their hair, and sneak into the men’s dormitories. Dorm elders and councillors of the same ethnicity as the students in question ignored these practices. Students were a second family, and the college a second village, also carrying out social control. The ‘sense of community’ had in some ways turned into ethnic grouping, which underlined ethnic differences and made students consecrate their ethnic groups. However much it made students ‘feel at home’, it also contributed to fuelling ethnic hierarchies and clashes in times of conflict and tension, as many people in Kenya experienced in the post-election violence in 2008, where Kenya went through a civil

106  ‘I have someone’ war-like turbulence with rioting, murder and attacks on villages due to the national vote for the presidency. The question is whether ethnic grouping could prepare students for a diverse world in which ethnicity permeates most aspects of everyday life, and whether ethnic grouping could provide for ethnic unity, which was a principal aim of national education. When Wummit students went for the National Drama Day in Nairobi, the Akamba students went in one bus, and the Pokot students in another. Students were guided and counselled by older and more experienced students, sometimes of the same gender and ethnicity. But only second-year students were permitted to vote in student council elections, since, as the overall chairman said, ‘they [first-year students] are still new and do not know the students who are interested in the different positions in the student council’. A social organisation focusing on minor members versus members of legal age in the Wummit family created distinctions between those able to legitimately participate in the democratic processes and those who, due to an illegitimate status, could not (Collins, 1998). But race and ethnicity were also at stake: Race is socially constructed, involves power relations and becomes socially significant through social, economic, cultural and psychological processes (Phoenix, 2008, p. 22). The study of Wummit show us how ethnicity does not describe something one is, but something one is made to be, and that it has consequences for who and how a subject is included in the social community. The overall chairman at Wummit was a popular person who was well liked by his fellow students. Unlike his counterparts in other colleges, he hung out with groups of different students, extended his hands to greet students on his way to the student council office, and was in return patted on the shoulder by seemingly satisfied students. In other instances, the groupings in the dormitories illustrated how the Wummit society was also an inclusive one, building equal rights; not a culture that was ‘colour blind’. A colour-blind approach attempts not to differentiate between people based on religion or race and to treat people the same (Hervik, 2001). The rationale behind this is to not discriminate; yet a colour-blind approach produces difference, since demands of equality cannot be met by different groups (Hervik, 2001) who have different access to resources, possibilities, alliances, power, etc. By not treating everybody the same and by treating students differently, Wummit favoured inclusion. Students were different, and instead of producing Otherness and ‘illegitimate’ students, Wummit students became included. At Wummit, first- and second-year students shared the same dormitory and cube, unlike the common practice at some other TTCs, where students of different academic years were segregated. Wummit students liked the arrangement with mixed dormitories. A first-year student shared a cube with a second-year student, who in the evenings helped the first-year student with mathematics. Many first-year students did not have all the books and amenities, so this relationship between the ‘older’ and ‘younger’ students fostered an informal community of learning that helped less fortunate or academically capable students.

‘I have someone’  107 The problems started when inclusivity and ethnic participation became means of social control, resulting in limitations, tribalism, ethnocentrism and corruption. Unity, solidarity and teamwork turned into ethnic priorities and differentiation. As mentioned, rumour had it that the deputy principal seemed to favour her own ethnic group during student intake, but she also favoured her own ethnic group when distributing bursary funds. A student explained: STUDENT  The

deputy principal is a tribalist. She just loves Akambas, because she is an Akamba. We always have an internal bursary here of around KES 900 [at the time of fieldwork, USD 11.160]. But the needy students from other tribes rarely get it. I have applied twice, but haven’t gotten anything. But last year there were Akambas who had even cleared fees but got the bursary. Imagine, some of them didn’t even apply. We wonder how and why. (Informal conversation, first-year male student)

In a related incident, the deputy tried to nullify the election of the student council as it did not contain Akamba students. This was another example of the negative aspects of active differentiation and of not being ‘colour blind’ (Hervik, 2001). Students actively reacted against what they perceived as unjust tribalism. Students who were not Akamba managed to exclude Akamba students from the student council, since they feared that these students ‘would spy on us’, as a second-year female student said. Non-Akamba students experienced cultural pressure from the deputy. This in return increased their orientation towards their own ethnic group and increased processes of ethnicisation, which developed into dislike for students from other ethnic backgrounds: Inside a classroom, two students, a male and a female, sit behind each other. They are both ethnic Luo background and therefore non-Akambas. The male student extends his hand and touches the shoulder of the female student, and says, ‘Will you leave that file here after PTE?’ The female student says, ‘Why? And I have a charcoal burner at home. I can’t leave my file to these stupid Akambas, vile wametudharau [Kiswahili meaning: ‘how they look down upon us’]. I can never do that.’ The two students laugh as they return to read their books. (Observation, second-year classroom) Ethnicity influenced how students came to think about each other and other ethnic groups. This did not result in common work ‘towards national cohesion’, as the aims for the national teacher education recommend (MOEST, 2004). Students came to think of each other principally from the perspective of ethnicity; therefore, some were considered Akambas, Luo, Pokots, Luyhas and other ethnicities before they were considered male and female, first and second years, rural and from town or rich and less rich. Ethnic interests were possibly fuelled by the experiences of unjust, ethnicised treatment modelled

108  ‘I have someone’ by the deputy. As a category of meaning, ethnicity can be viewed ethnographically as the systematic distinction between insiders and outsiders (Hylland Eriksen, 2002, p. 19). Ethnicity presupposes institutionalised relations between parallel categories, such as ethnic minority groups in Kenya, whose members consider themselves different from one another. An ethnic group will therefore define itself on the basis of social contact (Hylland Eriksen, 2002). To understand how students developed an identity based on ethnicity above all, rather than – for instance – being future teachers requires a closer look into how social processes take place and are constructed. According to social psychologist Tajfel (1974), group dynamics are characterised by several distinct psychological processes, which are decisive for the group’s and the individual’s behaviour. Social categorisation means that individuals will segment themselves with reference to different categories, such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion and income. Conceptions of what is ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ compared to the individual’s own position develop, and a social identity is formed (Tajfel, 1974). This identity contains information about the characteristics of the group that the individual belongs to, based on processes of social comparison and social distinction with other groups and individuals. The comparison falls to the benefit of one’s own group. Group membership leads to dissociation from other groups and a justification of actions in relation to those in the out-group(s). For instance, Wummit students with a Luo background felt they were in foreign territory surrounded by (ethnic) foreign students and dominated by an administration that made decisions based on ethnicity. As a result, they did not develop greater understanding of other customs and cultures. At other TTCs, students reported that one of the main things they learned at college was the possibility of interacting and developing friendships with students of other ethnic backgrounds. Yet being a student at Wummit strengthened the sense of ethnicity and orientation towards one’s own ethnic group. Talking ill of other students, and sometimes bullying, was justified through membership of student groups with the same ethnic background. Being pushed towards the margins and challenged in one’s cultural identity induced a sense of hostility towards others. Festinger (1954) enlightened us about how people make sense of and experience reality as a social construction, and how this reality becomes shared with and depends on social intercourse between people. Social comparison often takes place with those people who can further a positive self-evaluation, for instance other in-group members. In other words, students acknowledged the new social, constructed reality that was a result of membership in different student groups. They developed a ‘shared reality’, which highly influenced how they perceived themselves and others. Students became cultures of us versus them (Hylland Eriksen, 2002, p. 19), or those who are legitimate against others (Collins, 1998). They were in a new place, making new contacts, conducting new affairs and forming new norms, which, as Sherif (1966) suggests, developed in a collective way due to collective influences (Sherif, 1966; Sherif and Sherif, 1956). While ethnicity created division among students, it also unified students from the same background.

‘I have someone’  109 The language of student elders, teacher parents and ethnic prefects also advanced feelings of belonging to the place and the people in it. Therefore, and in spite of the cultural division, many students attached themselves to the place. ‘[Ethnic groups] may provide important goods and services for each other, i.e., occupy reciprocal and therefore different niches but in close interdependence’, writes Barth (1998, p. 19). This might explain why student groups occupied different territories with sharp distinctions to each other, while at the same time living in close interdependence, defining themselves according to their relative positions.

Tutors: teamwork and communality in the staff room At the start of the day, tutors from other colleges would hurry either directly to class or to their individual offices, if they had one. At Wummit, they would arrive at college before classes started, sit down in the staff room, read the newspaper, watch some TV and talk with their colleagues about the government, international politics or student performance before they dispersed to classes. The staff room was not just a place that one passed by. It was a place where one invested social time. Upon arrival in the staff room, tutors would start off at one end of the room greeting all of the tutors present with a handshake, one after another until they had made the rounds. The seating arrangement in the staff room took into account the social order of sharing and socialising: In the middle of the room were two large tables with matching chairs, but most seats were sofas and low armchairs, arranged in long rows with their backs to the walls in a large ‘U’ shape. In this way, almost all eightysix tutors could maintain eye contact. The sofas invited leisure and relaxation. As mentioned, many of the tutors either lived on campus or in the nearby town, which was dominated by Akamba people. But not all tutors were Akamba. Interestingly, the ethnic diversity among tutors did not seem to have resulted in social division among them based on antagonistic ethnic considerations. An observation from the staff room illustrates how tutors of different ethnic backgrounds apparently ignored ethnic diversity in their political discussions, although this topic usually segregated people everywhere else: Three male tutors, all of them of Akamba ethnic origin, discuss in the staff room a political theme in the upcoming election campaign. One tutor says, ‘These politicians have politicised this Mau issue. Let them leave Raila [Luo candidate for the presidency] alone. He came up with the idea, so let him implement it.’ Tutor two replies, ‘I don’t know why Kibaki [Kikuyu president at the present time] wants to frustrate Raila for just no good reason. He should let the man work.’ The last tutor nods. (Observation, staff room) The topic of discussion concerned the Mau settlers, who – according to the constitution – were supposed to be compensated for the land they were given during the former presidency of Daniel Arap Moi, a Luo by ethnic origin, that

110  ‘I have someone’ had been claimed back by the current (Kikuyu) government. The other presidential candidate, Raila – who was a Luo – proposed to compensate the smallscale farmers, but not the owners of large estates, since many of them had received their land plots directly from the former president either due to family relations or other acquaintances in the central administration. The issue of the Mau settlers soon became ethnicised and then politicised, since the farmers who had gotten their land from the president were mainly of the same ethnic origin as him, Kikuyus. Traditionally, Akamba and Kikuyu people belonged to the same ethnic branch, the Bantus, whereas Luo people belonged to the branch of Nilotes. It was therefore extremely unconventional for potential Akamba voters, such as the three tutors in the staff room, to speak in favour of a political party populated with another ethnic group in a part of the world where political decisions and resource distribution, power and access to decisions often depend on ethnic affiliation. People knew that leading individuals in the government would distribute resources nationally and geographically according to which part of the country was populated by their own ethnic group. The interest from Wummit tutors in political and ethnic parties other than their own illustrates how communality, solidarity and social justice can, at least in some senses, overrule political and ethnic interests. Many of the tutors had personalised relations with each other. They met outside the college on social occasions. For instance, the whole staff room was invited to the wedding of a female tutor’s son. The invitation to the party was written on the noticeboard in the staff room. A female tutor commented on the invitation: ‘We know their children. We are just like one family. So of course they’ll invite us for such a thing.’ The personalised relations had created awareness and acceptance of ethnic diversity among tutors. Wummit tutors came to experience a strong sense of belonging to the place. Consequently, most of them preferred to remain at Wummit rather than be transferred to another TTC, in spite of the obvious disadvantages of being in a rural and remote place, far from resources and infrastructure: TUTOR ONE  I

hear Narok [TTC] is recruiting new tutors. There are vacancies for PE [physical education] tutors. Would you like to go? TUTOR TWO  I don’t want to go because I feel at home here. It’s better the devil you know than the angel you don’t know. At least, hapa niko home [Kiswahili meaning: ‘here I am home’]. TUTOR ONE (AS BOTH TUTORS LAUGH)  I am not trying to force you to go, but at least I am trying to present the opportunity to you. (Observation, staff room) Tutors at Wummit often spoke about how teamwork and collaboration, sometimes even collegial supervision among tutors, became realised, and how tutors considered this beneficial for the academic work: GLADYS  What

I would say about this college, we are team worked. Take now for instance health science. We didn’t say that home science tutors go

‘I have someone’  111 and teach home science topics. We integrate so that the science teacher in health science tells the learners about personal hygiene. So another one comes in from the same group. The person in agriculture comes in and also handles personal hygiene. I am in home science but also handle about soil and plants. So they see us work together. That’s integration. (Interview, 45-year-old female tutor) Tutors at the Kenyan TTCs were ‘gatekeepers’ (Lewin, 1966). They were at the local level to transform education policies and national curricula into knowledge. In many Kenyan primary schools (Dahl, 2012b) and at other TTCs, teachers and tutors were ‘private practitioners’ (Cederstrøm, 1996, p. 18), meaning that individual teachers were given exclusive power in classrooms to decide the curricula in terms of teaching methods and subjects, which left common ground for developing pedagogy or subjects. But not at Wummit, where tutors not only willingly exchanged ideas regarding teaching and held lively discussions in the staff room about pedagogy, but also swopped classes and subjects: GLADYS  If

I’m not getting this topic well, I would tell her [another tutor], ‘Madam, go and teach for me this class. Handle this topic.’ And she would do the same for me, so there is that team teaching. There is a lot of time to interact with one another, so having to talk to her even for my own personal problems. So I’ll go to class with a smile. That is how we are available for one another. (Interview, 45-year-old female tutor)

The class swopping between tutors implied openness and willingness to be inspected by others. Making one’s job public and subject to possible criticism was a dangerous business in this part of the world, where remunerated jobs in the public sector are rare and difficult to acquire. The teamwork of Wummit tutors influenced their sense of obligation to their work. For instance, tutors preferred to be at work than at home, even when they had legitimate excuses, such as being sick: A male and a female tutor meet in the staff room. The female tutor says, ‘You are back to job?’ The male tutor says, ‘Eih, I was called to come back. I was phoned by the secretary that the principal had said I should be back on job. There is lot of work for me to do. Eih!’ The female tutor touches his shoulder. ‘Even if you are not feeling well?’ The male tutor wipes his nose. ‘I was told that there is a lot of work for me to do. I am needed in the office. So what can I do?’ The female tutor says, ‘Work is work! Don’t worry. It is also almost time. We soon break for home.’ (Observation, staff room) The conversation between the two tutors did not concern the principal, who seemingly ignored his staff ’s welfare by calling a sick employee back to work, as the central topic. Rather, it was an expression of the mutual

112  ‘I have someone’ reciprocity that had developed between the institution, the tutors and the management. The management had an explicit strategy for managing human resources, which acknowledged individual tutors’ capacities: PRINCIPAL  I

think the way we managed [good academic performance] is through the teaching staff. A very key person is a teacher, so if you make a teacher a very comfortable person and you encourage that teacher to do his work to his or her best and then continue encouraging him or her, then you expect that person to produce good service. But when you don’t recognise that teacher, you don’t motivate. When you don’t talk well to them, then you expect poor results. So what I have done is try to motivate the teacher, take them on a trip, talk to them. (Interview, principal)

The rhetoric about the visions of human resource management seemed transformed into viable practice: PRINCIPAL  Today,

I have sent some teachers [tutors] to Amboseli National Park for what we call a bonding trip. They need to learn about themselves. I have sent a full bus, thirty of them. It is expensive. But you see now, if you want results and good things, you should be ready to spend. When my teachers go out, I have to go with them because my presence is very important for them. They will feel that I am part and parcel of them. Two weeks ago, there was a group of science teachers who went all the way from here to Turkwell, the other side of Uganda. They came back with extra energy to work. So, although these things are small, they count a lot in terms of work performance. (Interview, principal)

The administrative acknowledgement of the staff as a resource requiring nurture and care increased the commitment of tutors to a special kind of tutoring ideal, in which tutors not only cared for students but also for each other. Tutors welcomed the initiatives of the administration and – in opposition to what happened at some other TTCs – did not use the additional space given for personal and professional development as a stepping stone to career advancement. Instead, they transferred the goodwill from the institution to advance their skills in their current place of work, as the data that follow indicate: GLADYS  The

teachers around here are committed, and on the other hand they are very much willing to learn. Most of them are in [education] programmes and learning during their holidays. But it is just capacity building, mostly. KARI  They want to change profession and advance to a higher level? GLADYS  No, they don’t want to change profession. Several who have done masters are still within, they haven’t changed. I’m one of them. I’m now doing a degree course.

‘I have someone’  113 KARI  Why do they stay here? GLADYS  The good thing with

the college, you are given your own time to do, to learn. Or maybe to research on. So that that good time for research people use it, people utilise it especially for those learning programmes and courses. So I think they like it. (Interview, 45-year-old female tutor)

Pedagogy: the personal lecturer Tutors at Wummit were not only lecturers; they were also personal lecturers (PLs), meaning they took care of and regulated the social and moral upbringing of students. The PL seemingly was supposed to be present in all TTCs but was not observed working actively in any institution other than Wummit. Each student had a particular PL assigned to them, who oversaw their academic and personal issues. Students experienced that the PLs were a particularly strong influence on their commitment to a profession that the majority of them chose due to lack of funding or grades, which prohibited them from pursuing other paths: ANN  I

did not want to become a teacher, but at long last I came to TTC. I just had to cope, because I was not feeling like … so I just had a whole term to struggle with my feelings. Every day I was feeling I wanted to go home. I felt I was wasting time, because I did not like the career. KARI  What made you have this change of feeling better? ANN  I faced my personal tutor. So I told her about it how I felt, how I had a negative attitude towards teaching, and she gave me advice. I also faced the dean of students, and with time, I came up. I felt good. So now I feel I can be the best teacher. KARI  That personal tutor, how did she encourage you? ANN  She told me to continue, instead of staying home for many years and waiting for money that will not come to me. I liked her. She was my role model. I did not like teaching, but with time I liked it. And every time we meet, she will ask me: How are you going on? So with time I changed my attitudes. I feel I can be a teacher now. (Interview, second-year female student) Tutors worked strategically with the PL function: FEMALE TUTOR  After

that TP [teaching practice], they get confidence and they start liking teaching. Actually, that first TP moulds them a lot. And then the way we encourage them when we are assessing and all that. They realise that, ‘Oh, so becoming a teacher is just like this? You just prepare, are confident, and give systematic flow of the content.’ Like the ones we are now microteaching, after several weeks they go for TP. From that TP they feel now confident, ‘Oh so I can teach, so I can be teacher.’ So from that now they become more confident. So by the time second-year we have no problem about careers. They have a good attitude by then. (Interview, female tutor)

114  ‘I have someone’ The PL motivated students and increased their commitment and sense of belonging to the teaching profession by engaging them in a ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) consisting of a PL and a student; in these communities, students moved from being peripheral to central participants through multiplex experiences of participation in daily life. A community of practice is a group of people who share a craft and/or a profession. In this community, learning emerged as personal or professional development through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Learning was indeed social (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) and took place as students spent time out of the classroom with tutors, received economic help from them, went to them for advice and came to develop an emotional attachment to them: ANETT  There

is this tutor, she encourages me so much. I really love her. The way she talks, she just makes me feel like ‘No, I have to read’. She tells us, ‘Leave these men here, these men you can’t trust them. After looking at the results you know out of the five distinctions there is only one female.’ She tells us, ‘Life is not that easy if you get these [examination] marks. Next time try to do it better.’ She is just talking from the bottom of her heart. She is a mother, so she gives us advice. She even talks with tears in her eyes. (Interview, second-year female student)

The personal relationship between tutors and students meant that many tutors felt responsible for the welfare of the students. As an example, at some point students got new water tanks and curtains in front of the cubes in the dormitories. The dean explained to a tutor how this was done ‘to reduce theft and for the students to have some privacy’. When I interviewed tutors, they often referred to the students for whom they were PLs as ‘my daughter’, ‘my son’ or ‘my children’. But the relationship also demanded respectful and obedient behaviour in return: ANETT  You

need to be in good contact with your PL. A parent tutor can refuse to help a student, for instance, to sign during the TP the student’s record, if the student hasn’t said ‘Hi’ during the years at college. (Interview, second-year female student)

Social relations in many cases had the major influence on the professional space at Wummit. Professional matters were solved from a social perspective. Many relations between tutors and students built on emotional and psychological attachment, not academics or economic power. Tutors were parents; students were offspring who needed guidance. Students were considered either older or younger siblings, which determined different levels of support. Their relations were consolidated through social bonds, which were to be maintained throughout a student’s lifetime at the college. But it also consisted of power, and sometimes the personal turned into intimacy resulting in differential treatment (Andersen, 2004), in which some students were given advantages. For instance, students reported how they had received a copy of an upcoming exam, the Continuous Assessment Test (CAT), from a tutor

‘I have someone’  115 in advance of the exam. The exam was an elimination test, which required students to re-sit the exam if they failed. All students in the particular class in question scored more than 70%, which was a very high score and far above the required pass mark of 50%. This score would appear on the national performance lists and be circulated to all TTC staff rooms and bring status to Wummit. The results from the CAT would not, however, influence the exam score for the final PTE. Rather, distributing the CAT papers to students in advance was a way for tutors to increase the number of students who could continue to the next level of study. By corrupting the exam papers, tutors helped students have a chance of reaching the national exam without being eliminated at a lower level. In this way, they critically negotiated the modern educational system, which was exclusively about academic qualifications, and where a student’s social and personal background was neglected, in what the literature has titled ‘educational rush’ (Fuller, 1991; Serpell, 1993) and ‘diploma disease’ (Dore, 1997) in African education. Wummit students experienced mutuality in their relations with the tutors, which can be understood as a kind of ‘exchanges of values, respect of rights and obligations’ (Ocholla-Ayayo, 1976, p. 32), as described by classic ethnographic literature about the pastoral life form in Kenya. Wummit students were not only subjected to obedience training, which is often accentuated as an aspect of education in the South (cf. Hundeide, 1995, p. 748; Rogoff, 1990, p. 122). Many of the teachers practised a pedagogical agency concurrently with the academic lectures, which also focused on nonverbal forms of communications (Hundeide, 1996, p. 94). This agency was a cultural form of mediation that focused on ‘typical ways of expressing communality of feeling, like sharing of emotional memories from the past and from special occasions where these modes are being used’ (Hundeide, 2001, p. 18). Since college life was organised along ethnic and quasi-familial lines, this broke with the conventional bureaucratic model of teacher education and left room for other dimensions such as feelings, interdependence, roots and the unexpected. Even though teaching at Wummit followed a traditional pedagogy by focusing on division of subjects, classroom arrangements, teacher monologues, etc., the college was open to a different pedagogical space starting in the personal connections between students and their teachers. Students experienced their tutors’ personal sides. Tutors were not merely street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) who overcame tensions and uncertainties in their job by compromising commitment to service.

Social rationality Wummit was situated in a community with physical hardships: a dry and poor corner of Kenya with poor options for employment, health treatment or educational opportunities, and with lacking infrastructure, commerce and access to basics such as food and water. But order, tranquillity and tolerance seemingly reigned there. There was no graffiti on the walls in the dormitories and no worn-out dustbins. Shoes were placed in long, straight rows outside the cubes where they remained without being stolen. Flowers blossomed in

116  ‘I have someone’ the beds in front of classrooms. Equipment, such as manual Braille typewriters for the handicapped students, was left in the unlocked classrooms without being stolen or destroyed. Older students advised younger students. Tutors assisted less fortunate students with financial help from their own pockets and with personal advice. All of this created a sense of community that made the deprivations of everyday life tolerable. The ethnic aspect of being a Wummit student was strong. Even though everyday life at college offered ethnic clashes and conflicts between students of different ethnic origins fuelled by an ethnicised deputy, and though students occasionally experienced the leadership as being one of differential treatment based on ethnicity and sexuality, there was an overall feeling of mutuality and willingness to help each other. Bourdieu (1977, p. 186) enlightens us that in the past, strategies were based on ‘trust and good faith’ … Strategies applied by the peasant aim to minimise the risk implied in the unpredictability of the outcome, by transforming the impersonal relationships of commercial transactions, which have neither past nor future, into lasting relationships of reciprocity. In the Wummit case, the social reciprocity contained genuine attempts on the part of the administration to involve students on their own terms. As mentioned, students asked for a TV set in the dining hall and got it. Their social backgrounds were taken into consideration when punishment for serious offences such as drunkenness was being measured. But students were also governed and disciplined at Wummit. Some actions were considered more legitimate than others. Christian commandments, sexual abstinence, bodily discipline, social order, mental purity and physical cleanliness were highly praised values. Moralities pertaining to ideas about teaching as a noble profession dominated, but students who could not meet these standards were not eliminated. Wummit had bureaucratic rules but was not administered as a bureaucracy. The system absorbed dissenters and nonconformists and subjected them through emotionally loaded relations into conformed persons. Students not concurring with college regulations were mostly given ‘a second chance’, but less often when they overstepped boundaries related to gender and sexuality. The discursive practice of moralism was a significant, constitutive force in the provision of subject positions, for instance female students dressing in Western clothes and engaging in intimate, romantic relationships (cf. Davies and Harré, 1990, p. 46). These students were marked in positions as criminal, promiscuous troublemakers by the institution and could, as mentioned, only partly transcend the marginalisation and exclusion that was imparted on them. At Wummit, power was used actively to create a space where many – but not all – ‘offences’ were tolerated. Hardship and difficult life circumstances contributed to the social interdependence and created a sense of communality among students and staff. Processes of normalisation took place in a social space with room for differences and disagreements; more for some than for others, however.

4 ‘I am someone’ Self-display in capitalism and reversing the social order

The rise of an enterprise When the Kenyan government, in the late 1990s, decided to privatise teacher education, TTCs mushroomed all over the country. Soon, every larger city would have one or more teacher education centres. By the first decade of this century, more than 100 of these institutions functioned alongside the governmental TTCs, which in 2010 numbered only eighteen. But how did private institutions of higher education in teacher education produce teacher candidates who could promote equality, welfare and literacy in primary schools, as requested by the educational authorities (MOEST, 2004)? Were students in private higher education in Kenya considered ‘customers’, with education reduced to being ‘a product’ that lacked ‘quality’, as Oanda et al. (2008) claimed? Global TTC is one of those teacher education centres. It was founded in 2001 as one of the first private TTCs in Kenya. Hidden behind a bushy dust road on a small land plot of one acre, crowded with concrete and semipermanent buildings, and sloping down to a small river that also served as a sewer for the surrounding households, lies Global TTC. The college compound is dominated by a large three-storey building surrounded by lower one-storey buildings that in the past housed a secondary school. Several of the buildings were hurriedly built to accommodate the large number of students who rushed to this institution because of a lack of a governmental alternative, or the opposite: young people, seeking something other than government-provisioned education. Once school fees are paid, students can enrol all year. At the time of our visit, the college housed more than 1,100 students and fewer than twenty-six tutors. It had the lowest student-teacher ratio of all the colleges participating in the study. Seemingly, students represented income, and the more of them, the better. The principal, Mr Arthur, took us around the compound. Through a narrow alley, past the dormitory and two latrines, which were used by about 600 students and produced a heavy smell that hung over the lower part of the compound, we zigzagged between the masses of students, muddy pools and tree roots that protruded through the wet soil, to the back of the ‘playground’ and the dining hall. What students called the playground was

118  ‘I am someone’ an outdoor plateau where students gathered to eat meals, take breaks, relax and socialise. The dining hall was a large semipermanent building made of rough wooden planks covered with corrugated iron sheets. Due to constant resource constraints, the school staff – especially the DoC – were forced to creatively stretch resources and make ends meet. Students had to eat in two groups due to lack of space. First years lunched first while second years were still in classes. Later, second years ate while first years went to classes. The dense scent of alcohol emerging from the principal made it difficult to focus on the introduction in the staff room. Here in the cramped room, fifteen tutors took their lunch, cracked jokes, read newspapers and prepared for classes. The tutors apparently did not notice that the principal could not remember their names and subjects. Minutes later, I squeezed myself behind the principal into a classroom that measured approximately five by eight metres, where ninety-six first-year students were sitting on narrow chairs. Meanwhile and outside, there was hectic activity from students who fluctuated in and out of the compound, bought food through holes in the fences to the neighbouring huts, and who queued for the latrines, the dean’s office and the single water tap outside one of the dormitories. The strains of the large student body relative to the resources of the college were evident everywhere. Classrooms were crowded, such that students in the back rows complained that they could not hear what the tutors said at the blackboard. Fees covered only the most basic necessities of life at the college. Food was very basic – grains, white maize and sometimes beans. A visit to the first-year women’s dormitory revealed that students slept in bunk beds of three levels pressed together in a large room made of wooden planks and corrugated iron plates. To access the bunk bed next to the wall, one had to climb over up to seven others. There was no storage space for private items. Each bunk bed had books, clothes and suitcases piled up around sleeping students. Shoes were hung by their laces using the steel wire on the bed above their heads. Students queued up hours in advance of the opening hours of the serving counter to get ‘hot’, to which they added tea leaves, milk and sugar at their own expense. What students called ‘hot’ consisted of a cup of hot water for breakfast. They bathed in the nearby river when the water and electricity was cut off for many months. New and obligatory fees were introduced regularly and at a fast pace. The students had begun to be charged fees for ‘broken chairs’. The library consisted only of books bought by students. Provision of library cards, which granted access to the library, depended on whether a student could donate three textbooks. The library was a sought-after place, but only a few students had enough money to pay this admission fee. The noise, crowds, smells and pollution made the students retreat to the dining hall to do their homework: MALE STUDENT  Not

that we like reading here. But the library is not accessible and the students are also making noise in the classroom. That is why we are here. You only get the library card if you buy three textbooks to the library.

‘I am someone’  119 FEMALE STUDENT  But

you see each book cost at least KES 500 [at the time of fieldwork, USD 6.20]. We struggle to pay fees, so do you think we can afford that? The way you see us here, we are all second years but we don’t even know how the library looks like inside. We just see the structure [from the outside]. (Informal conversation, second-year students)

All students had to pay a fee, which was used to purchase a set of twenty uniforms for members of the college sports team, who were picked on the grounds of their athletic performance. Global students felt exploited. Apart from tuition fees, medical fees exceeded KES 1,000 [at the time of fieldwork, USD 12.40] per term. This was a considerable amount, equivalent to a month’s salary for a building contractor. But for this fee, students were rarely treated with drugs other than painkillers. The place was run like a private enterprise. and all services cost money. The small kiosk beside the staff room was run privately by the deputy principal. The amount of stock was regulated by supply and demand. In the morning, the place was well stocked, but towards the afternoon, everything had sold out. ‘Private TTCs are entrepreneurs’, said the DoC. Entrepreneurs, I thought to myself, is a word that comes from business. Was it really all only about the money? It seemed so. ‘Defaulters’ were the institution’s official nickname for students who had not paid their school fees. Not paying fees was considered the most serious offence within the institution, but those who did and could pay were called ‘kings’ and ‘superstars’ by other students. Paying fees in advance meant an easy-going life for the rest of the school year. For example, students with money were able to supplement their meagre rations by buying food from the outside that was provided by local merchants. Kings and superstars were also a protected species and less punished than other students when they eventually offended college regulations. If you had paid the school fees, you were not sent home if you took part in fighting, assaults, theft and other serious offences. But if you complained about the college or the director, or even worse, criticised the college in public, you were sure to be dismissed or expelled. There was much concern about how such criticism could damage the college’s image and scare away potential clients. The matron unjustly allocated better dormitories to students with money. Lavington is an upper-class area in a leafy part of Nairobi that is inhabited by the rich, including the Kenyan elite and foreign expatriates. But Lavington was the name given to a dormitory that was luxurious by the college’s ­standards – it comprised of only six beds, two chairs, a small desk, and a shelving unit squeezed into a single room of ten square metres in one of the permanent brick buildings. Lavington had access to a small balcony and was inhabited by well-off students, one of whom was named Eliza. She rarely ate the basic food in the dining hall, which many students considered dirty and inadequate. Food was cooked in large, open outdoor containers and often contained insects and pests. Instead, Eliza had her own supply of cocoa and sugar and bought food through the fence: mandazi (oil-cooked sweet bread) from the matron and chapatti (thick pancakes made of wheat flour) from the kiosk.

120  ‘I am someone’ The principal explained how the college viewed students as customers: PRINCIPAL  There

are also some administrative problems: customer care. You know, the students are our customers, but sometimes we have some policies which do not favour them. You know, usually it is the students who market us outside and if they see something bad here and there, they don’t bring us [good marketing], [when] they say, ‘That college is bad’. He [director] is a bit strict on fees and everything. You see, somebody like me, when I’m here I don’t have any personal interest, so when I’m dealing with the students I don’t push them so much. But when the director is in, it’s different. (Interview, principal)

The college relied on its good reputation, but fees were necessary to run the place and maximise profit. Competing for students with other private TTCs made the director lower tuition fees and cut expenses, which influenced student satisfaction in a negative way. Struggling with dissatisfied and impoverished students, who suffered life in an under-resourced college and had difficulties paying the fees, wasn’t the only problem. The college started in 2001 in Kibera, the world’s second-largest slum area, which is situated in Nairobi. Their situation was, however, too insecure. Because of conflicts about ownership of the college with a pastor, from whom they rented the institution’s buildings, the director made the radical decision to relocate the college to the suburbs. Students were loaded on lorries one afternoon and in a hurry driven to this new suburban location. It was an ongoing learning experience and a struggle to survive all of the administrative, logistical and professional challenges involved in starting a college. Furthermore, they received little help from the more established colleges around them. The DoC explained that, ‘In the beginning we were really fumbling! So we did not know which direction to set.’ On average, a quarter of Global students failed the PTE exam. This was a very large percentage compared to governmental TTCs, where more students passed and got distinctions. On a national scale, distinctions were given to students who finished in the top 10%. Governmental colleges always spoke about the number of distinctions or the number of passes, but at Global, tutors and the director always spoke about the number of failures. Failures created a bad reputation for the school, attracted fewer clients and resulted in fewer products. Failures made clients (one way that students were perceived) lose their investment in paying for a college certificate. This in return demanded heavy renewed investment on the side of the institution in advertising to attract new clients, i.e., students. Most of the students were ethnically Akamba and Luhya. Many of them were recruited through advertisements broadcast on local commercial radio stations, which promised certificates and better prospects for the future: STUDENT  I heard the advertisement on radio, on Musyi FM [private Akamba

radio station] transmitted in vernacular [Akamba language]. They advertise for the opportunity, and gave up the principal’s telephone number. Then I called the principal. He told me that the college was very good,

‘I am someone’  121 and that they offer job opportunities after training. He told me that the college liaises with the government, and their students are given a special allocation. I knew I already had a job [after completing TTC], so I rushed here. (Informal conversation, second-year male student) The admission paper stated that Global students were given special allocation by the government for recruitment as primary school teachers by the Kenyan Teachers Service Commission; however, an inquiry at the ministry revealed that there was no such formal agreement, only a personal connection between a ministerial employee and the director at Global. Yet, this relation was possibly also the reason why students with lower grades than the governmentally required C-plus from secondary school could be admitted to Global. The tutors explained this as, ‘We try to fix it! You know, we have some ways of fixing,’ even though some students felt they had been subjected to misleading information in the aggressive marketing. They had seen nice buildings in the printed advertisements and reported that they thought ‘the learning environment were [sic] excellent’. The name ‘Global’ impressed and was associated with white people, an international atmosphere and material wealth: STUDENT  I

read the advertisement in the Daily Nation [national newspaper]. I was attracted by the name Global. I thought it was an international college with branches in Kenya. I knew I would find white tutors here and a mix of students [from] all over the world. I was surprised when I got here and found a totally different thing. The iron sheetsmade dormitories and the dirty toilets. I was even planning to date a South African lady when I got to the college. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

But at Global there were no white tutors or students with international backgrounds. Some students were ‘dropped’ at the place by their parents, blissfully unaware of what awaited them. Many parents felt convinced about the potential of Global to produce a life opportunity for their offspring: STUDENT  At

first when my father just heard the name Global, he was really for it. He brought my letter of admission and never allowed me to come with him. So he came and dropped me on the day of reporting. He only came and saw the structure that is here. He did not even ask anybody, ‘How is Global?’ I think our parents are not doing us a big favour. Before you take somebody to a place, you should know what is there. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Students appraised the place with mixed feelings: STUDENT  At times I really pity myself, but at times I really feel at home. I get

an opportunity to know some of the things that I did not know. I’m gaining something. When I was at home I would be watching TV or

122  ‘I am someone’ listening to music so sometimes I feel OK here. But at times, like weekends, when I wake up, no, it doesn’t work with me. I feel tired, stressed. I feel like I should be going away. My laundry is not done. I’m supposed to be reporting to class at eight twenty in the morning. I won’t get time to wash, because if you wash, you put them on the clothesline, somebody comes pick [steals] your clothes. So you are left with maybe only a shirt [when] you are going for TP [teaching practice]. So what will you use? You see, those are challenges with college. So at times it bores me. I feel like I’m disgusted staying around. (Informal conversation, second-year male student) Though students were lured to Global for different reasons, once fees were paid there was no way back. Some students had been placed at the institution by their parents without their prior knowledge. Global was a slightly more expensive option than governmental TTCs, but for some who had failed academically, it was the last resort and possibility to get an education. Motivated by hard circumstances and the expense, they sacrificed and, hoping for a better life, struggled through college: FEMALE STUDENT  When

I first reported here, I never thought this environment was like this: the overcrowded classroom, the bad food, the smelling toilets. It was different from what I saw on TV. I used to complain a lot, about the bad food and all that. But then, I sat down and said to myself, ‘Why am I wasting my time complaining about things that won’t change within a day?’ I then decided the only way out of here is to work hard and make sure that once I get out of this place, I don’t come back here to repeat. My aim is to get a distinction and most probably live a better life in the future. You know life is hard at home and here. I don’t want to live this kind of life forever. I have to change things. MALE STUDENT  I’ve spent a lot of money here and I don’t want to go home. So I better shut up, survive, finish my studies, get my certificate and go home. (Informal conversation, second-year students) But as we shall learn, many students came to appreciate the perspective of having completed an education that might lead them somewhere, though the choice of a teaching career for most of them did not represent the optimal choice of a future life career. How did this appreciation take place? What made students value the place, or not?

Values ‘All we have here is verbal rules’, said Mr Piko, the dean of curriculum (DoC). Compared to other colleges who had rules posted in leaflets and college journals and on outdoor posters nailed to the noticeboards, where regulations were read and deciphered daily in morning assemblies, and where students were disciplined in the deans’ office on an hourly basis, the

‘I am someone’  123 rules of Global consisted of only a half a page of machine-typed regulations, which the DoC kept in his bottom drawer. Students confessed that they had never seen these regulations. The principal stayed in his office, the tutors in the staff room, and the director came only to collect fees. Only Mr Piko was found all over the compound. He had the busiest office in the college and was always found there, if not in class, handling the long row of students queuing in front of his office. Mr Piko willingly listened to their problems. The dean often stayed in his office up to eleven p.m., though he had young children and a wife living in the nearby centre. He was a fundamental pillar of the institution: always present, even during the whole of December, Christmas and New Year when the director and all the other staff had gone home. He took care of all financial, curricular, logistical, staff, social and emotional problems at the school, from students’ personal problems and the menu in the dining hall to pedagogical strategies in classrooms. Mr Piko always found a solution to any kind of problem. He felt personally responsible for the wellbeing of the college and invested all of his time in the place: MR PIKO  I

have so many things to do. Look at those piles over there [pointing at a one-metre-high paper pile]. But I say, ‘Don’t preserve problems for tomorrow’. I have to relate on the students and the staff. I have to ensure that the work goes on in class. If there is some like this guy [a student] who has informed me that there is light problem there, I will come sort that. Such are the reasons that I have to be here. Problems are not just academic, they are social, psychological; there is guiding and counselling. But of course we [tutors and deans] normally do these things in consulting each other. I have to refer to the syllabus, call the tutor, tell him we are using the fact syllabus, then we reach an agreement. And then, if the tutor might realise that it might be a challenge to him or her to get back, now I can take it over to go and explain to the students. (Interview, DoC)

Though emerging problems were to be solved in consultation between the different departments of the college, in reality it was Mr Piko who initiated and mediated between parties to solve the problems, which occurred daily and in endless succession. Mr Piko was a man of action and did not wait for the slow bureaucratic process: MR PIKO  Just

be humble honestly and wholeheartedly. ’Cause I do believe that whatever you do, try to do it as if nobody will do it better than you are doing it today. And try to do it as if the world is ending today. Don’t preserve for tomorrow. Tomorrow will also come with its problems that need solutions from you. So if you preserve it tomorrow then you might end up having more and more things that require your own solutions. Trust in God but always tie your camel as well! I believe that I need to use my time to help others become better people and at whatever cost

124  ‘I am someone’ and whatever means. I don’t normally look at work as a burden to me. … Time is just a matter of strategizing because you don’t know what will happen in the next moment. Someone might desperately need your assistance and because you have tied yourself to this activity, you might fail to attend to that person’s need, and that is why I normally try to work ahead of time and not to beat the deadline. (Interview, DoC) Nothing was written, all was action. Values were present in the more fluid forms of concepts and tacit practices, which were intertwined within the daily meetings between students and staff. Mr Piko saw his finest role as ‘to chase stupidity out of people’s minds’, not to produce students with distinctions; not to minimise the number of failures in the final PTE exam; not to make students attend classes regularly; or to fight immoral behaviour, which other TTCs often stressed as their most important mission. No, Mr Piko’s mind was on educating students. The college’s motto was ‘Striving to achieve global objectives for education’. Mr Piko translated this as, ‘being global and turning to the world outside’. Becoming an educated individual in this institution’s optic was a means to further higher societal causes, not only individual development. Other colleges used what they called methods of ‘filtration’, in which hierarchies of more or less formal, institutionalised bodies of students and deans kept control of students. But Mr Piko used pep talks to encourage students to concentrate on their studies, to achieve a higher state of mind, as demonstrated in the following observation, where Mr Piko was talking to a firstyear class: Mr Piko comes into the classroom and ask how many of the students have finished reading the set books. A few students raise their hands, and Mr Piko asks one of them which of the set books she has read and what she read in them. The student smiles, looks down but does not respond. Mr Piko smiles, too, then continues to talk, now turning to the whole class. ‘You could have surprised me that you have read the books, but none of you did. Let me tell you something, the weekends you use to roam around Waithaka can be used to read the set books. Saturday afternoons in this college are meant for consultations between the students and the tutors. But you don’t make use of them. Only a few of you. Teachers are part of the learning resources and you should make sure that you use them. Make your future, read and work hard. You are the people to help this country in future, or do you think that the youth can’t be the presidents of this country?’ The students shout, ‘Yes, we can!’ while others nod and repeat the words, ‘Yes, we can.’ Mr Piko continues, ‘Yes, we can! Yes, You can! You can be the presidents of this country and if you are not making ways of becoming the presidents now by working hard, then you might not just end up not being one. You are the people who should be able to help others understand the constitution. In fact, your reasoning should be higher than that person

‘I am someone’  125 who finished his form four and didn’t proceed with his or her studies, you should not comprehend things the way they do. Your understanding should be higher. Start thinking of shaping your future now.’ (Observation, first-year classroom) According to Mr Piko, the college name Global referred to the possibilities of pursuing international careers. The statement indicated how optimism and hope for a better future governed people’s lives in this worn-down and overpopulated place, where only a fraction of the students who completed the course would end up in more profitable professional careers than a lowpaid teacher job. According to Mr Piko, teacher education should discharge students into becoming responsible citizens aware of their responsibilities to society. At the same time, college ethics concentrated on how to solve practical problems to survive in the harsh and resource-disadvantaged environment at Global, and to motivate them to ignore the physical challenges of college: MR PIKO  You

see, people don’t begin from a higher level growing to the highest level. You can begin from that lower level and then you just continue. I say that because I know the background … where the students come from. So when you tell someone, ‘You are not alone, everyone experienced the same thing’, they will find themselves, ‘Ok, so it is this way’. I try to make things easier for them so that they realise. ‘The mattress you come with here could be five inches thick. The time you leave here it is one inch thick. The pocket money that your parents give you, you can strategize and budget on. You shall also have friends here. You can share a room like this, the two of you and even the three of you.’ So those are the simple examples I tell them, ‘Don’t think like you are here permanently and don’t think like a beggar every day. Think like someone who can make life out of nothing and then you prosper and also inspire others.’ (Interview, DoC)

Mr Piko found the inner drive for his job through student appreciation. He prospered at Global carrying out his life mission of changing society and the students’ minds: MR PIKO  The

highest motivation for me is the students and nothing else, because by the end when they get off and then one year or six months after someone calls me, ‘Thank you very much mwalimu [teacher] for what you said about this or that’, I feel nice. I say ‘thank God’. It makes me feel good if I have changed someone’s life. And that person whose life I have changed will also change someone’s life and the change continues like that. And by that, however small it is, we are transforming the society. It begins from somewhere, and that is how the society gets transformed (Interview, DoC)

126  ‘I am someone’ According to Korthagen (2004), there are six different layers of teacher professionalism, the inner and most influential level being that of spirituality or the mission (p. 85). This level defines what a teacher sees as his or her personal calling in the world, since it is about becoming aware of one’s own existence and relationship to others. It is ‘the experience of being part of meaningful wholes and in harmony with superindividual units such as family, social group, culture, and cosmic order’ (Boucouvalas, 1988, cited in Korthagen, 2004, p. 85). In short, it is about giving meaning to one’s own existence. Mr Piko’s enthusiasm about their professional development and his personal responsibility for their attachment to the teaching profession made students feel attachment to the place. He became a role model to students searching for professional identity, as illustrated by the above pep talk in class. For most students, a teaching career did not represent their first and optimal choice, but during their stay at college, the physical environment of raw capitalism, resource deprivation and strenuousness faded into the background, and students came to appreciate the perspective of attaining an education that would lead them somewhere, helped by the dean’s infectious enthusiasm.

Bosses, untouchables, high classes and the principled ones Students at Global had often failed in other aspects of life compared to students at other colleges, and were ‘either very fresh, or very old, somebody who has finished high school long ago’, said Mr Piko. ‘Freshers’ saw the college as a continuation of high school and therefore had a high school mentality. They met college with ‘childish behaviour’, said Mr Piko, and they had difficulties understanding the social and cultural boundaries regarding intimate relationships, drinking, and socialising with tutors, many of whom were age-mates of the students. Younger students spoke of older, married students as ‘parents’. Older students usually kept to themselves, went to bed early and shared informal communities with other married students and students with children. They discussed the challenges of college and how to survive in a fast-growing and aggressive youth culture like Global. ‘We manage to control them a bit’, Mr Piko confessed when discussing how to deal with the younger students’ high school mentality, but in practice very little was done to effectuate this control. Instead, students were encouraged to spend time with each other: ‘From four thirty we want them to relax, they can even go to Waithaka [nearby centre with stalls, bars and small restaurants]’, said Mr Piko. Socialising with other students and taking part in the college’s youth life was a legitimate way for students to spend time. The social world of the college was also divided in other ways. Students who paid their fees in full before the semester started were a small group referred to as the ‘bosses’. They were believed to be invincible, superior and

‘I am someone’  127 matchless, and rightly enjoyed enhanced rights because having paid their fees gave them exclusive status. They toured the compound in long black coats over unbuttoned college uniforms with American-style caps turned backwards, in the style of hip-hop musicians. The bosses were also referred to as the ‘untouchables’ by other students – students who could not be punished, sent home or in other ways disciplined compared to average students who suffered due to constant delinquent fees. Bosses often did not comply with the few college rules and felt entitled to make their own. They often forced their private regime on that of the institution, as the following conversation overheard in the men’s dormitories between two students, marked as bosses by other students, illustrates: GEORGE  Imagine,

the tutor gave me a punishment to do! I refused. The tutor then decided to take me to the director. I told him [the tutor] that I cannot do the punishment. After all we are the people who pay them. Without us the college cannot run, and they cannot have their salaries. CHRIS (LAUGHS)  Even the director always tells us that we are the bosses of this college! (Observation, outdoor ‘playground’) It often appeared that the bosses could behave as they wished: ALLAN  The

director has a category of students that you don’t dare touch. They are the untouchables. These students have completed a whole year’s fees. Even tutors cannot tell then anything. If they are found to do a mistake and the tutor takes them to the director, or even the director just hearing [sic] about it, then whoever is trying to disturb the student in terms of punishment is always on the wrong. The director will warn the student leader or the tutor in front of that particular student. If you complete a whole year’s fees, you can remove the iron sheets from this dining hall, and nobody will ask you, because you have completed the fees. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Untouchables did not feel subject to the formal sanction system, and superiors had little disciplinary possibilities, since these students were protected by the director. They disregarded the principal’s authority and were in positions to negotiate directly with the main source of power in the institution: IAN  We

want to deal directly with the director, ’cause the principal is just another employee. In fact, he is our employee, just like any other tutor. We are the bosses here. We have the authority to decide what should be done to us. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

128  ‘I am someone’

Photo 4.1  Graffiti in students’ dormitory.

In another instance, a second-year male student, who was a prefect, was physically attacked by a group of untouchables late one evening on his way home to a dormitory outside the college. Earlier that day he had corrected one of these male students in the dining hall. The prefect got a bruise, scratches on his face and torn clothes. One of the attackers was sent home for one week for the assault, which at other governmental TTCs would have resulted in permanent expulsion. But not at Global. Rules were selective and differential, which most students considered unfair. But students just shrugged about matters they considered impossible to modify. By not acknowledging power, authority and rules, the bosses might have been marginalised and excluded as unsocialised young men in studies by Willis (1977) or Wexler (1992). As discussed earlier, Willis’s ‘lads’ disqualified themselves from getting an education by resisting and not complying with the social codes of the institution. Bosses and untouchables were dominant agents, however, who set the college agenda and triumphantly resisted the formal system since they carried with them the kind of capital that was acknowledged as superior in this field: money and material wealth. The ‘high-class’ students were another group of empowered students in the college, made up of young women. Equipped with new cell phones, new dresses every day, they would be picked up by their families on Friday afternoons – often in large four-wheel drives – if they did not jump on a bus to Nairobi for fun and shopping over the weekend. These students were always on display in the playground, noticed for their money and way of passive-aggressively diverging from reality in ways that fit their needs, as a male student explained: ‘People are divided according to class. Here we are the poor ones, then we are the average ones. Some of us are high-class students based on the richness they have.’ High-class students seldom ate the food at the

‘I am someone’  129 college but bought daily necessities and meals through the small holes in the fence, offered from the women living in the neighbouring huts. They paid other students to do their written assignments, teaching plans, laundry and cleaning duties, and were admired and envied for their supercilious attitudes and seemingly endless resources to fabricate another life than the average students were forced to suffer: A group of female students stand in the middle of the playground and speak about another group of five female students, who stand out of hearing distance in a group by themselves with cups of hot milk tea, bread loaves, and mandazis. They enviously glance from time to time in the direction of the high-class students, as they excitedly, but in whispered voices, discuss the high-class students’ tea drinking. The researcher approaches the group of female students, who are pointed out as high class, and asks them about the white bread and hot milk tea they hold in their hands. Olive, a female student says, ‘I cannot eat food that is prepared in the college. It is so dirty! It is also not properly prepared. Sometimes we find raw beans in the food that has not been prepared well and is not properly cooked.’ Lillian chimes in, ‘The kitchen itself is dirty. The food smells bad and since a dead mouse was found in it, I have never taken food prepared in the college. The director also tells us that if someone is not comfortable with the food that is prepared in the college then he or she can decide to buy food outside the college.’ Later that day, a male student laughingly comments on the incident: ‘Those girls! They never run out of money. Even towards the end of the term, everyone has spent all his pocket money, you will still see them buying food either from the canteen or outside the college compound.’ (Observation, outdoor ‘playground’) High-class students had money and strategies to deal with the problem of lack of resources that other students struggled with. These students did not experience dealing with the scarcity of resources as a major problem; rather, they felt better and superior to the place. Boredom was their major concern. This became evident in the detached and withdrawn way they spoke about the college: PAULINE  This

place I feel have got a lot of challenges that are not interesting at all, like maybe the conditions that we teachers [have] when we are undergoing this programme, that we should be exposed to some of them [the difficulties at the college] are so hard. I feel that we are not worthy to this kind of exposure. Because as a teacher, you shouldn’t be arrogant, you should not carry the negative attitude from the college to the school that you will go to teach. There are various challenges that, maybe, like the facilities, the kind of food that we eat around, maybe the hostel, the congestion is found there, it is not interesting me. And I feel a bit of the academic part of it is not standard [i.e., the academic

130  ‘I am someone’ standard is below the informant’s expectation] as much as I expected. With me I can feel, they are not 100% of what I expected. (Informal conversation, second-year female student) Eliza was one of the students that other students referred to as ‘high class’. She was spoken about as a sonko, Kiswahili meaning ‘a rich person’. She told me she had come to the place because she felt bored and had no actual education plans for the future. But she soon realised she was ‘too good for the place’. She used to hang out with a group of other well-off female students, from unconventional or different ethnic backgrounds. Being positioned as economically affluent seemingly overruled ethnic positioning. Eliza spoke about a weekend’s activities that included visits to restaurants, bus tickets to town and drinks with her college girlfriends and new boyfriend, signalling an unworried, self-indulgent and consumerist lifestyle that contrasted sharply with those of most other students. Eliza indulged herself in pleasure but in a controlled way, whereby she never let others take advantage of her. As she said, ‘men, you can’t trust them’: ELIZA  We went to town, Lillian, Pauline and I. You’ll rarely find us inside the

school during weekends. I’m bored. I will go out, have fun, and then in the evening I come back. I went to Wallet. It is a famous restaurant. After I was through with Wallet I went to Horn Bill. I was with that boyfriend of mine. We were having fun, music, and then by five, six he brought me to Commercial [railways]. He’s the one who invited me. Now you see he’s new to me and that’s why [I] am going to him. He wants us to get to know each other as open as possible, but I’m not going to let him anyhow. Just fun and then I come back. I refresh my mind. By the way, I like music and if it were not for music and dancing, I could not be going out. Though on the side of drinks, I don’t like. Maybe I just take juice. If it’s taking these wines, I’m not happy at all. I once tried it, but it was not the best. I can end up doing stupid things also with men, so I never drink. (Informal conversation, second-year female student)

On another occasion, Eliza received the fortune of KES 500 (at the time of fieldwork, USD 6.20) for lunch from her new boyfriend, equivalent at the time of the research to a month’s rent for a small one-room ‘flat’ with a single electric bulb, no water and shared outdoor latrine in a less prestigious area of Nairobi. During teaching practice, she paid other students to do the preparation of her teaching plans while she chatted on the phone with her boyfriend: Eliza sits with about twenty other students in a large room at a local primary school in a suburb of Nairobi, engaged in the obligatory teaching practice. A teacher from the school comes in and gives her a pile of exam papers from the pupils, which she is supposed to mark. With a tired look she takes the papers, but once the teacher has left the room, she parts the stack in two and gives it to a female and a male student on the opposite

‘I am someone’  131 side of the table. Eliza buys two cups of tea and chapattis from an elderly woman and asks her to give it to the two students, who mark ‘her’ exam papers. Eliza takes her mobile phone, which is lying on the table, types a message, and then throws the phone on the table as she loudly says: ‘Oh my God. Oh my Goodness!’ She grabs another, older phone on the table, which belongs to another student. Without looking at this other student she says, ‘Is there any credit?’ The owner of the telephone, a female student, says in a low voice, ‘Yes’. Without asking for permission to borrow the phone, Eliza dials a number and says, ‘Sweetie, tuko wengi [Kiswahili meaning: ‘Sweetie, we are many’]. I’ll phone you later.’ She removes a small mirror and a tin of hand cream from her bag, and after she returns from the toilet, a perfumed smell fills the room. A male student asks her a question about the subject of music. She answers by saying that she does not know and, ‘If it is not in the textbook, then go and ask your tutor’. Twenty minutes later, Eliza looks up and in a loud tone commands a male student in the far corner of the room to bring her his red pen. ‘Mutuku, give me the red pen. Bring it!’ The young man goes to Eliza and hands her a BIC pen, as he marks the amount of ink with a finger. Eliza takes the pen without a word and the student returns to his table. Later the same day, as Eliza returns to the student room after having taught a class, another young male student is just about to take a seat next to her. Eliza turns her head to ask him a question, but instead of answering the male student moves away from Eliza as he silently remarks, ‘I don’t want to sit next to you. Every time I sit next to you, you are always asking questions.’ Eliza opens a textbook, but then stares coolly into the open space with an indifferent countenance. She then rests her head on the table. After fifteen minutes she receives a call, which she answers in Kiswahili: ‘Aki sina lunch leo si unisambazie’ [Kiswahili meaning: ‘I don’t have lunch today, send for me through the phone’]. After two minutes she says loudly into space: ‘I have got five hundred and twentyfive from the M-pesa [wireless money transfer through the cell phone] from my boyfriend for lunch! Now I can go and have a heavy lunch at Waithaka or Kawangware, like chips and chicken.’ Eliza displays her new phone, which she got from her mother on her nineteenth birthday: ‘I’ve been losing phones all along, even I just forgot one in one of the lodgings in town last term. The one I have now is a very expensive Nokia. But do you know what? I am just careless. Like now I really have [a] hangover from the weekend. My boyfriend took me to [the] cinema and a live band from Friday to Monday. I was not even in college until Monday evening. I had to call my headmaster, whom we have here in the TP and inform him about it.’ The field assistant says, ‘Were you not punished for not going to TP?’ Eliza says, ‘Hee, I gave the prefect two hundred shillings to buy lunch so that he puts me present in the register, as if I was around, which is not a big deal. You just make arrangement with your headmaster and he was very okay.’ (Observation, teaching practice at primary school)

132  ‘I am someone’ As well as illustrating the joys of student life from an advantaged position, the observation illustrates how material capital was transformed into dominance and symbolic violence. The male student’s verbal and bodily rejection of Eliza’s request for assistance was one of the few times during the fieldwork when Eliza was let down and could not manifest her social position as a dominant agent who would get assistance, answers and advantages in front of other, less dominant students. By paying off students, prefect, and school teachers for doing her part of the work and for neglecting gaps in her attendance at college, Eliza ruthlessly used people, things and places without acknowledging social mutuality. She demanded favours and materials from other students with a natural obviousness, and the other students obeyed, mostly without objection. As a dominant agent she was feared and envied by the other students: feared for her ability to exploit social relations, in which she occupied a better social position, and as an ‘exposed’ student, meaning one who is able to navigate many social arenas with many agendas and who could naturalise her demands to other students. Following Bourdieu (1986), her cultural capital was embodied as a long-lasting disposition in the way her bodily gestures excluded/ included other agents according to their capital and disposition in the field of students. She was one of the ‘nobles’, and therefore one who could exercise power on behalf of the whole group (of students). Her extensive economic capital compared to other students, and her dominant cultural capital – displaying a modern lifestyle – converted into social and symbolic capital, which made tutors and students obey her wishes. Her lifestyle symbolised a powerful position, with the rich boyfriend, her physical appearance and her attitude of not acknowledging the teaching profession (i.e., ‘being too good for this place’) contributing to manifesting her position in a professional culture that long ago lost its status and prestige. She was envied for her position in the student teacher community, where she represented a lifestyle with money, abilities and a social network, and where she had managed to force the other agents to view her as she wanted to be viewed. Her subjective representations had in many ways been changed to objective representations (Bourdieu, 1993b, p. 58). Tutors also acknowledged the kind of capital that she brought to college and provided her with good marks. ‘Only the sky is the limit for you’, one tutor wrote in her teaching practice evaluation, in spite of her ‘teacher-centred’ approach in class during TP. But how did other students perceive the high-class students? And how did the high-class students’ orientations influence the environment? Often students experienced the behaviour of bosses and those in the high classes as antisocial and egocentric, and this sometimes led to corporal clashes between the different kinds of student groups: MALE STUDENT  They

[bosses and high classes] use to behave in a very awkward way, a very bad way. They have that very expensive mobile phones, they put on that louder voice that disturb the class, and when you tell

‘I am someone’  133 them to shut it off they answer you very roughly. (Informal c­ onversation, second-year male student) Social capital, according to Bourdieu (1986, p. 249), is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or, in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word. In other words, social capital gives advantages to those who have networks and connections. Putnam (2000) distinguishes between three types of social capital: ‘bridging’, ‘bonding’ and ‘institutional’ social capital. Some forms of social capital are ‘inward looking [network] and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups’ (Putnam, 2000, p. 22). According to Putnam, bonding social capital for instance includes ethnic fraternal organisations, church-based women’s reading groups, and fashionable country clubs. As such, bonding social capital can provide a socioeconomic safety net for individuals vulnerable to isolation and resignation. It is ‘good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity’ (Putnam, 2000, p. 22) and at Global it provided social support and networking among students to facilitate the study processes. But the question is whether the antisocial, aggressive and unempathetic behaviour displayed by bosses, untouchables and high classes at Global was beneficial to constructing a conducive learning and becoming community, in which students could grow up bonding and relating.

Photo 4.2  Posters made by students in a dormitory.

134  ‘I am someone’ Where there is power, there is resistance. The ‘principled ones’ were a third group of students, who reacted against the freedom, hedonism and occasional antisocial behaviour, which they experienced as ‘immorality’ among students. They disparaged intimate relationships between students, and between students and tutors, and blamed the managerial lack of control and supervision of students and tutors for the unruliness. The principled ones were, in their own words, sexually abstaining, hard-working and disciplined when it came to schoolwork, bedtime and socialising with the opposite sex. They were also God-fearing, as reflected in the following conversation between a research assistant and a principled female student: RESEARCH ASSISTANT  How is the college? FEMALE STUDENT  The college is good, but

you have to be principled. There is too much immorality in this compound. Starting from the cook, to the cleaner, to the students, to the tutors, up to the director. If you want to join this college, then you have to be principled, or else you will be swept by the wave of immorality. RESEARCH ASSISTANT  Why is there a high level of immorality? FEMALE STUDENT  Freedom. There is too much freedom here. After four thirty p.m. when the classes end, one does whatever and whenever he feels like. Students go out of the college to drink. Even me, if I like, I [could] just leave the college after four thirty p.m. and stay away for one week, even a month and nobody will ask me. There are even male students who sneak ladies into their hostels without the administration knowing it. They give the watchman something small, and they just get in. The administration knows, but they just assume [it is not going on]. (Informal conversation, second-year female student) Young men were also among the principled students. They blamed the immorality on the institutional lack of control: STEPHEN  People

here lack discipline. To be sincere, people are immoral. People indulge in unsafe sex. You can do anything at any time that you think is good for you and not for the community. We don’t have the guidance and counselling tutors here. Somebody who’s supposed to give somebody a better direction should first of all be a role model. PETER  There is too much freedom in this institution. You can get out there anytime you want, be it morning, evening; anytime. Indiscipline … is something that we inherit. There is that illicit intimacy between the tutors and the students. Some tutors here have got their girlfriends here, not a girlfriend, but girlfriends! So imagine, you are [a] tutor teaching a student and at the same time you normally have an illicit sexual affair with this student. ARNOLD  It doesn’t give a good reputation. It soils your name. That is why the issue of HIV/AIDS come[s] in. I myself don’t feel it [is] OK. You should not relate in that way, for the sake of my life and my future.

‘I am someone’  135 Maybe the woman has gone to somebody else the way she is coming to you. The tutors show us female underwear at the assembly, which they have found around the compound. It brings a lot of shame. If you have got that biblical kind of brought up then it can help you, because the Bible is always very clear. It says the remedy for sin is what? Death! So if you sin, you die! But if you live according to the [Ten] commandments, you live life. Life is there! (FGD, second-year male students) The principled ones requested guidance in social and moral matters, restrictions in their freedom, stricter discipline and keeping to biblical advice. According to them, college freedom had led to an increase in moral decay, from the director not executing appropriate punishment for the illicit offences, and to a bad reputation for the teaching profession. Keeping relationships at a platonic level, trusting in the Ten Commandments, and accepting the so-called ‘slim disease’ (i.e., HIV/AIDS) as necessary punishment for ‘immoral’ behaviour was the solution to problems at the college that got in the way of their studies, according to these students. But was there too much freedom at Global? Or was the problem rather that students’ lives, compared to other TTCs, were less restrained and controlled, and that students, many coming from traditional family structures with steep gender, age and generational hierarchies, had difficulty administering the newly gained freedom? For some, freedom from norms and values meant that personal boundaries were overstepped. For others, freedom represented the possibility of leading a less restricted life away from their parents in their rural village, and where ancestral restraints were at a safe distance. Yet without guidance, freedom became a double-edged sword in different ways for the youth groups at Global. Some of the students felt they benefitted from more freedom and could live unrestrained lives, yet forgot where they came from and why they initially came to Global to pursue a teaching career. Others felt that too much freedom was imposed on them and that this distorted their values, yet at the same time they stopped to explore life and closed themselves around values that restrained their being in the world. Bosses, untouchables and high-class students were influential and privileged subjects carrying symbolic capital in the college socioculture. It was a hierarchical field where some could dominate and where most students were subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations (Bourdieu, 1984). The privileged classes were always on display, noticed and negotiated by other students, but in most cases silently obeyed when it came to confrontations. Their presence produced a kind of social illusion, a practical acknowledgement of the stakes of playing the game in the field, to which other students silently acquiesced, as the case of Eliza illustrates. Most students were aware of the distinct class dominance and how violation of college rules had become naturalised. The principled ones, for instance, objected to the new social order but had little influence and protection from the management in a culture led by money, not by moral values. Their critique of the decline in moral status and of the lack of implementation of social and managerial rules

136  ‘I am someone’ was a secondary yet important contribution to raising awareness about the existence of a fundamentally different reality that could impact students as they were becoming teachers.

Pride, status and ‘the superiority complex’ MIKE  I

am here for only two things: One is the name of the college. Global Teachers Training College might portray me out there as if I went through an international training college, and this might give me an advantage over other students. Two, I just need the certificate, and that is what I am here for. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Image was all, and students guarded carefully the representation of the college as a collective secret. Being part of a culture and having a certificate from something international signalled modern, Western, new, technologically advanced and innovative, not traditional, African, old-fashioned, using manual labour and backwards. Students were aware of the symbolic capital the name provided them with, which might give them an advantage in future employment in a context of poverty, uncertainty and unemployment. Image served an important purpose in the eternal competition and negotiation between governmental and private TTCs about where ‘proper’ teacher education took place. Many private teacher education institutions were considered second-class compared to governmental colleges. According to public opinion, private TTCs did not possess what was regarded as appropriate cultural capital as educational institutions. For instance, many of them lacked a historical past, had restricted institutional layouts with less space and fewer buildings, lacked co-curricular subjects and the ‘right’ sort of staff and traditions. Global students actively worked to not let others, not even their own families, get insight in the real run-down condition of a school with few resources and less academic ambitions: MALE STUDENT ONE  My

friends think that I am in one of the best TTCs in the world – Global! I don’t tell them stories about this college, and if I have to, I tell them all lies, in the way we have this big library. What I always make sure is that none of my friends and any other person from the village visit me here. When they are in Nairobi and want to see me, I always make sure that we meet in town, not here. How can you show people this and claim that you are in college? (The student points at the overcrowded dormitory and the iron sheet walls). Even my high school [i.e., secondary school] is better than this. MALE STUDENT TWO  Even my parents have never visited me here. They have never seen these iron sheet-made dormitories. I don’t even tell my family the way we live here. That we sometimes go without water for four days and bathe in a river. And you are in Nairobi. The capital city! You can never say that! So they always think we are living an international

‘I am someone’  137 life, where everything is perfect. (Informal conversation, second-year male students) Students felt they got a ‘second-class’ education that positioned them as inferior to students from other TTCs. Being victimised as Other (Collins, 1998), the illegitimate, abnormal and inappropriate, students struggled to maintain self-esteem and a positive identity in front of students from other TTCs, and to regain territory as dominant agents. Family homes consist of individuals who share similar objectives, and homes represent idealised, privatised spaces, where members can feel at ease (Collins, 1998, p. 67). Home provides privacy and security, and family secrets must be kept. The following conversation between three male students in the dormitory demonstrates how Global students knew they were envied by students from other colleges, who perceived them as members of an economic and cultural elite in the field of student teachers: STUDENT ONE  When

they see the Scania buses [European automotive manufacturer] and the name Global, they think that this is an international training college. And some even tend to think that it is far much better than many government training colleges. They respect us based on that. STUDENT TWO  You know the buses scare them. When they see two big Scania buses, and you find that a college like Lexington has only one old bus, they think this college is truly international. STUDENT THREE  In fact, they don’t know that we sleep in iron sheet-made dormitories, and we also don’t tell how we live in the college. Or else, you [students] will be embarrassed. Most of them have not also visited Global. So they don’t know how it looks like. (Informal conversation, second-year male students) Identity was therefore eternally on display in the public space, especially in front of students from other TTCs. Four TTCs competed in a yearly sports competition where the interaction between students from the different colleges demonstrated the hierarchical position between colleges, in which power and class relations were constantly negotiated, though some forms of capital are always superior in the larger field of power and class (Bourdieu, 1984): Two male students from Lexington TTC sit on a lawn and watch the sports events. One of them points in the direction of Global’s Scania bus that is parked next to the sports field at Lexington TTC: ni shule ya wadosi hii [Kiswahili meaning: ‘This is a school for the rich’]. You see their buses? Look at their football team uniform. The first game, they had a different uniform, the second game, another different uniform, and now the third game in another uniform, and they are all new! (Observation, sports field at Lexington TTC)

MALE STUDENT  Hii

138  ‘I am someone’ The public display of Global students’ sports clothes and large, new buses illustrates how Global students seemingly had inflicted a positive self-image on students from other TTCs. Global students actively worked in the public space to uphold a positive image as rich, independent and opposed to institutional discipline: Three female students from Global stand on the sports field and watch the match between students from the two colleges. They wear blue jeans and new, tight, sleeveless T-shirts in bright colours that reach exactly where the tops of their jeans start. Two of the female students hold Fanta sodas in plastic bottles, the other female student a Dasani mineral water. The three students walk around the field, keeping a distance from the other students. They do not take part in the cheering, and become part of the scenery by positioning themselves in visible places. At the side of the next field, three female Global tutors stand in tight blue and black jeans, tight sleeveless tops, and the large dark brown 1970s ‘movie-star’ sunglasses currently in fashion. Each of them holds a bottle of Dasani mineral water. A male and a female student from Global walk with their arms around each other’s waists. They sit down under a tree close to one another and the female student opens her handbag and takes out two plastic bottles of soda, and chips and chicken wrapped in paper. They start to eat as they laugh and talk to one another. All of the other students sitting under the tree, about thirty-five to forty students from other colleges, turn their heads to look at the two students. (Observation, sports field at Lexington TTC) The three female students, the three female tutors, and the two chicken-eating students kept a distance from the other students and relayed a feeling of not ‘being part of the crowd’. Their display of Western lifestyle through clothing, coupling and economic domination in terms of expensive food and drinks seemed a way of positioning themselves as part of an exclusive youth culture, where other and less modern and capable lifestyles were excluded. Simultaneously, it was a way of rebelling against moralistic norms of repressive college logics (cf. Dahl, 2014b, 2015a), where students were supposed to subject themselves to disciplined, puritanical and nonsexual behaviour. Global students displayed self-confidence and dominance. Students from other colleges with less student liberty, for instance where public displays of intimate relationships and Western clothes were not permitted, felt that their ‘family values’ (Collins, 1998) were threatened and therefore atypically raised their voices in the public space, as exemplified by the female student in the following observation: A group of Global TTC students watch the sports matches from under a tree with students from other colleges. Three second-year male Global students comment loudly as the Global team scores their third goal. One of them, Lule, says, ‘What do you expect when a global college plays a

‘I am someone’  139 village college like Wummit and Lexington? A Global against a village!’ Ochar, his classmate, answers, ‘By the way, I also realised that all our first aiders are trained by Kenya Red Cross and all of them have the certificates.’ Lule says, ‘Of course, what do you expect of an international college? That is why we are doing things internationally!’ A third student, Barack, turns to the field assistant and says, ‘In fact we are the current national college champions in football. When it comes to football we are the best.’ The Global students from the far end of the field continue to cheer and shout to the playing students, as a voice from the loud speaker announces: ‘The cheering squad, please lower your voices because we have an important announcement to make.’ The surrounding group of students from other TTCs keep quiet, but the Global students continue to cheer, now in lower voices. Suddenly a female student from another TTC shouts, ‘These Global students are very indisciplined. They are still singing and dancing while the master of ceremony has asked for some quietness. That is indiscipline!’ (Observation, sports field at Lexington TTC) Students from other colleges felt that Global students, with their loud and articulating behaviour, had overstepped what was considered appropriate. They were ‘indisciplined’ and became inappropriate Others in the average student’s view. But the grandiose behaviour also produced other effects in students, a kind of a strong feeling of belonging to the place, identification with the name Global and a feeling of possessing symbolic capital by being members of what they perceived as an exclusive society. According to Bourdieu (1977, p. 179), possessing symbolic capital ‘is perhaps the most valuable form of accumulation in a society in which the severity of the climate (the major work – ploughing and harvesting – having to be done in a short space of time) and the limited technical resources (harvesting is done with the sickle) demand collective labour’, and therefore imperative for Global students, many of whom had grown up in rural places with subsistence economies. Coming from marginalised positions, students’ sense of belonging and self-assertiveness was reinforced during their stay at Global: MR PIKO  They

call themselves Global. In fact, when they get outside there, they even tend to add an article, ‘We are the “the” Globals’. In other words, ‘Look at us from far, don’t look at us from the way you think we are’. That is the communication they are trying to pass out. So it has become a culture in them now. They use the name Global and apply it in the field, yet they have realised there is nothing practically international in it, but still they identify with it. (Interview, DoC)

But behind the assertive and extroverted façade, many Global students felt inferior to governmental students. Symptomatically, the Global dean referred to this as ‘other colleges’ superiority complex’. It was not that Global students felt inferior, but that other colleges felt superior and devalued private

140  ‘I am someone’ TTCs, whom they thought of as positioned in less powerful and dominant positions in the field of TTCs: MR PIKO  Actually,

it is [a] superiority complex. It is not that they don’t regard [us] as a low college actually. They do. They count us as second-rate college. Private colleges are not regarded as highly as other public colleges. Private colleges have to ascertain their position. First of all [governmental colleges have a] superiority complex. They are always the winners and say, ‘We lead. Others follow.’ You [governmental colleges] have a mentality that nobody can defeat you. So, if by any chance you come out and defeat them in one discipline or another, then that is a challenge to them. That is some of the things they try to protect. (Interview, DoC)

A field, according to Bourdieu (1984), is a hierarchically structured social arena or market in which actors compete for power, prestige or money. Players in the field must have a sense of what is at stake, a mastery of the strategies to achieve success, a talent for innovation in continuously changing circumstances; in other words, ‘a feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 66). Global students disturbed the field of teacher education’s ‘harmonic’ social order by bringing in other values based on independence and individualism (as opposed to dependence and communalism), and modern and Western (as opposed to traditional and African). According to Bourdieu, fields are sites of struggle over the ‘principles of hierarchisation’ (Bourdieu, 1993a). In other words, it is about the power of legitimation and the power to define the value of one or another product, act or idea. A person’s position is linked to both the amount of their capital and to the person’s relation to the processes through which capital is distributed. This means that a person’s position shapes their actions, and the actions shape the field. As new players in the field, Global students competed to obtain legitimised positions, and they did so by introducing new versions of cultural capital such as Western clothes, individuality and modern self-assertiveness. Students from other colleges reacted by calling the Global students ‘indisciplined’ and observing them intensely. They felt that their position in the centre of the field holding ‘old capital’, in the form of a historical past with proud traditions and where noble Kenyans once studied to become teachers, was challenged. Global students struggled to improve their positions at the same time as students from other colleges defended their superior positions by invalidating Global students’ presence. Even though Global students’ presentation of material goods and money, their superior capital and excessive display of self-confidence to some extent did help to reposition them, such displays were often a reaction to feeling inferior. The dean explained that, ‘Our students were always looked at as inferior, so they want to be assertive and assert their position’. At a managerial level, between TTCs there was a constant struggle to become a dominant agent: a ‘cooperation but constant mutual surveillance’,

‘I am someone’  141 said Mr Piko. He and the principal had previously visited a governmental college to meet with the dean. Though they had an appointment, they were told on arrival that the dean was out of the compound. Mr Piko and the principal waited a full day in vain, only to find out that the dean was in but had avoided meeting them. On a later occasion, Mr Piko took some papers with pedagogical planning ideas to the governmental college, but the dean of the other TTC took the papers, photocopied them without asking permission and left the room. In another incident, the two teaching practice masters at Global and Lexington had agreed to divide the primary schools in the area surrounding the two colleges for an upcoming TP, but when the time to allocate schools arrived, Lexington, the governmental TTC, very quickly placed students at all the nearby primary schools, leaving Global forced to locate schools for their students more than an hour’s drive away. The fight for performance overruled the issues of politeness and consideration for others. It seemed impossible to win over the superior academic performance of governmental colleges. Global TTC therefore struck back in the only possible arena, which was co-curricular activities with other colleges at special events. ‘In the co-curricular activities, there was a war! But we have commanded respect! They have accepted us, but it is a fight!’ said Mr Piko. Ministerially organised meetings between TTCs enhanced dialogue between them. It helped to establish private colleges as legitimate players in the field of teacher education: MR PIKO  Sometimes

the ministry, through the quality assurance, normally organises on several meetings of either departments. Tutors and we normally discuss several issues there. It has become very fruitful to almost everybody because [it] is then that we come to learn and other people also come to learn from us. It is helpful, though some colleges still bully us. It is a problem that there is that feel of ownership that a private should not win. So what I normally tell our students, if you are sure that you can do this, if you can win and defeat someone then do not defeat someone merely, just go and win completely so that nobody will complain that this was only half done. (Interview, DoC)

Winning sports matches was therefore mandatory for a private college such as Global, and all efforts were used to succeed in this task. The institution did not accept its subordinate position, which blocked it from being able to transcend problematic categorisations and positions in the field of other TTCs, which might lead to exclusion and marginalisation (cf. Lagermann, 2015, p. 590). Winning the sports day was a carefully selected line of attack, planned in advance to position Global as a ‘real’ college. Becoming a member of the college’s sports team was the result of hard internal competition, not a democratically selected or inclusive process, since not everybody could participate. The team was selected based on individual student performance. It reflected the liberal idea that individuals should become competitive entrepreneurs (see Olssen, 2003).

142  ‘I am someone’

In no-man’s-land? Power in reverse The director owned the place and ran it as his private enterprise, but students felt they were in the Wild West, where only the fittest survived: ALLAN  This

college is a no man’s land. There are no rules and regulations. Everybody does whatever he or she feels like. If I want to go out, I just do it. There are students who have even gone home, and they will not be sitting the exams. They don’t care. The tutors also don’t care about the students. They don’t even punish them. The student’s council is as good as dead. It is as if it doesn’t exist. The student who fought me was never even punished. The matter went to the [student body] chairman, he took the case to the dean of students; even referred the case to the tutor on duty. The tutor on duty just told us to reconcile and forgive one another. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Many students felt that the place suffered from lack of rules, where ‘anything goes’ and there was a sense of ‘value nihilism’ (Jacobsen and Kristiansen, 2001, p. 112) in which ancient values, ‘truth’, ‘morality’ and tradition were found meaningless and therefore denied. They had lost their foundation of a value system but had seemingly replaced it with a feeling that egoism and individualism were necessary. Students left the compound when they wanted. The guard at the gate was easily bribed and would simply let students go in and out on a whim. Fewer personnel were around the college at night. This allowed students to engage with each other in less restrained ways. The director had been forced to rent some buildings on the road outside the compound due to the increasing number of students. Second-year students, who inhabited these buildings, were left on their own during evenings and at night. What did this seemingly less restrained institutional culture mean for the maturation of students? What youth culture and relation to the teaching profession were being constructed? But puzzling together the bits and pieces of everyday college life during more than a year of fieldwork at the college provided another picture. Power was there, but though students and tutors referred to it as ‘a single person’s chair’, where the director had sole management, power was not unilateral. Rather, power was sourced in and between the human meetings and occasions, and became imprinted in the frequently unconscious ‘rules for relevance’, which actors attributed to social situations and which often guided their actions (Barth, 1994). A new social order arose: the director was the absolute manager, unconstrained by public conventions about social welfare, equality and democracy. Rules of the market led to his preferential treatment of the customers – students – while redistributing power away from tutors and the administration. But students were not invited to share administrative power. The student council had no real influence. Tutors, on the other hand, fought for their conventional rights as masters of the classroom, and

‘I am someone’  143 in silence collectively disciplined students. Subordinate staff in the kitchen and the guards used their access to resources, such as food and shelter, to exploit poorer students; yet they were not reprimanded by the institution, since many of them had family connections to the director, who exercised positive, differential treatment (Andersen, 2004) towards them. Students reacted to this by differentiating and excluding students, who were victims of the structural power, and to segregate themselves into different groupings based on power, money, moral conviction and class. Ethnicity was especially used as a means of social positioning, both among staff and students: STUDENT ONE  I am a student council member, but Luhyas in this college are

treated more special than me. They don’t even queue at the dining hall. They just walk in and serve, and the cooks don’t ask them anything. Since I am Akamba, I have to queue, because if I go to serve directly without queuing, the cooks will send me away, and they won’t care if I am a student council member or not. STUDENT TWO  They [Luhyas] don’t even do manual work. Even when a tutor gives them a punishment to do, they don’t do it. STUDENT THREE  These Luhyas don’t see us as human beings in this college. (Informal conversation, three second-year male Akamba students) Though they constituted 90% of the student population, the Akamba students felt that they were looked down on by other students and discriminated against in terms of seats on the student council. Seats were delegated by the dean of students, Mr Matthews, who shared his ethnic origin with the director, who was a Luo, and as such closer in ethnic branch to the Luhyas than to the Akambas. Though students were customers and laws of the market, and income generation ruled the place, social categorisation also played a role, not only among students, but also in the way individual members of the management distinguished and included students due to their ethnic background. Ethnicity was, however, often overruled by money, and power mostly worked subtly. The director, for instance, used charisma to transform relations of dominance into emotional relations, thereby creating a form of emotional spell (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 187) that controlled students in alternative ways. An appreciation that somebody owes someone something becomes understood as a feeling, and thereby as a longer-lasting trait of the person who executes the generous action, says Bourdieu (1997). Students felt affection, devotion and connectedness with the director. Overt violence was not possible, since students represented the economic foundation of the college. Symbolic violence as a gentler, hidden form of violence (cf. Bourdieu, 1977, p. 196) was inflicted on the students and turned relations of dominance and suppression into emotional relations using charm and charisma, as illustrated in the following incident, where the director spoke to the students: DIRECTOR  First

and foremost, I have to tell you that today is my sad day. I am not happy.

144  ‘I am someone’ STUDENTS (CLAP, CHEER AND LAUGH IN CHORUS)  Why? DIRECTOR  I am going to miss you so much! We might

Why? have fought at one time or another, but I always want you to know that we are a family. And it is because of you we are all here. It is because of you that all these tutors are here. DIRECTOR (CHANGING TO A SERIOUS FACIAL EXPRESSION)  There are three things that I want to talk about. One, you all know that December is full of parties, but just party and don’t overdo it. There is HIV/AIDS. Please don’t choose to die the hard way. The second thing that I want to talk about is the issue of fees. There are about eighty to one hundred of you with huge fees arrears who haven’t paid anything this term. I have your names, and please don’t report to the college in January. I gave you enough time to come and see me over the issue of the fees. But none of you came. Instead you decided to play [a] ‘hide and seek’ game with me. You have … [until] Thursday and Friday next week to clear your fees arrears, or else don’t report here in January. DIRECTOR (SMILING)  The third issue is about the Ugandan programme I told you about; the one that our institution will be running in collaboration with a University in Uganda. Now I want you to help me market this programme. You know, as a family, we have to help one another. Go out there and tell your friends who scored D-plus in high school of a chance of a lifetime. Any student who manages to bring one student to register for the programme will be paid 3,000 Kenyan shillings. Now, if you owe the college 15,000 Kenyan shillings, and bring in five people to enrol for the programme, then you shall have cleared the balance. Please use this noble chance. Try and make some money during the holiday. (Observation, assembly ground) The mixture of fatherly advice, moralistic appeals and a display of family ties, threats, humiliation and economic payoff was forceful in directing and disciplining the students into the desired behaviour: to pay school fees and get new customers to the college. But though unity seemingly characterised the relationship between students and the director, other subjects such as the principal and tutors were openly disciplined: The director and the principal are standing outside by the administration block, next to a long queue of students waiting to see the dean. The director says to the principal in an agitated tone, ‘Must you wait for me to tell you what to be done here? You mean this simple thing cannot be done until I tell you to do them? This is not good!’ Without listening to the response, the director turns his head and shouts to the watchman at the gate, ‘Ernest, come here.’ The principal looks down silently. Meanwhile, all the students in the queue turn their heads towards the director as they overhear the conversation. (Observation, administration block)

‘I am someone’  145 Being a principal and thus the head of an institution meant being treated with respect, sometimes fear, in rare cases with jovial reactions. The public humiliation of the principal in front of subordinates such as students, tutors and the guard caused a heavy loss of authority and was considered inappropriate. The incident demonstrated how conventional hierarchies and bureaucracy dissolved. Tutors were also subject to public discipline. Once the director was heard shouting at a male tutor in his office, ‘Don’t “sir” me! Get out of my office and go and do what I told you to do yesterday!’ Obedience, paternal authority and mutual respect for maintaining social hierarchies did not work in the socioculture of Global. The business was about getting the work done and getting on with things in an efficient, modern way, even if it meant overstepping reciprocity and subordination, which is described in the literature (Hundeide, 1995; Rogoff, 1990) as what used to characterise social relations in former times. A humble attitude did not mean being forgiven, but was out of place in a society of efficiency, profit and unorthodoxy, working in a progressive, faster gear. The director had been travelling outside Africa, spoke fluent French and held a disco for the students at the end of the semester with Western pop music and beer drinking, which was an unthinkable occurrence at (some) governmental TTCs. The tutor community was upset. Anger was channelled at the students in a variety of hidden ways as physical punishment, when the director was not around. The principal, too, felt he lacked appreciation for his work and had been removed from authority. This influenced his motivation and productivity negatively: MR ARTHUR  I

used to like this place, but from last year my attitude has suddenly changed because of the way we are doing things. You see, when things are not done a professional way, it is very bad. [The problems arise] because the director is directly involved in running the institution. You see, maybe he is not conversant with what is actually happening. He feels the school is his so he can do anything, but such things will eventually bring down the college. KARI  But how does he respond to that? MR ARTHUR  He understands and then he forgets. But it can’t work to have two principals in a college [him and me]. And then again, he has employed so many people from the family, same clan. So they know him, he knows them, so he can’t control them. So he uses some other force like sacking other people. There is a very high turnover [of staff]. Like last year we lost five tutors. That one will definitely interfere with the performance because some of those who went were the best. You know we were employed as experts and we should be left to run the college. I never recommended for the sacking because in any workplace people can do a few mistakes but you cannot take sacking as the only disciplinary action. Again, if the administrative structure lacks, it is very difficult to run a college, because you don’t know who is supposed to do what, who is who. You can’t come up with policies and implement

146  ‘I am someone’ them. I don’t think there is anything we can do about it, because it [the college] is owned by an individual. (Interview, principal) Personal interests and agendas interfered with the professionalism in what used to be a bureaucratic structure, where the principal ranked highest and subordinate staff lowest. Yet, the new structure of social reverse also in some ways produced a better climate for solving conflicts, for instance among students. Being crammed in little space with few resources forced people to find solutions to upcoming conflicts in other ways. A conflict between Akamba and Luhya students in the male dormitory escalated into a corporal fight: ALLAN (LUHYA OF ETHNIC ORIGIN)  There

was a fight. It all started between me and another Akamba student. Four students refused to clean the dormitory. They came to the dormitory very drunk. They were duty roster of students supposed to clean the dormitory that day. When I asked one of them why he didn’t clean the dormitory, because I am the dormitory prefect, he told me to shut up and stop talking to him, and that I don’t pay his fees, so I better leave him alone. Then I told him that he must clean the room. They laughed, started talking in Akamba, and then the student just hit me. The rest of the students joined in to separate us. They removed their hockey sticks, switched off the light, and started shouting that they were ready for war. That is when the Luhyas also joined me. There was no much fight, but something bad could have happened. RESEARCH ASSISTANT  Why were the students behaving that way? ALLAN  Akambas feel that they are more superior than other students. They also feel that since the chairman is Akamba, then no one can dare touch them. (Informal conversation, dormitory prefect) Ethnic clashes influence the stability of many African countries, but often cover up fights about water, food and land. At Global, troubles between ethnic groups ignited quickly into uncontrollable battles. But conflicts between students were solved through dialogue rather than physical punishment, for instance expulsion or dismissal, which was often practised in governmental colleges: The tutor on duty, Mr Lwanga, and the Christian religious education (CRE) tutor head for the male dormitories, where they speak to the students. Mr Lwanga says, ‘It is quite unfortunate that this kind of thing is happening here. I want the students who sleep in here to get inside and stand beside the bed he sleeps in. We are shuffling you now.’ Students now come from outside in the playground into the dormitory and stand next to their respective beds. Mr Lwanga then says, ‘If you are sleeping all Akambas or all Luhyas [in one bunk bed], then you need to move. I want Akamba, Luo, Kikuyu on one bed, or Akamba, Kikuyu, Luhya.

‘I am someone’  147 Do that and move very fast!’ Without hesitation, the students start to rearrange their personal belongings and bed linen between the beds, as the two tutors also move around pointing at the triple-decker beds, and say, ‘Akamba up or down, and any other tribes on the remaining beds. We have to mix.’ Meanwhile the CRE tutor says, ‘You people should live as brothers. Leave tribalism to those who have not been to school. You are training as teachers. After completing your studies you never know where you might be posted to work. You might be posted among another ethnic group than your own. How will you work with either Akambas or Luhyas if you can’t get along here?’ Mr Lwanga asks over the crowd, ‘Where are the two students who started the fight? Come here in front and reconcile to each other. Each one of you to apologise to one another.’ The two students then come forward, stand next to the tutors, and say as they face each other, ‘I am sorry’. Mr Lwanga then says, ‘You people, by the end of this term, you should make a party as members of this dormitory where you will eat, drink and reconcile with one another.’ The CRE tutor adds, ‘Maybe you guys should organise and visit one another at home during this holiday. Akambas visit Luhyas, and Luhyas visit Akambas. You never know, you might just end up working in one another’s home area.’ (Observation, male students’ dormitories) Conflict resolution focused on initiating a learning process, where students of different ethnicity were forced to interact rather than being separated. This increased the probability of students developing insider rather than out-group feelings, as classic social psychology about group behaviour and norm formation has taught us (Festinger, 1954; Mummendey, 1985; Sherif, 1966; Sherif and Sherif, 1956; Tajfel, 1974). Being compelled to spend time in the company of outsiders – even those who are perceived as foreign and hostile – can, over time, reshape opinions and beliefs about ‘the Other’ in a positive way.

Tutors: young, urban professionals – on the move to somewhere else The tutors, or rather teachers, as the Global administration preferred to say, were far from conventional. Where the average tutor at many governmental colleges was a middle-aged woman, size sixteen, dressed in a decent below-the-knee long, wide, bright-coloured skirt with matching long-sleeved blouse, tightly buttoned around the wrists and neck, a wornout wig, and practical, flat shoes, tutors at Global symbolised a totally different world of speed, business, independence and sexual liberation. Most of them were in their late twenties or early thirties and dressed in tight-fitting black jeans, high-heeled shoes, and large, round 1970s-style fashionable sunglasses placed on the forehead. They did not wear wigs, but added oil to their own hair, which was straightened. One of the ways that the

148  ‘I am someone’ young female Global tutors established their modern cultural capital was through clothing, for example by eschewing kangas, the traditional African female clothing consisting of rectangular fabric with a colourful print to wrap around the body and to use for carrying children and goods, thereby distinguishing themselves from the uneducated, manual-worker women in rural areas. But it also meant positioning themselves away from the government-employed female tutors who wore colourful clothes, no make-up, and flat-heeled shoes, and who to a greater extent resembled women in rural areas than female tutors from Global did. In addition, the female tutors from governmental colleges were often older and married to men well-employed in the government who could place their wives in lucrative, safe, and enduring positions at governmental TTCs. Global tutors on the contrary signalled Western lifestyle, modern independence, availability and cultural capital with a large ‘C’ (Bourdieu, 1986). Their Western-inspired dress put the strivings of the students into perspective. Many of the Global tutors had just finished their university degrees and were age-mates of the students. Female students at Global were, as at all other TTCs, obliged to wear skirts and college uniforms. Female Global tutors distanced themselves from the student masses by wearing jeans, which Global students could wear only on weekends. At the time of the fieldwork, thirty-four tutors were employed at Global, about one-third of the number at other TTCs. Ratios of up to 100 students per tutor in each class were not abnormal. ‘We have to look after expenses’, explained Mr Piko. At governmental colleges, by contrast, the staff room was full during the daytime. Tutors were employed from eight to five, and it was mandatory to be physically present. They referred to themselves as ‘a happy staff room’, and indeed, cheering, laughter and small talk emanated from the staff room, which was a small room where tables were arranged in a square, where all tutors faced each other. The average age of the tutors was between twenty-three and thirty-five. Being age-mates of the students posed specific problems: Many tutors went out for a drink at the nearby centre, in the bars and small restaurants, and socialised with students of both genders, who often slept over at a tutor’s house if it was too late to come back to college. Mr Piko confessed that ‘it is a problem that tutors socialise too much with the students’, and tutors complained it was difficult to maintain order in the classroom. Friendly and sometimes romantic relations with students were not conducive to keeping order in large classes – crowd control (Whyte, cited in Meinert, 2001, p. 183) – and maintaining respect in the learning environment. Being forced to handle students as customers, who were also age-mates, with care and respect complicated matters further in student-tutor relations: MR PIKO  The

students are the ones who are paying the fees and the staff members get their salaries from the fees. So a student feels that he is the sponsor to the tutor. That is where the indiscipline starts, but we both

‘I am someone’  149 need each other. As much as I’m interested in the money that you pay, you are also interested in the content that I have. (Interview, DoC) Students held power over tutors, who felt frustrated and reached for illegitimate punishment. They constantly punished students for even small offences, such as having not completed their homework, making ‘noise’ in classrooms, and using their cell phones during class hours. Punishments were small but aimed at humiliating students. A group of students did not complete their group assignment in time and were therefore told by the tutor to go outside the class and sit in the mud. Complaining to the director was always a possibility, but sometimes not an option, since tutors then found more sophisticated ways of sanctioning students through, for example, collective exclusion from tuition, where an offence committed in one tutor’s class would mean exclusion from all tutors’ classes. A female student told me that, ‘If you have a grudge with a teacher, he’ll make sure that you fail. If you have any problem with that teacher or wronged him in one way or another, he’ll make sure that you suffer for it seriously.’ In another incident, a male student was punished for not being able to answer a question posed to him by a female tutor during class. The punishment consisted of carrying water in a cup to fill a container in the staff room, which the student refused to do. The rest of the tutors then shouted at the student in the staff room and told him never to attend any of their classes again. The student felt forced to write a letter of apology and hope for its acceptance by the female tutor. Tutors were a separate entity, working according to their own rules. They presented a united front against students, but were left out of the management-student coalition. The tutors’ reactions to the students, and the students’ lack of acceptance of discipline, led to a frustrated community of instructors. The possibilities for students to transgress control and to avoid subjectification depended on participation in and across different contexts, such as the school’s institutional structures, the student youth culture, everyday life with peers, and their family home. In other words, their trajectories at college were determined by participation in relation to structural arrangements of social practice (Dreier, 2009, p. 193) in those different communities of practice. Students were also participants and not just subjects who succumbed to institutional discipline; they participated actively in a manner that drew traces from their former and present lives, and to their hopes and visions for the future, for instance by sometimes accepting and sometimes objecting to the discipline exerted on them.

Sex, love and domination Like all other TTCs, romance blossomed, and intimate relationships were the norm rather than the exception. But at this college, an intimate relationship was an all-around experience that involved students, tutors and subordinate staff. Partners in romantic relationships, often called ‘coupling’ by students,

150  ‘I am someone’ were referred to as ‘college wives’, ‘girlfriends’, ’boyfriends’, and ‘lady stress absorbers’, which demonstrated the significance that students attached to intimate relationships, and which constantly guided their navigations: BONFACE  One time we had a disco here. My girlfriend sent one of my friends

to call me to go and dance with her, but I was not willing to. So I told my friend to go and dance with her. The following day so many people came reporting to me that ‘your wife has been taken by so and so’, not knowing that I am the one who had told him to go and dance with her. By the way, you should stay here up till very late, what people do in Mapenzi Street [outside corridor at Global and an infamous nickname for a red-light district in central Nairobi]. That is a hanging place for couples. They hold each other and do all kinds of things. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Coupling represented a way of practising modern relationships built on emotions and individual preferences, in contrast to traditional relationships based on, for instance, marriage as an economic construction or a choice guided by ancestors: BONFACE  In

fact, I have two girlfriends. Actually, one of them knows that I have another girlfriend, but she is still with me. They are not jealous with each other; after all, I am not intending to marry them anyway. They are just meant to enjoy life here. After I am through with college, they will never hear from me again. That will be the end. I don’t spend a lot of money on them, since I don’t work. After all there are so many ladies in this college. Even those who are willing to spend on men. These are just for company here, because I also have another girlfriend at home. And how can you be in college without a girlfriend? Even the married students here have their boyfriends and girlfriends. (Informal conversation, second-year male student)

Feelings and sex were used as commodities to get ahead of others. But intimate relationships also occasionally emerged as gendered power. Male students complained that tutors ‘stole their ladies’ and chased ‘freshers’ (the first-year female students). Female students enjoyed privileges but also suffered discipline and abuse in their relations with male tutors. Tutors’ possessions of power over failing or passing an exam blurred the feeling of freedom provided by the institution: KENNETH  When

you go to bars you’ll find tutors with their student girlfriends. This is a normal thing here. We refer to it as Global game. Nearly all the tutors here have student girlfriends. OTIEN  You see like in high school where teachers date your ladies to show that they are more powerful than you. That is the same way here. They try to show us that they are more men than us. Even the first years, that

‘I am someone’  151 the second years are supposed to chase, you find tutors also chasing the same freshers here. (Informal conversation, male students) The competition between male tutors and students of both genders created an atmosphere of constant rivalry and struggle involving sexual favours in return for academic grades, food and other advantages: WASHINGTON  If

today you go to these tutors’ quarters around here, you’ll find many ladies. Let me tell you even I’m sure you can’t shut down a request from a tutor if you are a lady or a man. If you do that, rest assured you’ll fail in every subject you gonna do. PETER  What works here is the ‘power of the thigh’. So long as you can offer yourself, then it will work best on your side. Go to the main course that we did there. You people are going to fall the very victim if you are not close to the tutor; then rest assured that you cannot succeed in the course. (Informal conversation, male students) Students called practices involving female students and male tutors getting ‘sexually transmitted marks’, that is, getting better grades than those who did not engage in this kind of exchange. Apparently, this transactional logic was accepted among students, even though female students who participated often felt victimised for being positioned as impure and ‘dirty’ (cf. Douglas, 1986, p. 123). Men and women seemingly accepted the conditions, but not without resistance and mixed feelings. Female students found it difficult to maintain respect for tutors who invited them out for drinks. It was difficult for them to separate academic work in class and the emotion/sex work that a specific tutor represented. Engaging in the girlfriend business with male tutors yielded temporary respect from other tutors but could very quickly turn into public humiliation and academic failure after being dumped by the tutor or expressing a wish to end the relationship: PAULINE  Engaging with them is not a problem. You find a serious tutor who

wants to engage with you, just passing time with you and having sex with you and dumps you there. And you see, let’s say when he approaches you, maybe another teacher comes and after that things become very bad, and it doesn’t work out the way you thought. KARI  What do you mean? IRENE  You see, I’ve been approached by a tutor. When I agree to him, he obviously will tell the others that this is my girlfriend and instead of being in [sic] the negative side of him, the other tutors will meet me and say ‘Irene, hi, hi’ and you wonder why are they greeting me? Just because they are in [sic] the positive side of him. So [it] is like everybody supports him in the tutor relationship with the student. KARI  What do you think about that? IRENE  It’s not nice, because some of the tutors are drunkards, so he just takes me to the bar. And after having sex, he just leaves me. I just feel

152  ‘I am someone’ that I’m now in college and everyone knew [about my mistakes]. I felt high when I was given, so when I’m dumped I can’t concentrate when I’m in his class. I will not listen to him because [of] what happened. PAULINE  A tutor wants to have a relationship with me, but I didn’t wanted [sic]. Exam’s time come here [and the tutor says], ‘You refused me, so I make you fail. I don’t give a damn.’ A tutor will even insult other tutors to make sure that you failed. (FGD, second-year female students) Students did provide active resistance, sometimes taking justice into their own hands, in order to protect their reputations as a last defence mechanism. For instance, a cook was found sleeping with a female student. The cook was verbally reprimanded by the director, but the female student’s access to her dormitory was blocked by the other female students who felt their high status as future teachers had been violated by one of them engaging with a subordinate staff member of less symbolic value. From a poststructural view, the ‘sex business’ could be seen as a coherent oppression system working under a matrix of domination (Collins, 1998) that victimises the non-male, non-rich, non-slim and non-young. The victims were poor, black, female students, who could not receive shelter and privacy in their institutional ‘family’, but instead were blamed, abused and punished through public humiliation, having transcended the invisible matrix of what was considered normal and appropriate behaviour among other students. This invisible matrix of domination built on class segregation and a social codification of workers being separated from the educated elite, the students. Violation of naturalised class categories meant rejection and marginalisation of these students from the community. The incident of the female student and the cook provoked different feelings among participants, in which some students were victimised and Othered: ‘Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to nonbeing, form to formlessness, life to death,’ says Douglas (1966, p. 5). ‘Uncleanliness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained’ (Douglas, 1966, p. 40). In this way, ideas of pollution regarding a ‘proper’ and especially an ‘improper’ way of thinking and behaving helped the students to control their experience of ambiguities and irregularities of TTC. Chaos and what could not be controlled was structured into a meaningful sense, yet such attempts are doomed to fail (Douglas, 1966). The students’ responses to so-called dirty and improper behaviour by another student, and the continuation of the ‘immoral’ behaviour by this other student, demonstrated how students struggled to get a grip on the inevitable failure of a structure that continuously produced risky orderings. As at other colleges, students grappled with psychological double binds, which, as mentioned, were social situations with several conflicting demands that a person experiences as unavoidable (Bateson et al., 1956, p. 253). The double bind at Global was produced in a structure of liberalism and commodification: whether turning down a tutor’s demands for sexual favours or giving in and engaging in a romantic relationship, in the outcome

‘I am someone’  153 was negative for students. In the first case, the student risked failing her exam and being excluded from class by the tutor; in the second case, she risked exclusion from the student community and, later, being dumped by the tutor and humiliated in front of the other students. Tutors, however, were not completely dominant agents, because they did not possess the means to fully force students to see them as they wanted to be seen (Bourdieu, 1993b). But did the students become more ‘immoral’ as a consequence of their stay at Global? Paradoxically, trying out in practice what everybody seemingly was permitted to do, or being exposed to what others referred to as ‘immorality’, made students become more principled and oriented towards being and becoming role models for others when they returned to their homelands. Students had experienced the consequences of engaging in the socioculture of ‘immorality’, which was developed during an everyday life as ‘the necessary matter of course’ (Heller, 1984). It strengthened students’ feelings of belonging to and accepting an identity that was very different from the institutional socioculture where they grew up. Students did not become ‘immoral’ persons; rather, their sense of morality became strengthened, and many of them came to think of themselves as role models in their later work as teachers.

Pedagogy: ‘Here to give us a clue’ Deans and leaders at Global had a critical and explicit awareness of the challenges facing students, the political context surrounding teacher education, and the values relating to what kind of teachers the institution should produce. But teaching in packed classrooms, often with more than ninety students, and having a workforce of tutors a third as large as most other TTCs – most of whom were newly graduated, young tutors – made it difficult to convert ideologies into adequate practice. Tutors were cramped in classrooms, limited to the forty centimetres of free space between the first row of students and the blackboard. Students had no place to study after classes apart from the classrooms, which were simultaneously used for other activities, such as socialising, drying clothes, music performances, debating, eating and dozing. As discussed previously, library access was non-existent, since few students could pay the admission fee. Pedagogy worked on creativity and the good will of students. Observations of class sessions revealed that tutors were seldom in class and, instead of teaching, often gave notes to the students for self-study. At other colleges, such as Lexington and Wummit, in cases where a tutor was not present, the class prefect would automatically start reading aloud from the textbook and students would start scribbling notes. But not at Global. When tutors were not present, students engaged in a variety of activities that appeared chaotic, but which also provided students with a sense of responsibility for their studies. Students wandered in and out of the classroom, some dozed with an open book and their feet up on chairs, accompanied by loud music from iPhones. The administration accentuated the pedagogical value of the ‘project group’ method, which seemed to make

154  ‘I am someone’ sense in resource-impoverished environments with little tuition assistance. This method consisted of tutors giving a short lecture or mentioning a topic, which students subsequently explored themselves. Tutors and the administration apparently agreed about the appropriateness of this method. As the dean explained: ‘Students realise there is content they can discover by themselves. Through discovering out the parts they do not understand they will take to the class discussion.’ A male tutor commented on the strategy: ‘We give them a clue, but they are supposed to do the rest themselves. We only tell them 15% during class hours, the rest they have to find themselves.’ Some students seemingly accepted the situation of little instruction and lot of self-study, as Eliza, a female student, commented: ELIZA  Here,

the teacher [tutor] just give you a clue. Not everything. Just a clue, instead of at least giving you little knowledge so you know how you’re going to do. But no. Most of the time when you find that you need to get assistance from the teacher, you won’t get it. (Interview, second-year female student)

Some felt responsible for their own learning, while others felt cheated: PETER  Global,

it’s like a business-centre-like institution. When you pay your money nobody will cater for your academics or what you came for. They are not assisting you to get what you want, so they leave you with your knowledge to do what you want. It’s like, get what you want and make yourself a teacher. BRIAN  To me, I don’t think the tutors make you fail. It’s the discipline we have ourselves. You know, it’s like this time the timetable reads you are supposed to be in class, but you’ll find no one in class. People have already gone their own ways. Then they blame the tutor. RICK  This is a private institution and we have the potential to perform even better than those in the public institutions, but success and failure begins with us. We have to work harder even if we have limited resources. (FGD, second-year male students) Deans and tutors used elevated, academic words to legitimise the project group method and other incidental ways of teaching. Many students seemingly accepted and naturalised the tuition practice without explanation, absorbing it as doxa; that is, ‘what goes without saying’ (Bourdieu, 1993b, p. 73), which was beyond discussion. For instance, the ‘objective achieved methods of teaching’, OAMT, was a concept used by some tutors, in which the students standing in front would pass on the information from the blackboard to the students in the back of the classroom, who were unable to hear or see what was going on in front. OAMT was a commonly used strategy that, by using a technical term, seemed to legitimise that students had only little access to classroom tuition since they could not hear or see the tutors’ lectures due to the mass of students. Mr Piko argued that the issue of the

‘I am someone’  155 narrow classrooms was a positive asset, as it could create a ‘highway’ of information communication: MR PIKO  You

see, it is a narrow class. That means the learners have to sit up to behind and they cannot see what is written up front. The individual attention now becomes a challenge. We don’t have the electronic microphone now. So the teacher must be audible in order to be understood and heard with all learners in the class. Most of the time, we normally create some highways in class so that the teacher will distribute the content evenly. You move round the class and for every learner to hear what you are saying. (Interview, DoC)

In reality, however, most of the time it was not possible for the tutors to move around the packed classrooms. Pedagogy was motivated by the absence of resources: lack of classrooms, tutors, books and space. Most teaching therefore took place as ‘project-related activities’, another word for self-study. An English tutor told the students: ‘Not all [of you] are meant to understand.’ But pedagogy was also encapsulated in something else, a ‘civil education’ that targeted beyond immediate preparation for exams. For instance, a tutor spoke to students about being responsible with their studies: ‘You know, when to leave the compound you go out and nobody asks you. That is because you are adults! You are able to make a choice between what is good for you and what is bad.’ The moral education at the institution urged them to become adults – responsible, self-aware and conscious – not positioning them as immature, irresponsible and immoral as in some other TTCs, as the previous observation of Mr Piko’s pep talk in a first-year classroom illustrated, in which students were urged to ‘become president of this country’, the ones to help others understand the constitution, and so on. Instead of punishment, sanctions and control, Mr Piko appealed in the observed pep talk to the students’ moral ethos, using political rhetoric from an American presidential election campaign about being self-aware, a role model, and taking responsibility for developing the nation. Moralisation was communication of ethics, but in Global it was done in a critical way, creating a politically conscious space for students to grow up in. Students learned to take responsibility and initiate their learning: The students have been without a Kiswahili teacher for the last four months and exams are approaching. Seemingly, students got tired of waiting and a second-year student initiated a ‘symposium’, which was a meeting where students could practise Kiswahili. An English tutor is invited to attend. The students arrive in large numbers in the dining hall, though it is Saturday morning and free time for the students. More than 500 students are gathered for the symposium, many more than the scheduled 170 students. Class 2A and 2B present in smaller groups a theme from a Kiswahili set book, which they have prepared in advance. Afterwards, many questions are asked by the students in the audience and intense discussions take place, though only one tutor is present. (Observation, dining hall)

156  ‘I am someone’ Being faced with few tuition resources, students were forced to be innovative and invented a do-it-yourself tuition. The large number of students participating in this self-initiated Kiswahili symposium, and their interest in contributing to the discussions, demonstrated an incentive to learn, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Learning did not take place in an ‘empty’ space rinsed of pedagogical value, but instead taught students to envision, plan and carry out new attempts to change the problem. In other words, students developed action competence (Jensen, 1993). They developed abilities to analyse an experienced problem, in this case the lack of tuition force, and learned to solve it in a creative way. They asked the director to lend them sound equipment, which demonstrated their ability to take initiative in a somewhat disempowering context with usually sharp social hierarchies, which in most cases did not grant students many possibilities to change the status quo. The socioculture of Global supported them in being innovative within the frames they were given. ‘Social resources are the strongest resource in Africa’, a Kenyan expatriate once told me. Usually, people attributed quality education to material resources. Global was a case of getting around the insufficient resources by constructing a meaningful alternative learning space.

Photo 4.3  Preparing for teaching practice in a primary school.

Laissez-faire rationality: lost in empty space? The core of liberalism is that state power represents a negative conception and the individual is taken as an object to be freed from the interventions of the state. In other words, the state must stay out of the market. The individual is portrayed as an autonomous human who can practise freedom (Olssen, 2003, p. 200). Neo­liberalism, however, represents a positive conception of the state’s role, seeing the state as an active agent who creates the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. In addition, the state creates individuals who are enterprising

‘I am someone’  157 and competitive entrepreneurs (Olssen, 2003). Yet, from a societal view, private teacher education institutions were not ‘free’ in the sense of the liberal vision. They were entangled in a complex web of positioning and ranked low in public opinion. They were overtaken economically by governmental TTCs, which had more resources and better academic reputations, and which bullied private TTCs by denying them access to the field and being perceived as ‘real’ teacher education institutions. Despite the resource differences and their poor reputation, Global still rebelled against what it perceived as ‘old-fashioned’ ways of doing schooling that seemed commonplace at some governmental TTCs. In other words, it was not the state, but the place that enforced enterprising and competitive entrepreneurship. To differentiate itself from traditional governmental TTCs, the college presented itself as modern, independent, economically elitist and international. The director wished to create an appropriate market at Global, in which free and autonomous students could create their own future in a competitive job market side-by-side with students from public TTCs. Laissez-faire is a personal morality that builds on a conception of value nihilism and where ‘anything goes’ (Jacobsen and Kristiansen, 2001, p. 112) in a context of minimal state intervention and control. In the Kenyan literature about educational planning, laissez-faire as a pedagogical concept was often referred to as creating chaos: ‘A school where laissez-faire leadership dominates is very easy to recognize. Teachers are frequently absent, or when present, they are busy doing anything but teaching; the level of noise is consistently high; and litter and stench permeate the whole atmosphere. In other words, the atmosphere denotes an almost total lack of supervision’ (Bennaars et al., 1994, pp. 177–178). Yet, the scenario with laissez-faire as the dissolution of structures and rules was difficult to spot at Global. Students worked hard to get their P1 certificate but also pursued a personal life in-between studies. They did so in a context with less restriction on their freedom, but not in a value-free space. Freedom was highly appreciated by both students and the administration, and individual initiative was rewarded. ‘Think critically and make something of your stay here at college’ was the institutional mantra alongside paying the fees. Restrained material circumstances and a management that favoured the free spirit induced creativity and entrepreneurship. A new social order was constructed. The institution took a minimalist role in bringing up students. In spite of this, many – mostly male – students developed belonging to the place, to the profession and to each other. But it was also a rough and dirty place where many female students felt chased, compromised and abused by tutors and older male students, and where food and other resources were exchanged for sex and other favours. ‘Liberalism presents itself as a form of limited government offering restraints on sovereign power, but it is the most fundamental and enduring extension of the powers of the government of the state so far witnessed,’ writes Dean (2002, p. 130). Global looked like a place without government, but ruling took place in the form of informal positioning and categorisation of students according to their age, sexuality and gender, and especially their market value in this field or their ability to dominate others, either as economically

158  ‘I am someone’ privileged high-class or untouchable students; as socially capitalised bosses, or as culturally capitalised principled ones. Dean (2002, p. 130) writes that the limitation of liberalism ‘is undertaken in the name of individual rights and liberty, and instrumentalise and shape various forms of freedom and choice … to establish a comprehensive normalisation of social, economic, and cultural existence’. Free will and choice in many cases resulted not in more democracy, but instead in an institutional shaping, where new hierarchies and survival of the fittest often reigned. However, students were not self-interested individuals, but they also learned to stick together and became dependent on each other in this tough setting. Dependency seemed the only means to survive. Female students stuck together against tutors and male students who were perceived as abusive. Students stuck together with the principal against the tutors. At Global, students were customers and kings and regarded as founders of the institution. They were spared the massive bureaucracy that at other – often governmental – TTCs sorted, disciplined and rendered students into subordinated masses of uniform subjects. Ethnicity seemingly did not matter much in this culture. Here, it was about managing school fees and stretching resources, displaying and improving identity, and belonging to a social group that could reinforce one’s identity, alongside absorbing as much as possible from the little teaching that went on in classrooms. ‘Good students’ at many governmental TTCs displayed appropriate ‘moral’ behaviour and achieved good marks, while bad students showed ‘immoral’ behaviour and achieved low marks. But at Global, ‘good students’ paid their fees and were thereafter left in peace by the administration. Global students were less constrained in their free time compared to other TTCs. This made them embody a more ‘modern’ lifestyle, in which they gained experience of different forms of life, such as urban youth lifestyles, that had emerged during the last decades outside TTCs. But freedom had its limit and the social order reversed. Divisions and fights for power, authority, rights and respect made it an unsure and difficult place to live with a reversed social order: Tutors felt unjustly treated by the director, who favoured the interests of the students; students in return lost respect for the tutors, since they felt they were the ‘sponsors’ of the colleges; the principal felt his natural power as the academic head and daily leader of the institution being overruled by the director, and his alcohol abuse made it difficult for him to attend to his daily duties; students who had not paid fees but committed minor offences were disciplined heavily, but students who had paid the tuition fees and violated college rules were not punished; female students felt chased and used by tutors and male students, and were bullied by their female classmates; and subordinate staff such as cooks and cleaners who shared ethnicity and family connections with the director had sexual relations with female students without being punished, which again caused anger among the tutor group, who felt superior to the untrained staff. Money talked. Personalised relations mattered, and so did friendship between students. Dirt, ambition and lack of supervision were daily routines. The social order reversed.

5 Becoming somebody in institutional contexts

In the previous three chapters we have seen how different institutional ­cultures in Kenyan TTCs provided different contexts for students’ ­becoming, in terms of the different ways that institutions were shaped, and provided different possibilities for shaping students. Assembling the empirical material presented in the chapters about the three colleges provides a picture that colleges had different ways of carrying out teaching, tutoring, regulating and administering, which constructed different and diversified social lives, cultural and moral values, and spaces for growing up. Colleges are institutions that are organised around different social systems, which in different ways structure practice (cf. Foucault, 1977). Institutional frames demarcate individual spaces of possibility (Douglas, 1986, p. 128). Different institutional cultures practised different forms of power, surveillance, control and discipline. New and distinctive types of social life, everyday practices, college life and ways of experiencing emerged in these different ‘sites’. This chapter continues the discussion of TTCs as sites for personal and professional becoming by exploring the pedagogical and psychological consequences of college life for students, focusing on spaces of becoming, which each of the three teacher education sites provide for students, and what this means for students’ processes of self-construction and the shaping of their personal and professional selves. It starts by setting an analytical frame for understanding becoming processes using everyday life theory and narratives, critical educational and psychological theory, and psychodynamics. Then it turns to an exploration of how personal and professional teacher selves were shaped in the different sociocultures of the TTCs. It does so by first looking at how college cultures were productive forces that, in various ways, constructed space for students’ becoming, for instance in the ways students handled and held their lives at college, were responded to by the institution and what this meant for the space of possible becoming. Based on these insights and the empirical material, we then explore how different versions of personal student selves collectively became constructed in the institutional ‘space of possibles’. Finally, five individual student narratives of their life trajectories through college are examined regarding how individual students construct specific professional relations to the teaching profession. This allows for the

160  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts chapter to conclude by looking at how college cultures influence students collectively and individually, as students become somebody and someone.

Learning, participation and becoming in context A central claim in educational and psychological theory is that learning and processes of becoming are highly dependent on possibilities for participation. Viewing learning as fundamentally tied to the social and cultural contexts in which it takes place, and seeing learning not only as cognitive or psychological processes but as sociocultural processes as well, is a perspective that has increasingly impacted learning theorists during the last decades (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Nasir and Cooks, 2009, p. 41; Rogoff, 1990; Wenger, 1998). The quality of institutional societies, such as student and staff societies, and of managerial culture affected students’ self-feelings and their ways of being and acting with others, in turn shaping their intentions and motivations for becoming teaching professionals. Students’ orientations could thus be attributed to a complex array of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, similar to those identified in other studies of teacher education in the South (Sayed and McDonald, 2017). The question was: How can processes of learning and becoming be understood analytically, and what does this mean for the study of student teachers in different college cultures?

Photo 5.1  Last day of college.

‘Learning culture’ or ‘learning organisations’ are terms that imply that learning can take a more collective and less individualistic form (Jarvis et al., 2003, p. 51). The learning organisation of the TTC meant more than just being an organisation in which ‘lots of individuals learned’ (Jarvis et al., 2003, p. 51). Instead, the study showed that new and contemporary

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  161 youth cultures became intensified and alternate learning spaces occurred. These findings are in line with the theoretical claim that learning is profoundly entangled with its contextual premises. In social learning theory, for instance, learning is considered a characteristic of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Lave, 1993) and dependent on the construction of the learning settings in which it occurs. This means that learning is as much about modifications and shifts in participation in social and cultural practices and activities, as it is about shifts in ways of thinking (Nasir and Cooks, 2009, p. 41; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990). ‘Figured worlds’ is a concept proposed by Holland et al. (1998a) that links cultural practices to identity formation, which is thus inscribed and must be understood in relation to a particular context. Figured worlds carry meaning, norms, values, hopes and motives that constrain and enable particular kinds of participation (Nasir and Cooks, 2009). Sensual, bodily and emotional participation are therefore aspects of learning that are closely linked to the sociocultural context, with a person’s shifting positions and relations to people and materials again affecting becoming. This chapter therefore explores the link between personal positioning, participation and ‘relationing’ of students in the institutional socioculture of the TTC with the trajectory of their personal formation and becoming. Constructionist learning theory acknowledges that learning can take different forms, ranging from reproductive to analytical and reflective (for instance, Bateson, 1972). But how did the sociocultures of the TTC produce transgressive or accommodative learning, other kinds of learning, or simply no learning, and why? From an everyday learning perspective, learning that transgresses the ‘inevitable order of everyday’ life is conditioned by constructing cultural surplus and thereby learning that changes the individual person (Heller, 1984, p. 47). Learning in an everyday life perspective, according to Heller, can take place at two levels: as an appropriation of everyday life, which is a tacit and embedded ‘know-how’ and ‘know-what’, and as a transgression of the necessary order of everyday life, which is a ‘know-why’. ‘Know-why’ is a form of questioning this necessary order that arises due to experiences of insufficiency in everyday life (Madsen, 1994, p. 73). Learning in Heller’s optic, therefore, is a modification of consciousness, reflection and understanding, and a kind of transgressive learning that arises when norms and routines in everyday life can no longer be explained by an individual’s self-understanding (as it is contained in everyday life). An everyday life learning perspective can thus tell us more about how students eventually learn to transgress the boundaries of institutionalised learning by objecting in different ways to the institutional discipline and questioning the knowledge they were presented with in the classroom. At the TTCs, students participated in a wide variety of practices and learning fields, ranging from classroom lectures and teaching practices to everyday life and institutional moralism. Every day, students had to connect their participation across practices and contexts in their own way, with their own reasoning, and in relation to their personal perspectives on the connections.

162  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts ‘Everyday conduct of life’ (Holzkamp, 1998, p. 9) refers to personal activity as a means ‘to organize, integrate, and construct the everyday in such a way that the different and contradictory demands on the individual can be united and arranged’. Everyday conduct of life conceptualises the active efforts that the individual must perform to handle daily demands, for instance through participating in different communities of practice. It does not represent a unidimensional or nonconflictual process (Holzkamp, 1998, p. 9), since the individual will encounter different and often opposing demands that must be integrated and prioritised in relation to each other for the everyday to proceed. This critical, psychological perspective can inspire an understanding of how everyday life conduct is problematic for individuals (Dreier, 1997, p. 121). But it can also help us to see how individuals integrate and handle their hopes, demands and challenges in contexts of diversity with conflicts in social practice (Dreier, 1999; Holzkamp, 1998); how the person composes changing contextual participations into a personal life trajectory (Dreier, 1999, p. 19; Hundeide, 2005); and what this means for the person’s self-understanding in relation to professional becoming as a teacher. For instance, the analyses of the three institutional contexts demonstrated that, every day, students partook in various communities of practice, such as disciplinary institutional moralism, modern youth communities, academic classroom learning, and struggles with resource deprivation (see also Dahl, 2014b). With Dreier’s and Holzkamp’s conceptualisations we can explore how individual students’ everyday life at college was challenged and became problematic, and a constant effort of integrating opposite demands for participation from different communities of practice. Hundeide’s (2005, p. 11) conceptualisation of ‘life track’ can help to explore students’ professional development as journeys in a sociocultural landscape with different paths, leading to different destinations, depending on the position, resources, personal visions and motives of the person in the landscape. Inspired by conceptualisations of narrative learning, we can also view student learning as a result of living a particular life in an institution such as a TTC, where the personal, individual life history can be useful to highlight the uniqueness of personal trajectories in institutional contexts (Goodson and Choi, 2008, p. 6). Narrative learning is a relatively new concept, though sadly neglected in the literature. The ambition here is not to provide an overview of narrative learning and life-history (for that, see Dahl, 2015b); however, a few points about how narrative learning and life-story research can inform the study of professionalisation shall be mentioned here. Narrative learning refers to the way people learn from their lives ‘in’ and ‘through’ the stories they tell about their lives (Goodson et al., 2010, p. 3), in this case living and developing professionally in a teacher education setting. Narratives are stories about human lives characterised by temporality, meaning and social encounters. Narratives encompass sequences of events and have personal significance and meaning, which become externalised through the telling of lived experience (Goodson and Gill, 2011, p. 4) and through living life. By following a smaller number of students on their

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  163 way through college, a more detailed and precise microperspective on their everyday lives and professional development can be offered. The point is that the stories people live and tell about their lives influence their personal becoming. Stories serve to make sense of people’s experiences and craft the sense of self and identity (Clark, 2010; Clark and Rossiter, 2008). Zittoun’s (2007) analytical conceptualisation of ruptures and transitions in self-development can be used to analyse the flow and interweaving of personal and professional change in students’ life stories. According to Zittoun, ruptures are interruptions in the normal flow of events (Zittoun, 2007, p. 190), and transitions are processes that correspond to re-equilibration subsequent to ruptures (Zittoun, 2007, p. 191; see Dahl, 2015b). These conceptualisations can help us to grasp how students stayed in or changed different life paths and trajectories at college, for instance due to contextual and institutional constraints and possibilities, and what it meant for them personally and professionally to succumb to different occurrences and experiences in their daily life, which is the focus of the following sections.

Spaces for possibility and searching processes ‘Searching processes’ is an analytical theme inspired by psychodynamic and poststructural psychological theory that refers to how persons or groups request, examine, wish and work in institutional spaces, which provide different conditions of possibility. This theme is somewhat absent from the literature focusing on teacher education, but it may be inspired by various linked conceptualisations of how people navigate and make meaning in cultural and institutional settings (see Chapter 1, this book; and Andersen and Kjær, 1996; Bourdieu, 1983; Dahl, 2021; Foucault, 2005; Foucault and Gordon, 1980). Inspired by Heller’s theory, searching processes in sociocultural spaces permit, as previously mentioned, transgression of ‘the everyday necessary order’ (Heller, 1984), which is a condition for constructing cultural surplus and transforming learning. How do these searching processes take place, and how do institutions respond? And how do these institutional responses shape people? Searching processes are dialectically linked with the concept of space for possibility, since a subject’s room for navigation and orientation will be demarcated by the sociocultural, psychological and material space for becoming in the institution. So what helped students to transcend positioning, marginalisation and other challenges and possibilities, and what were the barriers preventing them from doing so? Thoroughly regulated at Lexington Lexington was an institution primarily working on cultural capital in the form of academics. Students’ lives were dominated by academics. It was a thoroughly regulated life with little space for students’ own initiatives. Co-curricular activities were a continuation of classroom studies. Leadership worked top-down, and the only kind of student participation was preparing

164  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts for the next class or following instructions from the tutors or deans. The principal pressed the deputy principal and the tutors. Tutors pressed on students. Prefect students pressed on ordinary students, and ordinary students continued pressing on pupils when in teaching practice. Exam grades and academic excellence combined with a strict bodily and mental discipline were the significant targets. Here students learned ‘know-how’ and ‘know-what’ (Heller, 1984) – skills they could use as future teachers to recite large chunks of knowledge in front of pupils in bookless schools, but which did not question the status quo – learning did not address ‘know-why’. Students’ academic performances were on continuous display on the big notice wall. Whether tutors were in class or not, and whether students recited poems or rehearsed scientific formulas, no sound was heard in the compound. The staff room was silent, too. Here tutors sat occupied with books and lesson planning at individual desks arranged like a classroom, with all desks facing the empty ‘teacher’s desk’, where an unknown, mostly invisible, authority was present. The dean of students was only rarely occupied in his office with reprimanding students, since they were a disciplined mass of subjects who had internalised self-technologies. Instead, most often he was found in the panoptical position with his back to the staff room, overlooking the compound and all entrances to the first-years’ classrooms, assuming that second years had already learned the required attitudes. Students were afraid to leave the classroom to visit the toilet. Bodily gestures were carefully and automatically positioned in nonviolating signals to avoid contact with the opposite sex or activities that did not involve academic work. Students had internalised the know-how and know-what of being in a culture of twenty-four-hour surveillance, but they did not ‘know-why’. Learning was an appropriation of the ‘necessary order of everyday life’, which was about maximising academic performance and minimising social contact. It represented a cultural deficit produced in the institutional sphere, not in students’ lives. The only surplus left in this place was surplus produced in this thoroughly regulated bureaucratic everyday life, which resulted in a Protestant work ethic (Weber, 1958), in which: Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. (Weber, 1904, cited in Appelrouth and Edles, 2008, p. 159) Here students’ searching processes towards performance combined with an inflated superego aimed at shaping industrious workers, ‘who clung to their work as to a life purpose by God’ (Weber, 1904, cited in Appelrouth and Edles, 2008, p. 163) and who did not question the institutional frames. Sporadically, complaints were heard, but most often those students who were perceived as violating subjects were removed from the student population

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  165 and sent home, leaving the disciplined and silenced masses behind. Conflicts were swiftly and harshly dealt with, leaving no space for personal decisions: A female student was admitted to hospital due to injuries, caused by another male student, who had attacked her during the teaching practice with a stick. Apparently the disagreement developed about use of the sports field. When the female student came back to college, a suspension letter had already been issued, though this student was attacked physically and was not the attacker. The female student explained: ‘I came back from hospital and found my suspension letter ready. The mayor brought the letter to me immediately [when] I entered the dormitory. So I just packed and left.’ (Observation, outside corridor) Foucault (1977) argues that power is intimately related to forms of knowledge and that both are constructed upon the basis of concrete and local ‘terrains’ and ‘technologies’ rather than upon ‘wills’ or ‘interests’ (Driver, 1985, p. 425). By delegating corporal punishment with no regard to subjects or offence, the institution in Foucault’s optic represents a monarchical regime, where punishment might become torture targeting the body (Foucault, 1977). Discipline at Lexington became ‘ceremonial of sovereignty’ (Driver, 1985, p. 427). The punitive regime of Lexington did not discuss moral or pedagogical grounds for offences. Its function was seemingly not to requalify individuals as juridical subjects in a contractual pedagogical space, nor to format and train students as individual objects. Rather, the purpose seemed to be to forcefully restructure students, producing docile bodies and minds. Students were punished with reprimands at morning assemblies, which, drawing on Foucault (1977), served as kinds of public scaffolds: here students’ faults and ‘crimes’ were announced in front of the college’s staff and students, as part of the punitive regime. For instance, students were forced to return to college with a parent, being punished and intimidated in the public space like incompetent children. The publicly displayed ‘List of Shame’ named guilty students who could not pay college fees, but pressure resulted in counterpressure. Students accumulated aggression. They were consumers of public education, but they could not choose public service in the form of the TTC to which they would be subjects. They had to strike a balance between asserting their rights as citizens and accepting obligations, which the college sought to place upon them as students, to paraphrase Lipsky (1980). Unempathetic street-level bureaucrats, such as administrative staff and tutors, who had psychologically abandoned their aspirations to help students find a way through the strenuous college life, succumbed to private and compromised assessments of the status quo (cf. Lipsky, 1980, p. xiii). Lexington students therefore did not learn to deal with conflicts in balanced ways. Students’ requests and searches in the institution were instantly and massively suppressed, leaving no time for discussion or finding alternative suggestions.

166  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts In social space at Wummit At Wummit, students were organised into family dormitories; they had student parents, personal tutors and ethnic prefects; they received moral, motherly advice and discipline regarding sexual abstinence from the deputy principal and tutors; and they lived in a compound where flowers in garden beds, luxuriant, blossoming trees, and cared-for buildings with curtains, soft armchairs in the staff room and no litter, which sharply contrasted the dry surrounding area with its scattered, sparse vegetation, grass-roofed huts, and dusty, sandy roads. ‘The far [as] we can go in terms of students’ discipline is just to enforce responsibility. We call them to our offices and advise and counsel them, and let them know of the need to take responsibilities as teachers’, the overall chairman of the student council told me. Discipline became a learning process installing moral and ethical values. The principal was referred to as ‘soft’, but the female deputy was perceived by many students as harsh. She often managed to overrule the principal in cases of what was referred to as ‘immorality’ between young men and women. While the principal offered advice, the female deputy suspended students when they engaged in intimate relations. But she disappeared half a year after our arrival and left the culture intact with its values of caring and sharing. Nevertheless, social control was present and internalised in student behaviour. However, few students questioned the status quo, but instead felt accommodated and looked after. The classrooms were strikingly clean and equipment such as chalk, wall cards, manual Braille typewriters and other equipment remained in the unlocked classrooms after school hours. An overall ambience of being someone who would be looked after by a caring somebody emerged: the upholstered armchairs in the staff room were arranged around low coffee tables with newspapers and a tea machine, inviting conversation and relaxation. Every student was allocated a ’personal tutor’ to whom they could turn with personal or professional problems. But moralism surfaced. Communality and reciprocity were on the agenda, but so also was bodily and mental discipline. Punishment became the hidden part of the penal process and entered abstract consciousness. In a Foucauldian optic (Foucault, 1977, p. 9) it became effective, since it was perceived as inevitable, not because of its visible intensity. Justice at Wummit no longer took public responsibility for the violence bound up with its practice. Occasionally, it struck severely: The ‘immorally dressed’ female student, who wore pants during a weekend instead of a skirt, experienced such an assault from the deputy at a morning assembly (see Chapter 3). This did not happen as a glorification of the institution’s strength, but rather as an element of itself that the institution had to tolerate and that it found difficult to account for (Foucault, 1977, p. 9). The tightly regulated social system effectively and without corporal violence moulded students into the right kind of human beings, favoured by Wummit. Installing values took place through role-modelling by older students, presenting a good example, always sparing time for a conversation with a tutor or a dean. Social capital was released. Occasionally, the necessary

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  167 and obvious order of everyday life was transgressed, and knowledge in terms of ’know-why’ (Heller, 1984) surfaced. During their two years at college, the material indicated that students changed their attitudes to and motives for becoming teachers. They learned acceptance, being with and forgiving others in a general context of resource deprivation and struggles to access resources to gain advantages over others. But students never questioned the moral values of altruism, puerility, communality and social control that they were tacitly pushed into. Few students complained about the unpopular deputy, but many feared her. In this way, much learning remained know-how and know-what about being a teacher. Yet, being academically weak did not result in being disciplined; it meant mobilising the system in terms of getting more social support from classmates and ‘student parents’, who were older students taking social responsibility for younger students who were considered immature. Violating most college rules was forgiven. Drunken students were helped with their abuse. One action, however, was not lightly forgiven, and that was being deemed immoral, which resulted in public humiliation, reprimands in front of parents and the administration and other forms of punishment. Only a few students questioned the frames they were given. Students had rights and obligations, but it was a specific kind of right to navigate within a given, regulated space, where some students, the so-called ‘immoral’ ones, became positioned as Other and only partly managed to transcend marginalisation. Gendered freedom at Global The unofficial mantra at Global was ‘freedom and friends’. Students lived in deprived circumstances, but they decided for themselves and life took place through social relations. Being crammed together in small spaces meant increased social contact and many opportunities to learn to deal with others. Being given virtually no supervision and restraints in a liberal context that valued enterprising individuals meant space for something else, as a male student explained: MALE STUDENT  Water is limited, food is bad and the dorms are overcrowded.

But what will make you feel a little comfortable in this college, it’s the freedom you are given. Apart from the freedom, I’m telling you, my friend, you cannot survive. Go like to that other TTCs, there is no freedom. You are always in school. Any day you miss in class, you have to explain where you were. But here there is no restriction to that. And here what makes us stay is freedom and friends, like you are so stressed you will come here in class and find a friend, chat some stories and you feel that everything is OK. But apart from that if they restrict some restrictions, then this college cannot survive. (Interview, second-year male student)

Students hung out at ‘the playground’ – the open space between the hall containing the men’s dormitory and the dining hall – and stayed in the dormitories during class hours; they went to bars at weekends with their tutors,

168  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts had intimate and romantic relationships with the opposite sex, listened to pop music, chatted in class and enjoyed communal life. All of these were forbidden activities at many other colleges, but at Global they were the most important aspects of growing up. Still, it was not laissez-faire pedagogy in an empty space, but rather a ‘free room’ for students that was created in and between the physical structures. Free room is a term used by Fjord Jensen (1998) to describe a pedagogical situation, in which development unfolds independent of the governing forces. An empty space, on the contrary, is a space where no signs, texts or traditions provide decisive reference points for future interpretations (Fjord Jensen, 1998, p. 9). Global students grew up in a learning universe that looked ungoverned, but where pedagogy took place – primarily initiated by students themselves and ‘Mr Global’, the nickname given to DoC, for whom ‘freedom fighting’ was an important pedagogical category. According to the dean, providing frames for freedom meant giving students possibilities to explore themselves and gain personal competencies in the ways they related to others. Among the managerial staff, students were talked of as ‘grownups, who know how to handle themselves’. But some students felt that freedom left them in a cultural vacuum, where their expectations of the moral aspects of teaching professions were not met: PAULINE  It

has really discouraged me. I would not advise anybody to come to this college, because I feel it is not worthy to be a teachers college; because the kind of the role models that we expect as far as Teachers Service Commission is concerned is the code of conduct. But here is directly opposite. There is no hierarchy of leadership, because you don’t know whom to run to, where your problems can be solved. Maybe it is like a mixture of something you cannot understand. Personally, it has not changed me in any way. I will only get my certificate and maybe change my career. (Interview, second-year female student)

The question is whether these complaints about ‘too much freedom’ reflected students’ actual situation or public opinion about how institutional upbringing was to be effected within a societal matrix of domination with male, age and generational supremacy. Female students at Global felt it was difficult for them to use their freedom. When leaving the compound, the guard and others would assume that they left with the purpose of meeting a man, that is, of being immoral. Prejudice complicated freedom. Some female students felt harassed and abused by older male students, male staff and male tutors. But the young people helped each other move forward in the process of becoming adults. Peer-learning in African educational settings has been described as the pedagogical effect of membership in social communities between children and young people of the same age and gender, which contain more symmetrical relations than, for instance, traditional relations between adults and children (Onyango-Ouma, 2000, p. 143), and can therefore better initiate

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  169 formative learning processes, which target personal and social aspects. Thus, the young adults’ time at Global was not an empty space, because being together with other young adults potentially fashioned more inclusive learning processes (Rogoff, 1990, pp. 171–188). At Global there were no limits for student behaviour, yet two issues were not tolerated: being a ‘defaulter’, that is, someone who had not paid tuition fees, or spreading harmful publicity about the college, which could affect the institution’s income negatively. But students knew the rules of the game. They learned to handle grumpy tutors, who saw their role diminished to spreading academic knowledge in class, and not having legal opportunities according to the institutional values of disciplining or moralising students. Students who were abused or illtreated by tutors were considered customers and backed by the director. But being a student was not risk-free. Tutors slyly knew how to fight back against students by using dangerous punishments, such as expulsion from a classroom or cleaning up dirt all day with a toothbrush. If students complained about a specific tutor to the director, the tutors in a group would sometimes find other crafty ways of excluding the student from the classroom. Mostly, however, students were left in peace. Yet, the cancellation of bureaucracy seemed advantageous for the students: tutors were not able to position students as Other, for example as ‘bad’ students. New teaching forms were invented. Creativity was necessary when handling the few resources. Conflicts were permitted and not frowned upon, but carefully solved through dialogue. The fight among the male students in the dormitory was solved with diplomacy by the dean and a tutor. Students shook hands and nobody was expelled. There was unspoken permission for conflicts to arise, since there was a will to actively deal with, not suppress them. This changed minds and students. But freedom had its limits. Not everybody benefitted from liberalism. The law of the jungle reigned. Female students, especially ‘freshers’, were chased, exploited, used for sexual favours and manual work and bullied by their female peers for doing so. Though they seemingly conformed, they often complained about living in an open hunting ground, abused by male tutors and older male students. But being in a group of other female friends helped and taught students about handling obstacles. Students searched for explanations rather than consensus. Learning became know-why and produced cultural surplus about handling life in a diverse context, where freedom and constraints were simultaneous incidents of life. Students’ searching processes were visible and mostly accommodated in the institution: female students hung out in groups and complained about male tutors and older male students who chased them as game, but they still continued to visit bars and boyfriends in town, now more aware and therefore always in groups. Male students discussed the place, the tutors, and the director, whom they saw as a friend, in a lively way. But they also knew that freedom had its limits. A student not being able to pay college fees, and the director’s ambitions about not spreading bad publicity about the place, could easily lead to being sent home for good. Nevertheless, students could always air frustrations to the

170  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts dean of students or the director, who would listen and mostly share opinions but rarely provide resources or take action. Their seeking processes did not take place in social or cultural vacuums, though taking action was left to students themselves.

Evidence of becoming: personal self-constructions What happened to students and their inner selves at a collective level, in a thoroughly regulated institutional space, a social space or in a space characterised by gendered freedom? Let’s first turn to theory. From a psychodynamic perspective, the personal self arises as a consequence of its participation in social relations. This section explores the link between being a participant in a specific cultural universe and subjected to a certain social order, and the production of explicit mental conditions. Institutional learning is social correction through learning social conventions (Gulløv, 2004, p. 71). It is a prevailing understanding in developmental psychology and self-psychology that human beings need other human beings to become themselves. The quality of dyadic relations, such as how primary caretakers hold, handle and respond to the signs and requests of the child, and the kinds of attachment bonds – sometimes long-lasting – that develop, have long been correlated with how personal and social development take place, for instance in psychodynamic theory (Bowlby, 1985a, 1985b, 1989; Winnicott, 1974). According to psychodynamic theory, self-development is participation in interpersonal relations (Kernberg, 1996; Kohut, 1977; Main, 1995). Psychopathology and deviance from normality is seen as a specific kind of participation in relations and a mismatch and loss of sensitivity from the caregiver towards the developing individual (Stern, 1977). Some psychotherapists, for instance, believe that much change that occurs in psychotherapy arises from the implicit knowledge evolving within the relationship between therapist and patient, rather than explicit knowledge carried in interpretations that presumably make unconscious motives and beliefs conscious and explicit (Stern, 1977, p. 12). In other words, the relation and kind of participation that manifests between caretaker and the one taken care of predisposes a psychological outcome (Tracey et al., 2012). But how does this apply to the relation between institutional processes and individual becoming, for instance in the way personal relationships between students, tutors and the administration materialised? There is still only little knowledge about the connection between institutional group-level and personal, intrapsychological formation. Studies from Western contexts have found that teachers and students shape and become shaped by others as they interact with the different people and group identities around them in their everyday interactions in schools (Pollock, 2008) and home (Monzó and Rueda, 2003). Informal learning affects students’ lives in higher education institutions (Dahl, 2014b, 2015a, 2020a, 2020b, 2021; Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Horowitz, 1987). Informal learning is a term suggested as

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  171 a contrast to formal learning, which is ‘a prescribed learning framework, an organised learning event or package, the presence of a designated teacher or trainer, the award of a qualification or credit, and/or the external specification of outcomes’ (Eraut, 2000, p. 114). According to Eraut, most human learning does not occur in formal contexts, yet little knowledge exists about what happens to students in non-Western contexts who are confronted with Western schooling (Levinson and Holland, 1996, p. 17), for instance in Kenyan TTCs. But what is it specifically in an institutional socioculture that initiates processes of self-formation? Literature suggests that the diverse sociocultural environments in some education institutions influence the construction of self and identity differently (Dahl, 2020a; Luttrell, 1996; Wexler, 1992). In some of these studies, the becoming of self is explored as a psychological defence mechanism related to microsocial processes in an institutional culture, as a kind of identity learning (Dahl, 2012a, 2015a; Wexler, 1992). Is it possible to draw a correlation between different levels of causal origin, for instance regarding psychological conditions or formations? Søndergaard (1990) suggests that different levels in, for instance, psychiatry, such as sociological, interpersonal, intrapsychological, and biological functions, are mutually connected and susceptible (see also Dahl, 2005, p. 261). Some studies focus on these connections, yet mostly from a perspective of how ‘higher’ psychological levels influence ‘lower’ levels directly in contact with them, for instance how dysfunctional family structures influence dyadic relations and attachments (see for instance, Bowlby, 1989; Minuchin, 1974). The sections that follow explore mutual influence between levels that are not in direct contact with each other, for instance at the institutional and intrapsychic levels. Since this chapter is particularly about personal and self-construction, we may also turn to clinical psychology for inspiration. Millon’s (1996) psychiatric approach to understanding human personality can inspire an exploration of how coping strategies are reflections of individual adaptation to contextual conditions. According to Millon, integrated personalities are characterised by the ability to – in balanced ways – shift between polarities in existential goals, adaptive modes, replicatory strategies and abstract processes. Shifting between pain and pleasure, fluctuating between being active and passive, thinking of self or thinking of others, and paddling between thinking and feeling are part of a holistic register in integrated personalities (Millon, 1996). A psychoanalytic perspective can indicate levels of personal integration in individual selves. Activations of defence mechanisms might be signs of this. Kernberg (1996) provides a connection between personality structure, identity development and a person’s ability to test reality, helping to understand how collective selves develop based on psychosocial or other contextual stressors. Here the aim is not to objectify, legitimise, moralise or diagnose, but rather to describe, discuss and understand the tacit, institutional learning and how it affected personal development.

172  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts Depressed selves Lexington students lived in the past, rationalised the present and feared the future. They constantly worried about exams and were terrified of being expelled from class or college for actions that were judged offensive in an arbitrary and unpredictable way. This left students feeling on edge and constantly vigilant about nearly every encounter or action. They were obsessed with schoolwork and never skipped a class, but continued working even when tutors were out of sight. Signs and schemes from the college, like class bells and timetables, directed their lives to the smallest detail. They chronically neglected their bodies, were constantly tired and fell asleep during class hours due to pure exhaustion. They doubted social attachments and often isolated themselves from friends and classmates due to scrupulous attention to academic performance and fear of being sanctioned for not studying hard enough. They felt like lonely islands in oceans of demands, mostly on the part of the institution, and blamed themselves for not having worked sufficiently when an exam or a test was marked with less than a distinction. Students at other colleges perceived the students at Lexington as the best and as members of a desired academic elite in the field of the TTC: a place where former presidents and founders of the nation were once student teachers. But not Lexington students. With fearful eyes and lowered heads, scanning the compound for tutors or administrative staff whenever they left a classroom, their bodies had become the result of the social relations in which they were entangled. Social action had become bodily agency, performed by real, living people (see also James, Jenks, and Prout, 1998, pp. 146–147). One year, the regional sports day took place at Lexington. But Lexington students were alone, occupied in classes, self-studying, in pain and worrying about an exam, while the sports teams from the other TTCs partied and competed in ball games. The sports master repeatedly but unsuccessfully announced from the loud speaker that, ‘Lexington students should go to the sports field and support their team because your team is just about to start playing’, but students remained in classes, even if they weren’t on the timetable. They were apathetic, indifferent, stressed, worried and thought only of the upcoming exam. Unlike students at other colleges, they did not look forward to participating in the sports day with great eagerness and enthusiasm. Every aspect of their life at college was controlled, either by tutors in classrooms, by prefects or by rules and regulations; a thoroughly and tightly regulated room with no space for individual behaviour, self-initiated action or deviation from the overall plan to excel academically. Even leisure-time activities were appropriated by new forms of authority and subjected students to more regulation. Consequently, students at the college were left in a state of constant dysthymia, where pain, not pleasure, became an existential goal. Thoughts, feelings and personal needs were suppressed. They passively followed orders from above. Always feeling criticised, feeling below standard and never feeling praised produced basic assumptions about low self-evaluation,

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  173 which influenced their cognitive schemata negatively (Beck et al., 1979) and ­reproduced ­collective reality distortions. Negative thoughts circulated around how they saw their depressed future as teachers: MAGGIE  You

know the other students from the universities or another any other careers, they despise teaching. They think that teachers are failures. Most of them think that, you are in a TTC because you are a failure. Or you are in TTC because you lack the funds. Maybe you didn’t have the finances to support you to a university. That’s why you find teaching is despised everywhere. So, you don’t want to associate yourself. You find it so disgusting to be a teacher. (Interview, second-year female student)

The neglect and suppression of themselves as persons, yet not feeling rewarded for all their strenuous efforts, left them – students – in a psychological double bind, where they simultaneously experienced different and incompatible messages from the same system, the TTC. A ‘double bind’ is ‘a situation in which no matter what a person does, he can’t win’ (Bateson et al., 1956, p. 253), such as a social situation with several and opposite demands that the person experiences as unavoidable. The students also could not ‘win’. The oppressive demands placed on them by the institution for academic excellence could not be fulfilled without personal costs; however, fulfilling demands and becoming a teacher resulted in loss of identity and self-esteem, since teaching for many was experienced as a profession that did not live up to their dreams about a viable life (cf. Butler, 2004, p. 225). Not being a student and not studying was also not an option, since dropping out of college would forsake their families’ investment and restrict their future employment and income as teachers. This positioned students in a ‘sociological schizophrenia’, a kind of societal, structural double bind (Skott, 2002, p. 99) where they received different, incompatible messages about prioritising their studies. This had specific consequences for their becoming as teachers. Low self-esteem was strengthened during their stay at Lexington. Their moods changed intermittently and were characterised by chronic tension, destructive thoughts and feelings of alienation: ONYANCHA  My

mood keeps on changing. Like now, my mood is really a sad mood. Sometimes when I see things running smoothly, I’m very happy. And then when I see that things are not really going the way they are supposed to go, maybe I see some people have been given some favours somewhere … I discover corruption, people are not good role models. I become very sad. Sometimes back I used to feel bitter, but it has been a long journey. I need to accept that this is my life. (Interview, second-year male student)

In one FGD, more than half of the participants expressed severe melancholic and negative feelings about the place, indicating the schizophrenic culture’s influence on their personalities. They described the college as ‘undermining

174  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts students’ and providing ‘inhuman conditions’, with no d ­ emocracy and f­ reedom. This FGD was, however, a rare occasion when s­ tudents could freely vent their frustrations. Usually, students wrapped accounts of themselves and the college in long explanations about (dis)advantages, referring to themselves in the third person. Rationalisation and intellectualisation were signs of activated defence mechanisms, depression and neglect of feelings. This was evident, for instance, in a student’s account of his experiences at the college, in which he refers to himself and the TTC in generalised, abstract terms using elevated language style with many complex sentences and traces of officialese: ORANDA  Maybe

in most institutions there is a forum where people will sit down and discuss [issues] pertaining to their stay in the institutions. Maybe a student or a group of students are experiencing having problems. And there is nowhere [here where] there can be even that opportunity that where they can express their feelings. And I think this one is maybe creating more problems to the learners [students], and makes them to realise that, that experience of freedom they maybe were expected to be in the college is not there. (Interview, second-year male student)

In another incident, the frustration and anger at being a student in a highly oppressive institution was on occasion manifested in young men attacking their fellow students. In such instances, student aggression could escalate rapidly. Here the female student, described earlier, who was attacked during teaching practice describes the incident in her own words: FEMALE STUDENT  I

took the pupils to the field during PE [physical education]. While running around the area that I had marked, a male student came to me and told me that he is the one who is supposed to have a lesson there. I told him to mark somewhere else, since I had started my lesson, but he refused. I then told him that that is not possible. He then took a field marker and hit me on the head saying that he doesn’t argue with women. (Informal conversation, first-year female student)

The college’s constant surveillance and threats of termination not only induced fear in students; it also provoked aggression, in this case towards other students, and rigid and one-sided coping mechanisms for problem solving that used physical outbursts rather than verbal dialogue. At a far more disturbing level, the incident could be analysed as an effect of a segregationist institution culture underlain by structural racism. Racism, according to Bonilla-Silva (2015, p. 2), is not only a social construction, it is ‘the belief that some people are better than others because of their race’ and conceive of race – the presumed foundation of all woes in the world – as primarily a biological or cultural category easy to read through marks on the body (i.e., phenotype) or the cultural practices of groups. Racism produces racial structure, a network of social relations at social, political, economic and ideological levels that shapes the life chances of the various races. According

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  175 to Bonilla-Silva (2015, p. 3), a racial structure is responsible for production and reproduction of systemic advantages for some. If race is seen as a social category similar to gender, which is also a social construction, then gender also sorts and produces advantages for some on behalf of others. Male students in this culture became the dominant subjects, and female students the disadvantaged and subordinated group. Administrative and teaching staff practised institutional, structural racism, in which dichotomies, such as discriminatory and dogmatic dominant matrices based on hierarchies of gender, age, class and race, in which male teachers were acknowledged superior to female teachers who were subject to subordination to male authority, seemed to be mechanically supported. Domination disguised as bureaucratic processes were internalised in the subjects. Social isolation, powerlessness and meaninglessness resulted. Students became depressed. Surrounded selves Students at Wummit feared the deputy, but loved the principal. They lived in cubes consisting of mixed groups of older and younger students, were members of ethnic societies, had class parents, dorm parents and personal lecturers, discussed conflicts and problems weekly in groups of students of the same ethnicity and gender, and received advice from tutors during guidance and counselling. Rarely was a complaint heard; rather, smiles would extend when meeting in a corridor. Students felt responsible, adult-like, cooperative, eager to please, supported by their surroundings, understood and emotionally assisted, and absolute. But they also felt strongly dependent on others. They idealised and identified with superiors, displayed puritanical behaviour, denied sexual impulses and were hysterically obsessed about cleanliness and the orderliness of their clothing, cubes, classrooms and outdoor space. Religious communities blossomed. Behind the dining hall, groups of students could always be found in prayer or religious discussions. Student-made posters on doors to the cubes told visitors to remove shoes before entering. They suffered from large superegos but, strangely, also felt socially heard and seen. Tutors and older students were attachment objects for freshers and their younger classmates. According to Kohut (1977), the personal self is a two-sided, dynamic structure, in which successful self-development is contingent upon developing both poles: mirroring and idealising important others. Through messages and feedback from individuals in the institution, Wummit students could explore their feelings and needs, yet integrate conflicts and the diversity of others. They existed in social spaces, where they were recognised and could orient themselves towards personal role models, who provided an idealisation of what it means to be an authentic human being. This recognition allowed them to develop self-respect and the ability to want something for themselves. Idealisation developed strong values of connectedness and the ability to meet obligations towards others and the teaching profession. The

176  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts institution was not an empty space, but a place with codes and values, moralities and control. Tutors were not exclusively teachers who taught subjects; they were also primary caretakers. Students felt mirrored and embraced in dyadic relations. Rarely were they alone. Someone was always taking them and gently aligning them with the appropriate culture. Yet, developing friendly relations with one’s personal lecturer also meant being subject to control, occasionally disguised as caring, sharing and Christian forgiveness. By keeping on the narrow track of good, moral behaviour, the smiling and romanticised version of college life, with symbolic resources such as college design and blossoming vegetation that contrasted with the dry landscape, continued unquestioned. In other words, codification of life at the college as one comprised of smiling students and lush ground in contrast to the arid landscape never seemed to be questioned. ‘The feeling business’ (Van Maanen, 1990), in which smiles and happy moods were mandatory, and dirt and troubles were pushed to the background, did not operate by management decree alone. Students actively participated. Attention was on feeling good, becoming better and erasing dirt from the human mind. Institutional norms of the college were successfully implanted in its dependents: NOEL  Now the college is training us to be teachers and what it expects about

each of us. So it has provided us with a way that if you do whatever it demands then if you go to the field, you won’t see it as maybe pressure put on us. So I think about the dressing style, we should do as the college requires and not as you want. PAUL  They have really helped me, because when I had not joined this college, I did not use to tuck my shirt in, but now it has become a routine and I have seen it is a good way. I have now started tucking in shirts and then at least wearing decent clothes, which I used to despise then. Maybe the next step I’ll be wearing a tie. Really, it has helped me to accept those good behaviours. I never used to comb my hair and to [cut] short my hair. But now you can see I like short hair. It has really made me to be smart and I can see even when I go outside the society, they say you have really changed and a lot, and I can see I’ve really changed for a good reason. (FGD, second-year male students) Students actively participated in organising the determination to meet managerial expectations. Problematic behaviour was frowned upon, but as long as students promised to improve, it resulted only in raised eyebrows and verbal guidance. Students exhibiting behaviours considered rude, such as drinking alcohol, falling pregnant, abusing drugs, cigarette smoking, fighting and stealing, were guided into better versions through dialogue and close social contact with peers and tutors. Much of the traditional fear was taken out of the discipline and other subjects emerged, as a tutor explained: GLADYS  The

students are open, unlike the secondary school where they always fear. They will not tell you when they understand and when they

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  177 don’t. But here they’ll tell you, ‘Mwalimu, you are just too fast’, ‘give us time for this assignment’, ‘do this’. KARI  But how come they are open here? GLADYS  Because of their maturity. Once you get used to students, they get used to you. And then a relationship is formed, so in most cases you find that students will always have a good relationship with you. (Interview, tutor) Students and tutors talked and developed personalised relationships. Faults and shortcomings were permitted, but always within the narrow track of avoiding disgrace and feeling guilty. This possibly worked better at Wummit because a large percentage of the study body was recruited from rural areas with traditional gender, age, and generational hierarchies, as the group discussions with students presented in Chapter 3 illustrate. Many students came from pastoral lifestyles in rural areas with parents working in subsistence economies. They possibly had experienced more fixed boundaries and obedience training (cf. Hundeide, 1995, p. 748; Rogoff, 1990, p. 122), but also communality of feeling (Hundeide, 2001), than their urban colleagues, and seemed therefore accustomed to the special kind of social life at Wummit. They were emotionally mirrored but naively occupied by being perceived as good people doing good things, and blissfully unaware of another life. Exhibited selves Global students partied, spent their weekends with friends at bars and in town, pursued intimate relations with girl- and boyfriends, got chased by male tutors and older students, swopped meal cards for services, were ‘wives’ who washed male students’ clothes in exchange for attention, studied hard or paid others to do their homework and struggled with the unsanitary food, the humble housing, the poor hygiene and the general lack of water, electricity and medical services. They bought food from outside and bribed the matron for a better dormitory, enjoyed the lack of institutional supervision or used the free time in prayers and complaints about the immorality of the place. Most students, however, loved the place for its lack of visible authority, while concurrently criticising it for its lack of resources. They searched for pleasure and felt no guilt in skipping classes or engaging in romantic relations. Friends and family from outside the compound were rarely invited there to keep them from discovering what went on backstage behind the Global façade. Cover-ups were carefully stage-managed and identity guarded against extraneous insight, especially by students. Psychic energy was invested in protecting denying, grandiose selves. Outside the compound, students travelled in big new air-conditioned Scania buses, drank sodas, talked loudly on their cell phones and created an image of being sonko, meaning ‘rich person’ in the Sheng language. Inside the college compound, they slept triple-layered bunk beds in semi-permanent iron-roofed barracks, with the beds packed together with no space in between. They shared latrines with

178  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts hundreds of other students and had to pay to access the library. Yet the norms in the student community and participation at Global challenged the social order of other colleges, who gazed astonished at Global students, finding them impolite, ill-mannered, impudent and displaying rebellious youthful behaviour while also envying their presumed wealth and glorious reputation of individualism. Global students were not normalised by the institution into work-obsessive, anxious, rational, shame-feeling and panic-stricken individuals, but could, relatively unsanctioned, ventilate their frustrations, hopes, despairs and doubts without fear of being disciplined. Yet they were also scared for their future careers and employment prospects; demoralised by the prospect of becoming low-status primary school teachers; intimidated by the different kinds of youth culture at the place and their demands on body and identity; and troubled that anybody might discover the derelict reality of life at Global. Identity and self-confidence was on endless display. Students felt self-important due to being members of what others thought of as an exclusive association of the transnational elite. They tried hard to live up to that positive self-imposed image. Appearing self-confident was a value accentuated by the institution. The college uniform was noble, yet elegant and suggestive with tight black knee-length pencil skirts for women and blazers with black ties for men. Students at other TTCs wore loose skirts and polyester sweaters, and hurried into jeans and T-shirts at weekends. But not at Global. Even on Saturday mornings, Global students could still be found dressed in the college uniform: black tie, blazer and shiny polished shoes, which gave an elegant impression despite the worn-out facilities. Positioning themselves as an academic elite was more important than rebelling against moralism and suppression. Freedom was already an asset they possessed. Yet, behind the glorious front, self-esteem was not always present, as observed by the Dean of Curriculum: MR PIKO  They

are self-believing, but not really self-confident. They want to make someone see the positive side of why they believe in themselves. That is the moment when one can say that you are proud. They are assertive. First of all, they believe in themselves. Then they want others to believe in themselves as well. (Interview, DoC)

They gathered in groups and baptised each other with nicknames based on certain characteristics. In this way, group identity became an individual matter. Students were labelled as bosses, high class, untouchables and the principled ones. Global provided a social space that fostered many social identities, protest cultures and a wide range of youth cultures, where young people fused with each other. Here students could live a youth life that crossed the usual societal discipline. But identity battles between groups also filled empty holes and orchestrated new grounds for attachment and social relations. Rivalry and group dynamics produced admiration concurrent with feelings of inferiority. Some developed impressionistic relations to the outer

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  179 world, in which reality testing occasionally became unclear and personality was easily influenced by peers. Constant identity work and coping with devaluation from the outer world surfaced as raised moods and aggression, which could be seen in their responses to interpersonal relations: MR PIKO  They

normally develop by themselves. Nobody interferes with that. In fact, if by any chance when they are out there and I tell them ‘now cool down’, I might become their enemy … haha. But if I happen to pass closer to where they are, I will be mobbed by ululations and shouts and all that. Because … they were also looked at as inferior, so they have also come to be assertive now on their own. Then we have our own culture now that combines the administration and the students. And this normally is very clear. They know to what they go and they know to what level they don’t go. So when we say that we are supposed to be at this particular place, rarely will we have problems. They are sponsors of the college but they never, as opposed to other colleges … never try to make any other person feel that indeed they are the sponsors. (Interview, DoC)

Still, students knew the limits for impertinent behaviour. In various ways, they were to integrate and organise the opposing demands of study, friends and family, and managing identity struggles and life career dreams into personal life trajectories (cf. Dreier, 1999). This seemed simple, yet became a demanding task in a modern and liberal organisation, where cultural norms were dismissed and all were fighting for survival. Students had to find their own way. However, they were not alone. Their selves became ventilated by institutional freedom and their friends’ companionship.

Paths to professionalism: learning to relate to the teaching profession This section explores what it meant to be an individual student embraced by a specific culture of teacher education – in other words, what it meant for the individual student to study and grow up in cultures like those at Lexington, Wummit and Global. The student bodies varied at these colleges, and each college was also inhabited by a diverse range of students with different stories of how a particular TTC shaped their becoming. At the same time, students in the different TTCs had many aspects in common at the institutional level. But the level of professionalism and competencies developed among students in the different TTCs differed substantially. In these different institutions, individual students made their distinctive path through college – a path to professionalism that was individual and personal, but that simultaneously was shaped by the institution. This part of the chapter starts by discussing understandings of professionalism before exploring how professional learning and becoming took place among students at an organisational level. Finally, it turns to individual students’ stories of professional becoming to explore the link between persons, the institution and the profession.

180  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts As mentioned in Chapter 1, there have been many attempts to define what a teacher’s professionalism or professional identity is. The term ‘professionalism’ can variably refer to cognitive subject matter and pedagogical knowledge, attitudes and values in complex undertakings, dispositions, motivations, confidence, personal qualities augmented by particular talents, personal self and sense of self, self-consciousness and feelings of belonging to the teaching profession, proven high standards, arising from an individual’s learning processes, such as professionalisation (see, for instance, Bullough, 1997; Edmond and Hayler, 2013; Hargreaves, 2000; Korthagen, 2004, 2017; Shin, 2012; Sugrue, 1997; Tichenor and Tichenor, 2004). The topic of teacher identity has only recently begun to attract widespread attention in the academic study of teaching and teacher education. Trying to put the essential qualities of a good teacher into competencies is insufficient when it comes to understanding what constitutes teachers’ professionalism (Korthagen, 2004), since competencies are context dependent. As mentioned earlier, some definitions of teacher professionalism turn attention to the deeper levels of the personal self. Such definitions of student teacher identity include, among others, ‘what beginning teachers believe about teaching and learning and self-as-a-teacher’ (Bullough, 1997, p. 21) and teacher identity as the answer to the questions ‘Who am I as a teacher?’ (Korthagen, 2004, p. 82) and ‘Who am I at the moment?’ (Beijaard et al., 2004, p. 108). These definitions point towards personal self and self-understanding as critical aspects of teacher professionalism: ‘Consciously, we teach what we know; unconsciously, we teach who we are’, says Hamachek (1999, cited in Korthagen, 2004, p. 77). The important question is to what extent the emerging professionalism of students was a product of the socioculture from which they emerged with professional identities? Korthagen (2004) defines six levels of change occurring in student teachers during initial teacher education: peripheral levels, such as environment and behaviour, deeper levels, such as competencies and beliefs, and in-depth levels, such as professional identity and mission. The in-depth levels of change, which include the professional identity of students’ learning to become teachers, constitute the core of one’s personality. In Korthagen’s model, the outer levels – environment and behaviour – influence the inner levels and vice versa through the changes that occur in competencies, beliefs, identity, and feeling of professional mission. The inner levels are mutually constituting: Competencies are determined by beliefs, and people’s beliefs about themselves refer to how one defines oneself; that is, how a person sees his or her professional identity (Korthagen, 2004, p. 81). Many Kenyan student teachers had problems identifying with the teaching profession. They doubted their reasons for becoming teachers and did not see themselves as practising teaching in primary schools in the future. A generation ago, teaching was considered a ‘noble profession’ enfolded in great status. But at the time of writing, it is a low-status job, something an individual engages in if other education opportunities are excluded. Despite the fact that most students interviewed said that teaching was not their

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  181 first educational choice, data from the questionnaire demonstrates that the majority of the students (see Table A.9, in the Appendix: 63.6% of first-year students and 65.1% of second-year students; n = 3,145 students) would still choose to become a teacher if they were given a second chance. This suggests that after having entered TTC, students experienced the teaching profession as meaningful, and their stay at college had an overall positive influence on their attitudes towards choosing teaching as a career. Korthagen (2004, p. 93) suggests that inner levels, such as mission and identity, come into play among those who acknowledge teaching as a suitable profession for themselves. These levels are more difficult to identify, since they cannot be observed, and will therefore be analysed as traces and orientations in students’ individual journeys through life and college. Inspired by critical psychology, narrative learning and theory about professionalism, the following sections illuminate some of the more possible life paths and trajectories (Dreier, 1999) or life tracks that students followed in different teacher education cultures. This discussion will bear out that, among the student teachers, a diversity of life trajectories at an individual level led to a diversity in ways of relating to teacher professionalism, as Korthagen (2004) suggests. First, the general representation of institutional paths of becoming is discussed, then individual paths of professional becoming in the specific institution are illustrated based on five students’ concrete life stories. Lexington: teaching as a stepping stone Being a Lexington student meant hard work, perseverance, subordination, conformity to rules, neglect of the personal self, and a college life focusing on academic achievements. Students were concerned about performance and distinctions, and they competed against each other, time, tutors and themselves but never felt sufficiently skilled. Yet, becoming a teacher for many Lexington students was not a goal in itself, but a stepping stone to something better, as the following interview excerpts indicate: DOMINIC  Teacher

training college is the lowest. We are the lowest-ranked people if you are ranking teachers. So that’s why I call it a stepping stone because we feel that it should be above where it deserves. College is a stepping stone for others. DICKSON  My relatives back home advised me to just lower myself because I was seeing the P1 course something too minute. Then I just said I would use this as a stepping stone to other areas, so I had no option but just to join TTC. (FGD, second-year male students) Yet, in one of the FGDs at this college, fourteen out of nineteen second-year male students who initially did not want a teaching career in primary schools had, by the end of their studies, come to express appreciation for the teaching profession as a possible life track. For most of these students, however, attaining a P1 certificate was a way to get a job and income that, in the long run, would provide the means to pursue advanced education at university level.

182  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts Lexington students grew up pursuing academics. Though subject matter knowledge represents a potential for action, it is not action itself (Korthagen, 2004, p. 80). There is no direct connection between knowledge, attitudes and action (LaPiere, 1934) in spite of claims of the opposite (Ajzen, 1991). Whether competencies can be converted into action and expressed in behaviour depends on circumstances (Caprara and Cervone, 2003; Korthagen, 2004, p. 80). We can therefore not be sure whether subject matter knowledge will be converted into appropriate knowledge, for instance in the pedagogical situation with pupils. This depends on the values, ideals and beliefs of the individual and on how the context supports or inhibits personal conceptions and ideas about being a teacher. Print (1993, pp. 10–19) defines the ‘hidden curriculum’ as a form of implicit learning that is not part of an intended or planned curriculum. It adds to the existing curriculum by bringing norms, intentions and values into schooling. The explicit and the hidden curriculum is the totality of student learning associated with the school. Truly, the hidden curriculum and implicit learning at Lexington taught students that their feelings did not count as important indicators for being human. Conflict between students resulted in severe disciplining of both victims and offenders. Normal adult behaviour, such as engaging in intimate relationships, was promptly eliminated. During their teaching practice in primary schools, most Lexington students applied a pedagogy that centred on transmitting knowledge to pupils. Did this lead to a belief that attention to pupils’ feelings was unnecessary? Following Korthagen (2004), it is questionable whether student teachers will develop competency to show empathic understanding of others, for instance their pupils, if they do not receive this themselves during their training. A purely subject-matter-centred curriculum teaches us that the natural place for a teacher is in front of the blackboard behind the teacher’s desk, explaining things for the listening, passive audience: the pupils. Yet, data in this work point in slightly different directions. It is too simplistic to view institutional power as solely repressive. Students did develop apathy as a defence against a totalitarian social order, but they also developed resistance in order to maintain a positive self-image. In some ways they rejected the college. They found ways of skipping the co-curricular obligatory activities and stayed in class to study. Some escaped through ‘gate C’, the secret hole in the fence, so they could leave the compound unseen. Others met with their boy- and girlfriends in the narrow, dark alleys behind the dormitories, in spite of the risk of being expelled. Discipline, at some level, remained external. The social relations with the institution were emptied, but students did not exist in a vacuum. They received a response to and social reflection on their actions, although it was mostly a sanctioning and negative response. Their learning processes were subtle and centred on withdrawal, oppositioning and resistance. Students learned hard work, but also something else. New versions of professionalism were constructed, as the cases of Frederick and Maggie demonstrate.

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  183 Frederick: losses, life-mending and reconciliation Frederick was an older 28-year-old Kikuyu student who lived with his family among Kalenjins in Rift Valley, until the ethnic clashes in the 1992 national elections drove him and his family away from their land. The family lost all their possessions, and Frederick finished his secondary school degree only by chance. Due to lack of finances, Frederick then had to wait five years, until his younger brother had finished secondary school, before he could begin his higher education. Frederick enrolled at technical college, but had to drop out after two years as he failed an exam and his family had no money for him to redo the academic year. Initially, Frederick did not want to become a teacher, but having lost hope of another educational opportunity and because this was the only education his family could afford, he applied for TTC. Gradually, he came to like the profession, though he spoke of his early days at college as ‘not unhappy, but also not totally satisfied. But I came to like it more and more’. Frederick categorised himself as a serious student, who restored his broken life through his college stay. He thought of himself as one of those people at college ‘who are mending their lives; trying to find a foundation after a long struggle; putting up the broken places.’ Frederick focused on the positive aspects of being a student teacher and tried to ignore the institutional humiliations. Being seen as a role model and someone to whom other students could turn made him feel valuable and treasured: FREDERICK  Here,

it’s like a second home to me, because I have a lot of friends. Nothing stresses me up. You know, there are some things, which you don’t need to put in your mind, because they’ll just disturb you. Now if we talk about the food here, it is not the best. But if you put that in your mind, you’ll just starve. That will not help you. All my classmates come to me for advice for this and that. I have to help them and I don’t even have free time to study anymore! (Interview)

Frederick felt he got a second chance at a point in his life where all other opportunities had fallen through. He felt he had entered a progressive track towards something meaningful in life, when he became admitted to TTC, and said that ‘God has been very graceful to me. I just find that my things fall in place.’ Frederick came to think of the profession as something supernatural, but also a concrete way of sustaining his life economically. He spoke of teaching as ‘a call from God’, which had now been ‘turned into a profession’. For Frederick, teaching came to represent a highly personal mission, as well as a possibility to earn a living: FREDERICK  Me,

I feel I am in both. When I come into class, I have to like the children. But for me both are there. Also the remuneration part. You want to do good so you can get more money and then continue to doing good! Me, I feel I am a teacher; that is a call in me.’ (Interview)

184  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts Classroom observations revealed that he related to pupils with an empathetic and emotional attachment style: FREDERICK  The

key to success is you have to be free to your pupils. They have to have access to you when they are in need. You have to make them not fear you, for instance make them like you, so they will ask for help or ask questions. To be a successful teacher you must put yourself in these pupils’ shoes. You [the teacher] can even read their mood changes. You have to focus on the individual child, not the whole class. (Interview)

Frederick’s empathetic teaching style illustrated, how he had developed intrinsic motivation for the teaching career, though this motivation was cultivated gradually and started with a decision about making the best out of the given possibilities in life: FREDERICK  I

had to be at peace with becoming a teacher. Options are there, but the time you had to spend on the other options [is not there]. There comes a certain time in life where you have to be satisfied. I have learned not to dwell on the past but concentrate on the future to make it better. … A teacher is a society maker. (Interview)

Frederick’s story illustrates how structures do not influence human beings solely in deterministic ways. Rather, people act within the frames they are given and try to mend their life possibilities according to constructs of meaning and significance. Frederick’s life track through TTC was a story of professionally moving from ‘teaching as the last resort’ to becoming ‘teaching as a calling’. Frederick was one of the few students in this institutional culture who experienced not only internal motivation for teaching, but also thought of teaching as a mission. Having lost hope for all other life tracks and having experienced serious losses during his childhood and youth made him grateful for receiving a second chance to achieve a formal education. He was able to treat institutional discipline indifferently, possibly due to his age and difficult life experiences, and more so than younger students, towards whom he felt protective. Difficult ruptures in his past personal and educational life story created a sense of tolerance and altruism towards other people. He found free rooms in the institution where he could live life as he pleased. He bribed the guards to let him leave the college during afternoon hours, smoked cigarettes on the sports field and became drunk at weekends. This provided him with energy and motivation to sustain the insensitive environment. Maggie: social decline, dawning acceptance and personal collapse Maggie was the firstborn child in an ethnically mixed family of an Akamba father and a Luhya mother. The father held a high-ranking position with the

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  185 police in the criminal investigation department. The family lived a relatively wealthy life in Isilii, a better part of Nairobi, in a self-contained house with water, electricity and TV, but had to move to a rural area after the family’s economic collapse due to Maggie’s father’s sudden death. The social decline of moving to a rural area represented a psychological and cultural shock to the family. The father had secured Maggie a study place at the prestigious Kenyan Institute of Mass Communication, but he passed away a few days before the fees were paid. The family was left in crisis, which precipitated a negative development in Maggie’s life path. A failed intimate relationship with a married man, who turned her down, contributed to her increasing feelings of hopelessness. Before commencing TTC, Maggie became pregnant and was a single mother by the age of 20. She kept her child, which was left with her mother, a secret, but confided in me to talk about how her life collapsed with the death of her father: MAGGIE  I

was so disappointed and disillusioned. I just had to start from zero. I didn’t expect anything of the sort. It had never hit my mind. I knew he [my father] was sick, but I was sure he’d recover … There was a time after my dad passed away, in most of the weekends I’d go drinking because I found everything so hard for me and because I knew my mum could do nothing for me. That would keep me throughout the weekends. So, I became a drunkard … Then I met this man. But after he turned me down, I got disappointed more and more. I also confabulated even doing suicide seriously. (Interview)

Four years later, the family had, however, amassed sufficient funding for Maggie to enter TTC. But she did not want to become a teacher, and struggled throughout college with her dislike of the profession: MAGGIE  When

I got a chance, I was forced to come to this place. It was never my dream that one day I’ll be a teacher. It never hit my mind. I had to do it, because there was no other option. The first year, I had hatred for teaching. I used to tell my colleagues that I’m just being forced to do this and I’m not ready for anything of the sort. (Interview)

Associating with other students at college nevertheless changed her aversion into a lukewarm acceptance of the teaching profession. Maggie felt that ‘It was hard to come to terms with not doing what I wanted’, but that in the course of her time at college, she ‘learnt to live with everything that came on my way.’ After some time, Maggie experienced a renewed respect from the villagers at home. This changed her attitude towards the teaching profession as something that might bring a positive value to her life: MAGGIE  Back

home, the respect that I am given, you know they’re already calling me a teacher and I am not [yet]. These guys respect me for who I am. Sometimes they find it [the profession] is a calling. So I said that

186  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts [I] am not going to let them down because they’ve really supported me and giving me that motivation. Calling me a teacher gives me that motivation to know that if I go back to the village I will serve them the way that they want. (Interview) Maggie felt that joining TTC was a crucial turning point on a life track that initially took a course towards depression and despair, but turned out to give her a second chance: MAGGIE  It

[TTC] has really saved me, because after my first TP I did nothing to the children that I was teaching. I was just going there because it was a requirement. My partner [classmate] would look at me and wonder, but I told him, ‘This is not what I wanted to do’. Then after summer holidays when college opened, I just said I just miss going for TP. I am ready for it. I want to teach. This time I want to do my best. (Interview)

Maggie experienced a dawning liking of teaching, and this created further positive relations with the pupils. She described her life at college with the children as ‘having fun’ and stated that the pupils liked her and wanted her to be their teacher. Though Maggie had seemingly changed course in acknowledge teaching as a possible career, she was mostly motivated by status and prestige. If, later, she could move on to other, more lucrative or prestigious life opportunities, this might reduce her interest in maintaining teaching as a career: MAGGIE  I

feel, it’s like I am ready to be a teacher because that’s a career that I’ve taken. I am ready for it. People at home give me respect. They term me as a teacher. I am proud of that. The only people who see us as failures are the students from the university. I still believe that maybe if I’m not a teacher, if not advanced, I’ll do something else. (Interview)

Maggie’s story illustrates how some students who experienced teaching as a second chance came to develop acceptance though not intrinsic motivation for the teaching profession. New friendships and peer socialisation at college, emotional back-up in the form of admiration and respect from the home environment, and experiencing professional success made Maggie consider the teaching profession as a possible life career that could sustain her, at least economically, in the future; however, she never merged completely with the profession during her years at college and did not come to see the profession as a personal calling. Using too much psychic energy on keeping up with an authoritarian and disciplinary structure, and being a student who questioned the college environment, her dawning teacher self was buried in internal struggle. She claimed freedom and independence, but received control. In one of the last interviews with Maggie, she told me that ‘what we are doing here [at college] is not fair, I despise it here.’

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  187 Shortly after the last interview, Maggie tragically passed away after an illegal pregnancy termination at a roadside clinic. She was distressed about whether the college would discover her pregnancy and send her home on the one-year forced maternity leave, which would mean failing the final exam and probably never getting her P1 certificate. She had no money for a proper surgical procedure in a country where terminations, at the time of this fieldwork, were illegal. The college system in which she was inscribed forced her to make a choice that put her life at risk, since continuing with the pregnancy would most probably have cost Maggie her future college degree. Paths to professionalism at Lexington Frederick’s and Maggie’s stories are evidence of student lives lived in a hierarchical and authoritarian college culture, demonstrating the diversity of student life in a system that curtailed individual freedom and critical thinking and replaced it with control, anxiety and pressure. Yet the two stories also bear witness to how some students, due to the pressures of the system, developed cultures other than that transmitted by the system. Similar to Willis’s (1977) students, students at Lexington brought their experiences, values and norms into college, where they manifested as an alternative curriculum. However, in contrast to Willis’s study, the Lexington socioculture produced more positive effects in students than mere resistance. Students developed a sense of cohesiveness with their fellow students and came to different forms of acceptance of the profession, as reflected in both Maggie’s and Frederick’s stories. But these stories also signify how the particular culture stopped students who received their P1 certificate from this institution from fulfilling their potential as teachers. Frederick is an example of a student who, in spite of the regressive institutional culture at Lexington, found a way through college that positively influenced his motivation for teaching. Maggie’s case, however, demonstrates the shutdown of an independent spirit in a system that did not provide much space for individualism and free criticism of the system. Wummit: teaching as a calling Many Wummit students were Akambas by ethnic origin, being admitted from the catchment area around the college through the second and third intake. Wummit valued the community and therefore admitted more students from the local area. For people in the Akamba homeland, Wummit represented one of the few higher education alternatives to a life based on the subsistence economy. Like other TTCs, Wummit valued good academic performance and often appeared in the top-ten list of best academically performing TTCs in the country. The list was heavily debated in the staff room, but feeling connected and developing social responsibility was more important than academics. Unlike other TTCs, markers of student participation in co-curricular activities were clipped to their P1 certificates to demonstrate

188  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts competence in areas other than academics. Students lived in social spaces filled with personalised relations with tutors, the administration and fellow students, yet the social communities favoured dominant matrices that were founded in ethnicity and religious values. The number of students who described their relation to the teaching profession in terms of being one of inner motivation was remarkably higher at Wummit than at other TTCs. For instance, many Wummit students spoke about teaching as ‘my profession’. Teaching for them represented a highly valued enterprise and a life mission that was foundational to society. For them, teaching was about developing a child’s moral habitus, not purely academic qualifications: JOEL  The

best thing about being a primary school teacher is that you are the second role model to that young child after now the family. You are the person that creates the next family situation to that learner. So everything you do matters a lot. The teaching profession determines the character and the morals and every other human aspect of that young child. The most important part to any teacher is to be the best example to that child. (FGD, second-year male student)

This particular understanding of teaching professionalism emerged from an organisation characterised by social capital. Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of social capital, elaborated earlier, has occupied an influential position in the international debate. Putnam (1993, pp. 35–36) also emphasises social capital as ‘an accumulated stock of networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit’, and thereby adds a collective dimension to Bourdieu’s definition. According to Putnam, social capital is not only advantageous to single individuals at micro levels, but also to groups and whole societies at meso and macro levels (Svendsen, 2013). Social capital exists between people and belongs to more than one person. The aforementioned definitions of social capital are, however, tied to sociological categories such as positioning, distinction and economic advantage, and not to human categories such as sense of connectedness, empathy, respect, support and helpfulness (in contrast to what human beings do not admit to, for instance inhumanity, egoism, social blindness, etc.). Social capital at Wummit was not only about being well-connected as an individual, but about being inclusive and reaching out to others in a social space of mutuality. The collectively owned capital was about becoming a decent, self-sacrificing individual, and the institutional credit was feeling a sense of belonging to people and the place, as reflected in the story of Anett, whom we met in Chapter 3. Anett: decent morals, Holy Spirit, and doing good Inspired by a teacher at her primary school, Anett decided to become a primary school teacher despite her stepmother’s advice to become a secretary.

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  189 Anett’s father supported her in her wish, since ‘it is good to have several ­professions in one house’. Anett was the third-born in a polygamous Kisii family. Initially, she opted for a private TTC founded by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, since it was compatible with her own religious background, but she found it too expensive and felt forced to apply for a governmental college. She was comforted by experiencing that Wummit, where she was admitted, favoured religious worship. After the first semester she was elected student councillor and ‘librarian’ by the other students and tutors. According to Anett, this was a prestigious task, since the person chosen is ‘someone who is respected by the other students’. Feeling well accommodated, her feeling of connectedness with the institutional culture increased: ANETT  The

tutors are very understanding. I like them very much. They are role models. But not all students think of them as role models. But here at the college we are given the freedom. We can go and worship outside college during weekends. (Interview)

According to Anett, institutional discipline was a necessary circumstance to conform students to a culture of mutual obligation: ANETT  There is no school I have gone to that the deputy has a peace of mind

[and has good relations] with the students. Deputies are just most disliked. Once you don’t get in contact with her [the deputy principal] in a negative way, you don’t see her negative sides. The only way you can change that negativity is just do good, then the rest will follow. Me, I see her as a mother. Her duty is to be harsh. If she is lenient, the students will take advantage of her. Just walk in her steps and you are safe. Just follow the rules and regulations as they are, and you are out of trouble. (Interview)

Feeling emotionally accommodated by the institutional culture provided acceptance for the more authoritarian aspects of the place. For instance, female students were not allowed to wear trousers inside the college, even though many of them were freezing and trousers were the only option to stay warm. In spite of this and many other events, I seldom heard Anett speak critically about the institution. Institutional norms seemed subjectified into personal values: ANETT  We

[female students] don’t put on trousers. The female students are not allowed. It is not written, it is just when you are here, you are told. To me that is OK. Because you see if you allow trousers, with these Kenyan ladies, the way they are coming up, you would see funny, funny dressing that would not be pleasing the eye. You have to dress decent. The only thing they [the administration] could have allowed is in the evening, when we go to class; we could have been allowed to put trousers under the dress, because it is very cold. But the rules, we just have

190  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts to obey them, because it is just a short time we are here. If you have to put on a trouser, then put on a decent one. (Interview) The college’s identity as an ‘inclusive institution’ that accommodated physically impaired students increased Anett’s motivation to study. For Anett, the teaching profession became a personal calling connected to her growing desire to altruistically assist others in an almost religious way: ANETT  The

teacher profession is very important. It is a calling to me, a continuation of my work in church. I have to lead people and help them to go the right way. Some other [students] say, ‘Let me do it for a while, at least I will have something, maybe when life gets tough, I will have a certificate’. But me, I want to practise. The second-year [students] and those physically impaired students, they give me strength to go on. (Informal conversation)

Anett’s story illustrates how a student who was originally interested in the teaching profession came to develop a deeper, inner motivation for the profession with ‘teaching as a calling’. Teaching for Anett represented a supernatural power to uplift the moral standards of new generations. There were two main reasons why Anett entered a life path in college that was not only compatible with the college’s line of moralisation, but also enhanced her anchoring in that special version of teaching professionalism that was encouraged at Wummit: First, like many other Wummit students, she developed far more emotional relations with tutors than students at other colleges did. She accepted tutors’ roles of being both caring and disciplining parents, and also student’s roles of being perceived as ignorant and immature minors. Her personal upbringing in a rural area with traditional family patterns possibly taught her acceptance of gender, age and generational hierarchies. Second, she was approved by her fellow students and tutors as an appropriate caretaker of the high-status position of student councillor. This did not, however, make her feel proud; rather, she thought of it as a possibility to altruistically improve the environment and people around her. Teaching became a noble task elevated above worldly goods. Being confronted daily in class with less capable physically impaired students put her own struggles into perspective. The presence of impaired students gave her a feeling of being in a community, where she should be grateful and do her best. Paths to professionalism at Wummit Not all students at Wummit developed professional identities like Anett. Not everyone felt teaching was an altruistic task, nor were all concerned about whether their future role was as a moral guardian and social supporter of pupils. But being mirrored while at the same time idealising important others, such as personal tutors, provided better opportunities for developing a balanced and mature personal self. This, in return, provided more psychic

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  191 energy and surplus for turning the attention away from personal benefits towards doing good for others, for instance pupils. The holes in the safety net in the Wummit welfare system were smaller than at other colleges, and fewer students fell through. However, Anett’s story also demonstrates how students who were subjected to institutional moralism learned to adhere to a new social order, and to internalise and accept the positions that they were placed in by the institution. Global: teaching as a last resort, passing time, and a second chance Global was slightly more expensive than the public colleges, since admission fees were higher and students had to pay various expenses alongside tuition. But admission to Global was considerably easier. Once payment was made, a student could commence studying with a day’s notice, even if it was midterm. In some cases, students with secondary grades slightly lower than what was permissible under the strict admission requirements at national TTCs were admitted. Masses of students from the poorer, rural areas in eastern Kenya listened to a heavy rotation of radio advertisements about Global, which inspired them to rally to the place and be admitted. But Global students had varied social and personal backgrounds, and motives for studying. For some, teaching was the last chance to get an education, a terminus, due to a conflictual life path with losses and unfortunate incidents. For others, teaching represented a second chance in an educational career when they had been unable to take up their first choice of schooling or had dropped out of another track. For another group, teaching was a way of passing time or passing through an education, either because of ignorance or indifference, or because this college was easily accessible and affordable. Most students were enrolled by their parents; some did not even know they were starting a teaching career before they were brought to the place. For most Global students, teaching was not a positive choice based on personal ideals and values, but something that happened incidentally without too much reflection. For those students, teaching remained an externally motivated issue. Most of them, nonetheless, developed some kind of liking or acceptance for the profession, fuelled by positive experiences with peers and the college. Many came to see teaching as something that might assist them in the future as a stepping stone to something else, as the cases of Eliza and Arnold will illustrate. Yet there was also another story present at Global, in which students built confidence and realised their potential during their studies. Exposure to another reality developed them as persons, changed their personalities and helped them overcome stereotypes. Global represented a sociocultural space with a minimum of guidance. The administration believed in free spirits and market mechanisms, but it was not an empty space. Students were given room for self-exploration in an otherwise regulated society, characterised by firm hierarchies of control and authority. From a distance, students had watched modernity sweep over some parts of the population in Kenya’s larger cities.

192  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts Global represented a space for reflection. There was less ­regulation than at other institutional teacher education settings, and less social control was exerted compared to many students’ backgrounds in rural areas, where a tough life in the fields correlated with an occupied mind. Fewer students passed the P1 exam, and fewer students received distinctions at Global compared to most national TTCs, yet their studies brought them something else: a critical attitude towards and consciousness of the world around them. Students struggled to keep up appearances. Compared to other TTCs, they emerged in a variety of youth cultures, and their identification with modern symbols was legalised by the institution. They were permitted to display the uncompromising and sometimes transgressive marks of adolescence’s search for identity. This made them competent in ways other than those permitted in other colleges’ social spaces (see also Dahl, 2014b, 2015a, 2020b). They actively negotiated their experiences of self as a way of being in the world (cf. Wenger, 1998). Students were subject to many and conflicting impulses in what seemed a virtually free space, free of governing forces as described by Fjord Jensen (1998). Some of them developed critical awareness due to the reflection this instigated: WASHINGTON  I

enjoy being here. I’m glad to be struggling for that water. I’m also happy to bathe down at the river there because it’s kind of an adventure. I’m also glad to be missing some meals, so it’s kind of an experience. Maybe in life I’ll not get a chance to experience these things [later]. CHRIS  You see, I’m a happy man! That’s what freedom is doing to me [at Global]! No one is pushing me. You know everything is there at the public institutions. They have resources, land, everything … [their] sport, library, compound is spacious. But then again, you might have the best resources in the world, but if you don’t use them for the purpose they are used for, it will not make you a better man. If you are in a place where you are limited because of lack of resources, it stimulates your thinking capacities and you become more resourceful and creative, because you think outside the box. PATRICK  College has really helped me. One area is creativity. I have used the skills I have learned on how to overcome those situations and how I can go about making something rather than buying in the shops. I have learnt to improvise something, or I can help the children to deal with situations. (FGD, second-year male students) In the process of ‘conscientization’, a person becomes consciously aware of his or her context, and is hence empowered with knowledge and skills to function as a critical agent in society at large (Freire, 1973). The students’ stay at Global made them critically reflect upon their position and action possibilities. They became action competent through the reflection initiated in the system. Action competence implies ability to address problems at both individual and collective levels based on experience, vision, commitment and insights, ultimately targeting societal change (Jensen and Schnack, 1994).

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  193 This means being able to shift perspectives, which Global students felt their experience at college effectuated. The knowledge they gained was a kind of transgressive know-why, where the necessary order of college life, and thus society, was questioned. Everyday experiences of struggling with the scant resources were transformed into abstract and creative thinking, and into the will to change the difficult living conditions. Most of these competencies did not, however, address the underlying political and social causes of, for instance, poverty, suppression and ignorance in schools, but made students learn to deal with the complex problems of everyday life in concrete ways. Their action competencies were contextualised and situated in the cultural context (cf. Nygren, 2009) of non-Western schooling. Students constantly negotiated dominant concepts of teaching, schooling, personal selves and becoming (see Dahl, 2012b). The academic level never reached that of some other TTCs, but maybe more importantly, stronger selves emerged, as the following interview excerpts illustrate: NICODEMUS  Confidence,

it has really built it in me. Now again it has made me drought resistant because if I may can go outside there [at Global], where things were worse, then I can cope [with things in my hometown]. ARNOLD  Otherwise I pray that Global continues to build people with potential like it has built one in me. BARACK  Global has to a great extent changed my personality. NICOLAS  I have been exposed here. It has helped me to become a good social person. Without Global, I couldn’t have become who I am, to be a good teacher. (FGD, second-year male students) Conscientisation, action competence and potential were in various ways built into students, as the stories of Eliza and Arnold illustrate. Eliza: fun, pleasure and self-realisation Eliza was Akamba by ethnic origin and lived with her mother, who was an accountant and divorced from Eliza’s father, a wealthy now-retired district commissioner. Eliza, whom we met in Chapter 4, was troubled about which education to choose, since her mother wanted her to do accounting at a business college and her father wanted to pay for a clinical officer degree. She decided to enter a TTC in order to not choose a side, yet teaching also presented an escape from university studies, which she thought of as too demanding and something that would not leave space for her free-time activities with friends: ELIZA  I never had time to think about teaching. Teaching was the last option.

If I could be doing everything, then I’d probably do accounts, but most likely it [accounting] was overloaded. I really liked the accounts, but now coming out there is like one [parent] wants you to do accounts, another wants you to do medicine, but all along I did not choose any of them. I will not fail any of my parents. (Interview)

194  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts Other students referred to Eliza as high class. She had money and opportunities to enter a more lucrative and prestigious education than teaching. Once, she was even a candidate to be an airline hostess for Kenya Airways. Teaching for her was the beginning of a life track that possibly would not be the last station in her career. Her reflections about a career were not about material necessities and privation, since these were assets she already possessed. Rather she felt guided by hedonistic calculations about how life opportunities and pleasure could be maximised using the minimum of personal investment and time: ELIZA  I

feel I have to do accounts one day in my life. I learn about the accounts, and then I can be handling teaching and accounting at the same time. Then I go on maybe advancing to [university] education degree. But clinical, it’ll need most of your time. By now you would have switched from education, of course you cannot combine the two. (Interview)

Eliza spent the years in college with friends, going out at weekends, and making life as pleasant as possible: ELIZA  Last

weekend, we went to town. No, actually I went alone. They left, I don’t know where Lillian and Pauline [my friends] were going … I can’t remember. It’s very rare you find us inside the school [college] during weekends. I find myself lonely hanging around. I will go out, have fun, and then in the evening I came back. So, after I was through with Wallet [restaurant] I went to Horn Bill [nightclub]. I was with my boyfriend, we were having fun, music. He’s the one who invited me. He wants us to get to know each other as open as possible, but I’m not going to let him anyhow. Just fun, refresh my mind and then I come back. If it were not for music, I could not be going out. I like dancing and also singing. (Interview)

Though she considered teaching a possibility, her life visions and dreams about the future by the end of her studies did not centre on furthering her education, but on the qualities of a life in the better part of the Kenyan middle class with independence and a nuclear family life far from traditional values and rural subsistence economies: ELIZA  I

have so many dreams! In my lifetime, one of my dreams is to drive. I love driving. After I am through with the exams, there are two things I must make. I do driving, and I do computer courses, too. So, that’s when I’ll be through with everything, and I’ll be able now to buy a car and drive for my own, not to look for someone to drive me. My husband, I must love him, and he must respect me. But for now, I don’t want to settle and get married. (Interview)

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  195 In contrast to many other student teachers, Eliza had numerous other career opportunities than teaching. Yet, she came to think about teaching – though not in primary schools – as a possible life career. Her better economic position was reflected in her dreams about the future, which appeared confused, but also signified a person who possessed choices and an elevated social network that permitted her to have different dreams to most of her fellow students. This meant that she probably would not terminate her career as a primary school teacher. Full of self-confidence, she set off to explore the possibilities of life in a context of opportunities and fewer restraints than at home: ELIZA  Teaching,

I really like it. I have the feeling that I’m a teacher. But at a higher level, that’s what I mean. Off course, PhD also. But part-time things. Maybe like when you have a vacation, you just don’t go home and just rest all the time. At least find a time to be busy with something. The rest of the time I will be spending on the teaching field, yah, or this other beauty therapy, or accounting. But of course accounts, it needs a mind which is fresh, so I may be going for beauty therapy. To set up myself a business. A beauty salon, I love it. I really love beauty, something to do with beauty. I love it. You know, us ladies have so many needs, like we need a dress and so on. (Interview)

She approached teaching in the same indifferent way in which she had lost two expensive cell phones in the month before the interview, bribed the matron to get a better dormitory, chose boyfriends according to their ability to party and pay, and paid other students to do her homework. She thought of pupils as annoying since they disturbed her, but still managed to convince others about her superiority in the field of teaching: ‘Pupils are bothersome’, Eliza tells me on the way out of class three, where she has just taught an English lesson. She has been walking up and down the long rows of about ninety pupils with a stick in hand, swinging it to remind the pupils about the possibility of slashes over fingers or backs if they are not quiet while studying their textbooks. The students are assessed by tutors from the college. In Eliza’s assessment book a tutor writes: ‘Only the sky is the limit for you!’ (Observation) Yet, college gave her an emerging awareness of an alternative order of life, in which money, independence and self-awareness merged in new realisations about her overall mission in life: ELIZA  You

shall not always come back in the house [and say], ooh I saw, I saw, I need. Men of today, they don’t need those people who are like always ‘give me, give me’. They also need some help. KARI  So men don’t want such a person at home?

196  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts ELIZA  No.

Even our director keeps on telling us, ‘There is no room for housewives in Kenya. They’re clearing housewives.’ He tells us if we fail to work hard, there is no room for housewives. You need your own money. Of course if your money is to be controlled by a man, eeh, that’s sad. But if you’re so idle in the house, you’re not able to buy. You should have some money, to buy for this, and this. And if it’s end month and you don’t have money, he can give you money, and you also to give him some money. You go and do the house shopping together. My boyfriend, he does washing by himself. (Informal conversation)

Eliza joined college with the attitude that teaching would pass the time and enable her to conduct her studies in the most enjoyable way. She was a student with many other resources, especially material and social capital, in the form of her father’s money and a social network with connections in the upper strata. She had a boyfriend who had a technical college degree and knew people employed in white-collar jobs and the ministries. Yet, she had no sense of what teaching could bring her. She took up teaching on a sudden impulse. She dumped the university degree with the casual attitude of a resourceful person who could choose among several positive alternatives. She knew her educational choice would not be definitive and therefore chose something that gave her space for enjoying the pleasantries of life to which she was accustomed. Still, Eliza’s journey through TTC was a personal one that shaped her experience of teaching as a positive and not indifferent part of her life. Arnold: hardship, ambitions and looking for a better future Arnold was a Luo from a small village in Western Kenya, where he lived with his five siblings and their single mother. The mother owned a small shop at the wooden stall market and sold homegrown maize and beans, and basic household items. From this small income, she managed to put together money for Arnold’s education without the help of his father, from whom she was divorced. The father had no income and was a ‘drunkard’, according to Arnold. Arnold initially wanted to study accounting, but his mother could not afford this since it cost eight times the fees of a TTC. Other students feared Arnold for his position as a prefect and an academic officer during teaching practice, envied him for his good marks, at the same time looked down on him for his puritanical and disciplined behaviour and did not see him as a dominant agent and role model due to his upbringing in a rural environment with subsistence economy. At college, he had only a few friends. He avoided what he coined ‘immoral’ behaviour between male and female students. Mostly he kept to himself and his studies. During the last semester, his meal card and mattress were confiscated, and he was excluded from attending class since he could not manage to pay the college fees. The dean took pity on him and let him stay in the dormitory until his mother managed to sell two of her three cows to raise capital for the tuition fee.

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  197 Studying at a TTC for Arnold was not a goal in itself, but became a means to something else – assisted by feedback from the system: ARNOLD  Most

of the tutors are my good friends, because they were also impressed by my work. They even asked me, ‘How many marks did you get in the KCSE [Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education]’. Then the tutors told me, ‘Then you don’t belong here. Then what do we need to do? You are here now. Work hard and prove to these people that you are not supposed to be here.’ So you see I realised that my marks were far much above average to these people. So they told me that, ‘You should work hard and move even higher than this; you don’t need to stay and drag behind [in TTC].’ (Interview)

Arnold’s good academic performance and relations with tutors caused distance between him and other students, whom he during teaching practices in schools consistently called his ‘staff’, positioning himself as ‘head teacher’. These labels probably contributed to distancing him from other students, who were afraid of Arnold, presumably due to his close relations to teachers at teaching practice schools and his constant ordering around of other students, telling them that ‘this is what you need to do’. The other students envied Arnold for his close relations to tutors: ARNOLD  She

[external assessor] was very much impressed with what she saw in my class. Afterwards those people [other students] started asking me, ‘Why? Why the other time you had the visitor of the college coming to assess you, they didn’t assess us?’ (Interview)

Arnold belonged to the group of students discussed in Chapter 4 called ‘the principled ones’, who linked teaching ideals with higher moral ground, Christianity, and puritanical behaviour. His life was based on traditional, collective values that centred on keeping order, mental discipline and hard work. He often spoke of other TTCs in the rural areas as exemplary places of teacher education and as places where ‘things are in an orderly manner’. In rural TTCs, according to Martin, people were ‘more friendly’ and ‘all together’, and classes and the institution were ‘very much organised; there is no noise’. At Global, however, there was always noise in class, cell phones ringing, loud music and a variety of activities going on; therefore, Arnold always prepared his homework in his cube and mostly kept to himself. His pedagogical approach was most of all about maintaining discipline and silence in class, and training pupils to adhere to principles of hard work, defined by the teacher: ARNOLD  There

was a time I used to tell pupils that ‘if you remain disciplined, children, then you pass, but if you remain indisciplined [sic] automatically there’s no even need of me being here in class, because definitely you’ll fail’. I tell them the importance of being disciplined.

198  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts So I didn’t have any problem of indisciplined cases. There was no noise in class. They were trained. So I just like the pupils that we teach right now, since it was a disciplined class and it was a very hard-working class. … You need to tell them the positive aspects of them being disciplined. (Interview) He distanced himself from caning, not because of its lack of pedagogical value but due to its political illegitimacy: ARNOLD  It

is very clear from the Teachers Service Commission that learners are not supposed to be caned. So you see, that’s a very well-stipulated policy. So if you’re found caning a learner, then you’ll land into problems. Maybe you’ve caned a learner; then all of a sudden the learner falls sick. Then you face problems. Using a very mere stick, that’s not a problem. So, the last approach is to cane them. (Interview)

His dream for the future was to leave the teaching profession and enter another career. It was therefore important for Arnold to score high enough marks during TTC to get subsequent employment so he could support his future studies financially, and he worked hard on the books. Arnold’s story shows a student who entered TTC due to lack of funds to take up a university career. Teaching for him became a stepping stone. Arnold did not adhere to the common youth culture at Global and was feared, scolded and made fun of by other students for his good contacts with tutors and his ideas about bodily discipline. He reacted by withdrawing into a defensive position, where academic performance became the only measure of the value of studying teaching. Being in a place with loss of control, he reacted by becoming inordinately perfectionist and performance-oriented, at the same time demonstrating a large superego, criticising the students around him for immoral behaviour. He felt, though, that he was influenced intellectually and emotionally by exposure to another reality: ‘It [TTC] has hardened me, so it will give me the real picture of what I can do out there [in schools].’ Yet, concurrently, the place also ‘confused him’, being exposed to other values. This increased his sense of authority and resistance towards what he saw as lenience and added to a construct a professionalism building on more discipline. For him, it became of major importance to ‘ensure that the rules are followed, strictly followed’. Arnold worked hard on his studies and arrived at the interviews with me in full college uniform on Saturday mornings when other students were dressed in more relaxed jeans and T-shirts. His career ambitions were fuelled by the realisation that the P1 certificate allowed entry to some university degrees subsequent to TTC. He was convinced he would proceed in his education, but his disadvantaged socioeconomic background left doubts as to whether this would be possible.

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  199 Paths to professionalism at Global At Global students became somebody in spite of, but maybe also because of, the lack of institutional discipline, as witnessed in the students’ accounts presented. For some students, like Arnold, the potential laissez-faire character of the college culture resulted in strengthening of self and defence towards the elastic rules and disintegrated control. For students like Eliza, the freedom provided space to explore potential destinations as she proceeded through college life. Both Arnold and Eliza developed some kind of contextualised action competence, which arose within the specific context of Global as they learned to deal with the complex everyday problems in concrete ways. For many students, the culture at Global strengthened their psychological core and ability to resist external pressure. They learned to navigate in chaos, in systems without absolute principles, though the lack of control and support from the system also meant lack of protection for vulnerable agents: female students and freshers. But female students learned to depend on each other and developed clever tactics to fight back. Students learned resistance against hardship such as dealing with the scarcity of resources materially and psychologically, and used twice as much time on teaching practice as students from other TTCs. This potentially helped them as future teachers in rural areas, where they would be confronted with a complex of problems related to poverty, disease, hunger, large class sizes, lack of teaching materials and resources, many orphans and political instability. They felt ready to be ‘makers of the school’ in a challenged context with little national assistance.

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts The work presented in this book demonstrates that institutional processes and sociocultures of an institution – in this case, a teacher education institution – influence students’ processes of becoming in various ways. This chapter explored the significance of schooling at a student level by exploring how, in each of the three institutional cultures, students were provided possibilities for becoming somebody at a communal level, and how this affected their psychological construction and shaping of personal selves in the various institutional sociocultures. The chapter then explored individual life paths and professional orientations at the subject level in and through spaces of possibilities, and how this affected students’ orientations as teaching professionals. Two critical questions need to be answered. How did institutional culture make students become somebody; i.e. what is the link between the institution and the students as a collective group? And why did students in a specific institution not all become the same; i.e. how did students in collective college cultures also become someone? To answer the first question, we will turn to the analysis of students as a group in the institutional socioculture. The analysis of college cultures identified a variety of sociocultural universes with different institutional logics and habitus, emerging in different ways at the subject level as local universes

200  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts with distinct meanings, practices and significance. College cultures constituted different organising themes and rationalities that influenced students in distinct ways at the institutional level. In some college cultures, students felt genuine participation as they shared visions about teaching with other students, the teaching staff and the administration. Wummit was such a place, though learning and becoming was also restricted at Wummit and took place within a highly regulated space of possibility. Not all actions and ideas were welcome, and students’ explorations of themselves and their future profession were limited by both smooth and striated boundaries of autonomy. Being in social space meant being embraced and mirrored, but also controlled and disciplined into being less critical subjects. In contrast to this, the learning space at Lexington was hierarchical with little student participation. The common space established between students and the institution was that of getting good grades so that the institution could claim superiority over other colleges, and for students to move beyond and especially away from the teaching profession. Being thoroughly regulated in a bureaucratic culture such as that at Lexington meant being given little space for personal development; the research material indicates that students here arguably suffered a kind of collective depression. At the private teacher education institution, Global, students had a high degree of participation, yet freedom was gendered. Student communities evolved frequently and gave them opportunities to position themselves in a somewhat regulated and authoritarian context. Global provided free space for their personal and professional searches, but not all students benefitted. Some – mostly female – students felt violated and occasionally abused; others felt lost as there were too many possibilities to decide for themselves; some reacted against the perceived immorality and excessive freedom, and compensated by studying more; and some felt misused by stronger others in the wake of value dissolution and lack of control and civil society. Identity searches at Global emerged in a space that at first glance seemed smooth and only slightly striated; students had many possibilities to decide for themselves during their stay at college, and this seemingly free space created possibilities for smoothness such as spaces with open-ended lines of flight and movement rather than striated spaces with fixed entities or objects (following Deleuze and Guattari, 2005). Yet the space was also striated (see Lagermann, 2015, p. 578), since freshers and many female students experienced being ill-treated and abused due to their positions. The two spaces – striated and smooth – coexisted interdependently within the same space and were woven together. Female students’ and freshers’ possibilities to move, change and become in new ways were both expanded and limited as part of the actual social and pedagogical encounters in everyday life practice at college. However, the different student communities helped students to find an identity and feel that they belonged with the others, and this helped them as professionals as they became critical of the world around them.

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  201 This book has presented an organisational analysis of TTC cultures, where power, authority and discipline, but also morality, local logic and cultural phenomena, were focal points. The analysis demonstrated that power played a significant role in how social life and everyday life was constructed and unfolded. But to what extent did power and discipline occupy students’ minds? Table A.10 (Appendix) indicates that students did not regard feeling oppressed and decided over as a major challenge; what they seemingly perceived as major challenges were instead matters related to the fulfilment of academic demands (40.3%) or having sufficient financial resources to study (37.6%) (n = 3,145). Though many students were enrolled in thoroughly bureaucratic and, in different ways, authoritarian structures, very few of them (2.4%; see Table A.10) seemingly perceived power and disciplinary issues (as measured through the statement ‘adjusting to the rules and regulations at TTC’) as a major challenge. One reason might be that students simply accepted other challenges, such as lack of funding or academic troubles, as more stressful than being disciplined by moralism, tutors, a deputy or strict college regulations. This would mean that students seemingly grew accustomed to college life. But a more troubling analysis may take another direction: In a Foucauldian view (1977), students apparently became accustomed to life at the institution as they became positioned as passive college subjects, tacitly internalising and objectifying college rules and regulations as positions that were made available to them. But, as the analyses of the three different cultural universes illustrate, students did not comply with discipline in an instrumental and mechanical way; rather, they critiqued, resisted, and disavowed college culture and formed their own culture and identity in a dialectical way, though structures and bureaucrats also tried to position and criminalise them as Other (Phoenix, 2006, 2008). The students’ selves emerged as discursive productions (Davies and Harré, 1990), and some of their positions became constructed as more legitimate than others, using gender, ethnicity, sexuality and heterogeneous values as distinctive categories (Butler, 2002, 2004). The second critical question to be answered is: Why didn’t all Lexington students become depressed and academically ambitious? Why didn’t all Wummit students internalise teaching as a personal, supernatural mission? And why didn’t all Global students become pleasure-seeking hedonistic individuals, for whom teacher education seemed a waste of time? Ruptures in periods of transition during students’ individual life tracks through college and before TTC had a crucial effect on their professional becoming. But it was during the years at college that the puzzle of becoming and eventually desiring to become a teacher and feeling belonging to the profession fell into place. This study made it possible to follow a number of individual students closely during sixteen of their twenty-two months’ stay at TTC. The case stories of Frederick, Maggie, Anett, Eliza and Arnold demonstrate that, although institutional contexts mattered in how students became somebody, students also became someone through more personalised processes,

202  Becoming somebody in institutional contexts following life tracks that had already started before they entered college, but which were reinforced, redirected, ruptured and transformed. All five students changed their life course in a more or less positive direction towards acknowledging the teaching profession as something they might, could or would use in their future life, as they moved along the path of teacher education. The change was accompanied by an intrinsic feeling of being subjected to a higher calling – as Anett’s and Frederick’s stories demonstrate – or externally motivated by the prospects that a teaching certificate might bring in the future, such as being a stepping stone to something better, as Arnold’s and Eliza’s stories express. Difficult life circumstances forced some students into teaching. Frederick and Maggie initially felt the pressure to reconcile with teaching since no other educational possibilities were available in their life track. They both, on different grounds, developed a dawning acceptance of becoming teachers. Other students experienced the studies as a way of passing through time in a joyful way away from ancestral restraints in a world of newly gained freedom, as was the case with Eliza. Though few students initially aimed for the teaching profession, a large number of them experienced a positive movement in their motivation towards being and becoming teachers, some more so than others. Overall, analyses of the five students’ individual life trajectories before and during college illustrate how students met their future profession with certain expectations, which were changed into personalised and other, often more positive, versions of what teacher professionalism was during their stay at TTC. But the study also demonstrates that these institutions are not rigid, determining structures, but rather initiate a diversity of professional paths to becoming at the individual level. In other words, although institutions constructed student homogeneity, students were also individuals who operated, negotiated and constructed unique meaning in their lives within the frames they were given. Students’ becoming was tied to the socioculture in which they grew up. Students became ‘somebody’, and it was possible to trace characteristics of each student and their professional identity to the type of college where they studied. But they also became someone because of how their individual life tracks through college unfold in practice. Their professional identities were therefore influenced at various levels by their contextual surroundings and different spaces of possibility, but in less deterministic ways than sociology predicts. They actively participated in constructing their learning settings through the different ways they participated in the field – for instance, the ways they became members of youth groups, enjoyed intimate relations with the opposite sex, enjoyed their freshly won freedom in the nightlife of Nairobi, prayed with fellow students in new social communities, subordinated themselves to tutors and hard studies in class, or turned their backs on coupling and ‘immorality’. These communities of practice affected students’ ways of thinking about, their feelings towards and their motivations for becoming teachers (Nasir and Cooks, 2009) on their individual trajectories through college. Their different figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998a) of being student teachers

Becoming somebody in institutional contexts  203 at colleges initiated development of professional identities. As we saw in this chapter, these ranged from internal to external motivations for entering the teaching profession, and from seeing teaching as a cognitive task to perceiving it a social, political or personal mission that provided them with different forms of meaning and a sense of direction in life that, for some, had been lost. Lave (1993) reminded us that ‘Persons acting and the social world of activity cannot be separated’ (p. 5). In other words, phenomena and students’ everyday practices at college cannot be analysed in isolation from the sociomaterial world of the activity in which they live. Students became somebody as collective groups in the context of the culture in the particular place in which they grew up as professionals. But they also became someone in singularis (i.e. as individual persons), embracing the professional tasks in highly personal ways and having diverse and personal feelings about being teachers due to personal orientations and trajectories in the socioculture of teacher education. However, the point is that these individual pathways were also influenced by the institutional culture, and could also be traced to an institutional level.

6 Fields reconstructed Teacher education at a crossroad

At the core of this book is an argument that teacher education institutions are different and provide different sociocultural spaces for becoming and learning. They constitute different ‘sites’ for professional becoming and the shaping of the professional self. The work presented in this book contributes to an understanding of the ways in which institutions – in this case, teacher education institutions – are shaped by and shape particular ways of becoming and being. Overall, the work provides a framework for rethinking teacher education as a nexus of the personal, the communal and the institutional. It helps us to understand teacher education as something that constitutes a professional self that is imbricated in place: It consists of multiple layers and ties between the person, the institution and the different groups and communities that emerge in the different places of teacher education institutions. This chapter puts into perspective the stories, places, people and processes of becoming presented so far, and discusses the insights gained from them in a larger perspective. What does it mean for teachers and their profession in Kenya that they are growing up in educational cultures of diversity, conflict, power and values, where they are normalised, subjectified and – ­sometimes – freed? Teacher education in Kenya, and other parts of the world too, is undergoing changes in times of shifting political stability, economic globalisation and new cultural demands and needs for growth, welfare and human development. But there is also an increasing harshness in Africa, where education has long since become the new mantra and a good for those with money, connections and resources, and a burden and drain for those without. In this new harshness, education is an apparent good believed to provide welfare and opportunities, yet such opportunities are often shown to be an illusion when resources do not allow for schooling beyond the primary or secondary level. Fuller (1991) described the Kenyan education system as a weak, ‘looka-like’ – ersatz – modern state system. But TTCs were not weak dependents of the state system; on the contrary, they were strong, in many ways operating independently of government manoeuvres. Kenya today may be understood as a liberal political economy, which, according to Gamble (1979, p. 4) may be described as ‘a means for reorganizing the state sector in a period of recession, increasing spending on maintaining order and reducing it on certain kinds of welfare’. Such a reorganisation was rolled out at the three

Fields reconstructed  205 TTCs in various ways, with each college acting as a strong miniature state within the larger society. The state, in this case the institution of the TTC, was rolled back in some areas and rolled forward in others, in the same way students experienced more and another form of control and sanction in the two public TTCs and new forms of segregation of liberal power in the private one. The ambivalence of modernity (Bauman, 1991) did not provide educational opportunities and welfare to all. Education institutions have practised welfare and optimism but have also segregated, differentiated and excluded, as previous studies of schools and education have shown (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Reay et al., 2011; Willis, 1977). The answer is never clear-cut, and new initiatives such as private teacher education institutions, which arose in Kenya in the new millennium, challenge modern ideas of making schooling, in which performativity, hierarchy and authority often seem to be given pride of place. The chapter starts by exploring education as a societal phenomenon and then links it to issues of educational politics and the privatisation of teacher education. It continues by summing up the insights about processes of becoming in the different college cultures in the light of college cultures’ rationality, morality and positioning of students, and does so by focusing on the categorisations and moral grounds of what were considered ‘good students’ in the three different college cultures. Then the themes of person, profession and pedagogy are discussed in relation to three important perspectives on processes of becoming a professional teacher – respectively professional ‘judgement’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘belonging’ – and how these aspects of professionalism are cultivated in the different cultures of teacher education.

New times, other lives: policies in practice Teacher education institutions are not isolated islands with their own curricula and subjects, but part of the cultural continents in which they are integrated. Education is a materialisation of a culture’s way of living and not just a preparation for living it, according to Jerome Bruner (1996). But schools also represent something else. They are places for producing the core meaning of self or identity among young people, according to Wexler (1992, p. 155): ‘The main thing about schools is that they are one of the few public spaces in which people are engaged with each other in the interactional work of making meaning’. What is emphasised in the quotation from Wexler is that schools, and colleges too, are public spaces and, as such, also places where public ideologies about development, innovation, maturity and advancement are reflected upon and potentially implemented. Colleges are mirrors of society and of contemporary global change – from local communities to international policymaking – and are therefore not isolated islands. At the same time, they are places for cultural cultivation, identity politics and state sublimations. Turning to the student level, cultural cultivation is not only a matter of cultural repression or emancipation in the socioculture of

206  Fields reconstructed teacher education. Students actively protested, avowed, aligned, applauded and insisted on living different forms of student lives in the diverse cultural civilisations at the colleges where they were enrolled. Their lives in college were anchored in specific, cultural, material and historical circumstances and realities, to paraphrase James, Jenks, and Prout (1998), which sometimes operated independent of state ideologies. But education institutions are in crisis – in Kenya as elsewhere. The crisis is one of public welfare, of socioeconomic divergence, and of resource deficiencies, environmental challenges and changing political environments and priorities in global economies. These crises are reflections of broader, fundamental problems in society, which makes education an illuminating eye into society (Stambach, 2000). But this doesn’t mean that the sole responsibility of the education institution is to reflect society. Education institutions have a task. Critical education argues that education must emancipate and socialise people into being political subjects who are aware of what happens to them and around them. In this view, education must make people learn the rules of the game and increase their ability to question these rules, to cite Hellesnes (1975, p. 17). Although Hellesnes’s work is rooted in a Scandinavian educational philosophy emphasising democracy, the question is whether Kenyan teacher education enabled students to act upon what happened with and around them, or whether they became subjects to be dominated and controlled. The syllabus for primary education in Kenya is ambiguous in this sense, and phrases like ‘social responsibility’, ‘social equality’ and ‘actively work towards’, which are written in the syllabus for Kenyan primary education (Kenya Institute of Education, 1994, pp. v–vi), give the impression of choice, democracy, and Western welfare philosophy. According to the aim of Kenyan teacher education, students shall develop ‘commitment and competence’ during their teacher education, so they can ‘develop the child’s ability in critical and imaginative thinking in problem solving and self/expression’ (MOEST, 2004, p. ix). As mentioned, scholars claim that educational aims in Southern countries are often informed by the international community and donor-driven demands to fulfil certain imposed conditions, for instance Western standards for education (Dore, 1997; Tessema, 2008; see ­Chapter 1). Scholars argue that national governments in the South have limited control and little sense of ownership over international education agendas (­Grigorenko, 2007; Samoff, 1999). Yet, the Commission for Africa (2005) declared that teachers play a substantial role in reaching the ­Education for All agenda, and teachers’ professional development should therefore be emphasised (Moon, 2007). In spite of these sunny intentions, ample research indicates that classroom practices in African school settings continue to suffer from stifled and stilted hierarchical, teacher-dominated and science-oriented teaching practices (Hardman et al., 2009, 2011; Pontefract and Hardman, 2005; Tessema, 2008). But the Southern schools’ seeming failure to ‘live up to standards’ for good teaching portrayed in the educational literature does not account for the fact that many schools in the South have to implement school agendas

Fields reconstructed  207 and educational policies developed in contexts far away from the realities of Southern school life. Political visions concerning principles of democracy, participation and human rights in educational institutions, the Education for All agenda (WCEFA, 1990) and the broader aims of Kenyan teacher education were all only somewhat effective. This point resonates with many other studies in the field: educational policies are never unconditionally and unproblematically realised at the level of practice, but change and are distorted on their way through the system. Cultural paradigms and conceptualisations about students and educational practices transform as they ‘move’ through cultural layers in, for instance, education institutions like TTCs. TTCs are systems of power that, in different ways, normalise, position and categorise students, and shape them as professionals. One reason might be that street-level bureaucrats such as tutors and administrative staff – especially deputy principals – play substantial roles in how each college develops techniques and regulations as mentioned to ‘salvage service and decision-making values within the limits imposed upon them by the structure of their work’, following Lipsky (1980, p. xv). Many of the street-level bureaucrats at the colleges, such as tutors, deans and principals, claimed to have high service ideals, which they used to pursue ‘holistic and quality teacher education’, as it is written in the national curriculum for primary education in Kenya, stressing both curricular and noncurricular content. Yet, street-level bureaucrats’ everyday practices often seemed destructive to this task, and TTCs were brutal enterprises that enforced state policies on students with various outcomes. Tutors and administrative personnel probably also compromised their personal ideals and values due to structures in their work – or, rather, their values and norms were changed as a consequence of working in the specific sociocultural structures. Following Lipsky (1980, p. xv), giving up on tutors, deputies, deans and principals would, however, leave students to others with possibly even less concern and interest in teacher education ideals. It would mean giving up the narrow areas in which public workers at Kenyan TTCs have tried to make a difference or where some progress could be seen. Yet the problem of converting national ideologies about teacher training in Kenya, as elsewhere, persists. According to Fuller (1991), legislative and administrative organs are segregated from the civil society in Kenya and possibly elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Some literature suggests that African education becomes a parody to fulfil symbolic and integrative purposes (Fuller, 1991; Levinson and Holland, 1996; Menzel, 1993). Claims have been made in the literature that what is often overlooked is that democracy is not new to Africa (Bennaars, 1998). According to Bennaars, most traditional communities in precolonial times practised democracy in a functional manner, talking ‘till they agreed’ (Bennaars, 1998, p. 26). With colonialism, ­African pedagogy became ‘a pedagogy of difference’ (Bennaars, 1998, p.  37). Gender differences, for instance, were enforced and new forms of dominance from foreign, colonial governments, and Christian religious education arrived with missionaries and European authorities. The colonial pedagogy of difference advocated male, white, Western, Christian superiority and

208  Fields reconstructed puritan principles in front of the barefoot, black, illiterate masses (­Bennaars, 1998), similar to those segregation processes originating from the bureaucratic structures of the TTC. Boys’ academic education was encouraged ahead of girls’, which was confined to learning domestic skills. Traces of ‘moralistic’ segregation can be found in today’s teacher education in Kenya, where, for instance, strong gender ideologies advocate for student immaturity and puritanical behaviour, and where academic (nature) scientific knowledge is favoured over learning practical, pedagogical and social skills. Processes of othering (Phoenix, 2006) and gender and ethnic distinctions (Butler, 2002, 2004) were structural conditions particularly for female students in patriarchal contexts. Bennaars’s answer to this is a humanising pedagogy that ‘respects and uses the reality, history, and perspectives of the learners as an integral part of educational practice’ (1998, p. 47). As Kung suggests (cited in Bennaars, 1998, p. 49), these ‘“integrative human convictions” need to be supplemented by new ideas and insights … not just freedom, but also justice; not just equality, but also plurality; not just toleration, but also ecumenism; not just brotherhood, but also sisterhood; not just coexistence, but peace’. These Freirean-inspired words (Freire, 1973) may seem hollow and highly ideological, but the South and Africa in particular are settings characterised by strong differences and many conflicts – conflicts that arise from poverty, political instability, piracy, land grabbing, ethnic exterminations and migration, nontransparent economies, international sanctions, deadly pandemics and diseases such as AIDS, Ebola and malaria, social problems such as human trafficking, child soldiering and slavery, and monolithic international business corporations. This calls for educating a critical mass, paraphrasing Jensen and Schnack (1994), that can envision alternative actions, rather than being provided with only limited skills- and subject-oriented knowledge, which fosters choosing and doing within a given frame. The Kenyan government stresses education as a ‘vehicle towards the achievement of national cohesion and national integration’ (Njeng’ere, 2014, p. 3), which is ‘bound to be a silent social revolution following in the wake of rapid modernization’ (Kenya Institute of Education, 2008, p. viii). However, as mentioned, modernity proved to be a less fixed destination then intended (Geertz, 1995, cited in Moore, 2005, p. 4). Yet there is no need to regress to disillusionment or depression. Some scholars have described teacher education as ‘a quick fix that got stuck’ (Coldevin, 1988, p. 5), but this book shows that teacher education does something to someone by bringing them somewhere (else). Democracy cannot be forced. It needs to be developed, nurtured, polished, taken care of and cultivated, and needs to inscribe local settings and local needs. Implantation of a Western curriculum in settings where it has not evolved has unpredictable consequences (cf. Melhuus, 2002; Moore, 2005). Privatisation of schooling in the South is a critical theme in recent literature, but as restricted to a small body of work on schools rather than teacher education. The impact of privatisation on teacher education is discussed in the following. At the heart of Bourdieu’s work on higher education is a

Fields reconstructed  209 desire to expose higher education as a powerful contributor to the maintenance and reproduction of social inequality (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Naidoo, 2004, p. 457). Did privatisation in Kenyan teacher education contribute to further social inequality? In Kenya, privatisation of teacher education was made possible in the beginning of the zeroes. This resulted in an explosion of TTCs, which a decade later outnumbered public teacher education institutions by more than five to one. The debate in the literature focuses on issues of access and social justice in private versus state schooling, and much literature is critical of privatisation of schools and other education institutions in the South. According to Macpherson et al. (2014a), privatisation has led to a consumer-oriented thinking of schools and education, to increasingly being opened up to profit-making and trade, and to agenda-setting by private, commercial interests (see Macpherson et al., 2014b; Oanda et al., 2008). Nussbaum (2010) too warns about the silent crisis in education in which nations discard skills as they ‘thirst for national profit’ (p. ix). According to Nussbaum, arts and humanities are being downsized everywhere, which destroys the fundament of democracy since it removes the source of critical thinking and keeps us from learning about each other. This means that we cannot cultivate our ‘inner eyes’ and imagination about others, and this might lead to less tolerance and progressive action. Following Nussbaum, education should not be a tool for economic growth, since economic growth does not invariably generate better quality of life. Yet examining a teacher education culture in the private sector, such as the case of Global TTC, demonstrates that profit-based, private teacher education was not necessarily rinsed of important content; nor did it lead to nonhumanised curricula and heavily disciplined, controlled and unimaginative students. Instead, the cultivation of an environment without strong hierarchical disciplinary structures at Global combined with motivated role models (such as the DoC and the director) taught students to become critical and imaginative. Private schools, or, rather, private teacher education institutions, may develop in less uniform ways than public schools or public teacher education institutions do – ways that offer both possibilities and restraints. Literature about privatisation of schools in the South often focuses on the negative consequences. For instance, concerns have been raised about how privatisation of education leads to mental shifts in how people think about what performance is in education and who education is for (Macpherson et al., 2014a). Private schooling in the South has been criticised for not meeting the demands of all poor students and for serving niche markets (Sommers, 2014); for causing differentiation of students (Bhatta, 2014; Sommers, 2014); for becoming a standard for what ‘quality schooling’ is (Brehm and Silova, 2014); and for exploiting teachers’ working hours and families paying tuition (Rolleston and Adefeso-Olateju, 2014). In Kenya, privatisation of higher education has raised concerns about the diminishing role of promoting social equity, and the enforcement of a narrow definition of quality (Oanda et al., 2008). Yet data from some studies indicate that private schools, not higher education, in Africa might provide better

210  Fields reconstructed supervision and managerial monitoring of teachers compared to governmental schools, even if private schools work on market principles and have fewer economic resources (Rolleston and Adefeso-Olateju, 2014). A study from Nepal (Bhatta, 2014) indicates that private schools rank higher in public opinion than state schools. Private school teachers are considered friendly and regular in their attendance compared to publicly employed teachers, who are considered qualified and experienced but reluctant to teach, uncommitted and irresponsive (Bhatta, 2014, p. 71). These studies illustrate that it is necessary to include a wide range of factors when evaluating the imprecise term ‘education quality’. Private schooling, for instance, and thus also private teacher education, may offer alternative possibilities for inclusion and for institutions to orient themselves in other and potentially positive ways towards their ‘consumers’, the pupils and students, than public schools do, which may be crucial in contexts that are sometimes paternalistic, bureaucratic and hierarchical. The question of accessibility and social justice in the private sector is a challenging dilemma: Tuition fees might be higher at private institutions, but access via exam grades might take a more inclusive approach. For instance, at the private TTC in this study, students were occasionally admitted with a lower grade than the minimum officially required (C-plus) for entering a public TTC, which was valuable for students with lower grades, who often came from poor families. Ninety-five percent of Kenyan student teachers (n = 3,421) came, as previously mentioned, from rural areas or smaller towns, and the majority of them shared a parental background with little or no education beyond primary schooling. The private TTC thus provided better access for less well-off students to an educational opportunity that would otherwise be outside their reach and may in this way offer opportunities to increase educational access for students with less-advantaged backgrounds. Oanda et al. (2008) argue that Kenyan private higher education defines education quality narrowly. As mentioned, there is little consensus among scholars in the field about what ‘quality’ in teaching and education is (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Peterson, 2016, p. 4), although there is a tendency to place teachers at the centre of responsibility for the successes and failures of the education system (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Hargreaves, 2000, 2003). But the present study found that private teacher education has a wide conceptualisation of educational quality. The privately operated TTC did not have less quality, but a different quality of education: one with less science but more social science, humanities and possibilities for identity and personality work. Indeed, the private TTC in this study in some senses regarded students as customers and education a product, similar to Oanda et al.’s findings (2008, p. 4); but it also provided entrepreneurial models of education, where something else happened: senses of freedom, and experiences of critical liberation and emancipation, potentially producing other kinds of citizens. Kenyan TTCs had high levels of autonomy to decide about disciplinary measures, class hours, student engagement in co-curricular activities, and most other institutional and everyday practices. Internal forces such as the

Fields reconstructed  211 missionary Christian Board of Governors and authoritative administrative staff only partly played a role in the construction of institutional socioculture. Economic issues, such as students’ access to funding for their studies, played a major role in their everyday lives. For some, it restricted their possibilities for positioning and negotiating what was considered a viable life. Yet the opposite was also true: some students at the private college (in this book) prioritised freedom above access to resources. Remarkably, however, this book illustrates that education institutions’ access to economic capital was not decisive in determining the quality of how the institution shaped the professional self when looking at commitment and motivation for teaching. For instance, the run-down private college in addition gave students autonomy, freedom, creativity and critical consciousness, which might be resources in their future jobs as teachers in hierarchical and resource-deprived primary schools. On the other hand, some of the students from public TTCs learned to navigate in highly bureaucratic organised institutions, while others learned social dependency and attachment. Data from the questionnaire illustrate how students in the private and the public colleges roughly share the same socioeconomic background (see Chapter 1 and the Appendix). The pursuit of fees was a condition for being a student teacher regardless of social class, ethnicity and gender. Interestingly, payment of fees was, however, not an individual but a collective matter. Students shopped for fees in their social networks. Extended families struggled to pay fees at the cost of other necessities. In other words, many students could, independent of their social background, enter higher education such as teacher education. Poorer students with lower exam grades often settled at private teacher education institutions, where they had the chance to mingle with financially advantaged students, who chose this educational possibility because of its impressive façade and fewer restrictions, for example around institutional control. Introducing private education into teacher education in the South does not, therefore, necessarily produce more inequality and restricted access to education, but may provide education opportunities to disadvantaged and less privileged students. It also provides possibilities of ‘doing teacher education’ in different ways and with different outcomes. This shift might introduce other values and practices to the increasingly standardised practices and ideologies of doing teacher education that have developed globally.

Cultural universes, categorisation and issues of professional becoming The social institution in which most children and young people spend the majority of their waking hours is the school. Schools provide important arenas for children as they grow up. This arena is social and cultural and thus important, since learning is social and comes from our experience of participating in daily life (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Here they learn to negotiate social relations produced by the educational context (Phoenix,

212  Fields reconstructed 2008, p. 21). But learning is not something that individuals do that ‘has a beginning and an end; that it is best separated from the rest of our activities; and that it is the result of teaching’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 3). Also not for student teachers in Kenya, who live and study at teacher education institutions, which are boarding schools. This means that learning and becoming are ongoing, integrated in all aspects of our everyday lives, and take place both inside and outside the classroom. The concept of situated learning, proposed by Lave and Wenger (1991), suggests that learning involves a process of engagement in a community of practice, yet this metaphor does not explain how the processes of developing self and identities in these communities occur (Phoenix, 2008, p. 21). The research material presented in this book demonstrates that teacher education in TTCs does something to students’ professional selves and to how they come to think of themselves as teachers. They develop professional missions about teaching that become integrated in their life trajectories. In other words, teaching for them becomes part of a possible life career that might bring them a viable life – some more so, however, than others.

Photo 6.1  Lunch break.

Despite differences between colleges and students, TTC cultures produced layers of uniformity among students. But students also internalised institutional norms and practices differently, as apparent from the ways their social communities developed and how they, at an individual level, followed different tracks or paths to becoming teaching professionals. Students and staff were entangled in constitutive forces of discursive practice about moral purity, Christianity, sexual abstinence, bodily discipline, academic performance, gender and ethnicity, yet they were also persons capable of exercising

Fields reconstructed  213 choice and will, drawing on Davies and Harré’s (1990) recognition of human selves as discursive productions. Students’ experiences with the profession, self and identity were expressed and could be understood through the categories available to them in discourse, yet they also actively negotiated and rejected dominant and available discourses, and constituted their own learning fields, for instance in the informal learning space with peers during their free time (see also Dahl, 2014b, 2015a, 2020a). College cultures in many ways resemble what Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘orchestras without choirmasters’, where students are subjects made to play in time with the compositions of the dominant group. Despite this compelling metaphor of total control, a central finding of this study is that resistance was not a deviation, but rather the norm. It was not just a small fraction but the vast majority of students who resisted, and they did so at all three of the colleges presented in this book, though in different ways. Silently, through conforming to institutional control by keeping their heads down, yet ruminating about the unreasonableness that they felt hit them, or physically by escaping through holes in the high wire mesh around college. Overt, through resistance while dressing in modern clothes, listening to loud pop music on their cell phones, and complaining to each other and to me about the institutional discipline and insufficiencies. Teacher education institutions are unique cultural societies with diverse possibilities for becoming for students. The analysis shows how social categories such as class, gender, ethnicity and race intersect and are mutually constitutive, intertwining in different ways within each of the three college cultures. Phoenix (2006) argues that we can only understand what it is to be somebody by looking at those social categories in which subjects become positioned, and looking at them in combination. An intersectional approach can make us recognise how ‘everybody is simultaneously positioned within social categories such as gender, social class, sexuality, and race’ (Phoenix, 2006, p. 22). Students cannot be perceived solely as isolated individuals, since their processes of becoming are social and systemic, which requires ‘the analysis of differences, as well as communalities, within groups’ (Phoenix, 2006, p. 22). In other words, students lived and experienced simultaneous positioning in their everyday practices. This meant, among other things, that their chances for academic success were, to a great degree, different according to how they were marked by social categories, and how this marking operated in the different contexts of teacher education. At Lexington, for instance, ‘good students’ were those who kept to their books, performed well and ignored their adolescent urge to engage with each other and the opposite sex. Social, ethnic and gender background seemingly was a minor issue in this bureaucratic institution. Lexington represented a colour-blind society working in accordance with new dominant, racist ideologies. Colour-blindness stresses quality and ignores differences to avoid discrimination (Hervik, 2001). But by ignoring differences, colour-blindness discriminates through the demand for homogenisation and

214  Fields reconstructed standardisation of different groups of students (Hervik, 2001, p. 41) who, for instance, have different backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity and social class. Colour-blindness is ‘a racial ideology based on the superficial extension of the principles of liberalism to racial matters that results in “raceless” explanations for all sort of race-related affairs’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2015, p. 7). The process of fabricating ‘sameness’ at Lexington positioned students differently, some students experiencing social problems related to abuse and issues with paying fees (often students with parents from lower social classes with less economic means) and early pregnancies (female students and therefore gender related) were thereby prevented from fulfilling standards of academic excellence and made Other. They were categorised as different from the minority of students able to live up to college regulations and who were therefore considered ‘good students’. This positioning was associated with power and therefore not neutral (Phoenix, 2006). Since Lexington was situated close to the capital city, it was a multi-ethnic institution, but the principal and dean were Luhyas, and this meant power struggles between the administration, staff, student council and students, since none of these groups possessed the ethnic majority by numerical proportion. ‘Good students’ at Wummit did not display their sexuality, but were submissive and (for female students) reticent. Academic grades were less important. Even substance abuse was forgiven. In the Wummit culture, students were not always treated in uniform and standardised ways; instead, they were often forgiven, included, embraced and spared punishment, even for serious offences, giving primacy to individualised treatment favouring certain students based on their ‘colour’ and other categories. However, certain issues were not taken lightly: Gender and morality, and sometimes also ethnicity and class, were often intersecting categories, such that being a female student who was sexually active meant being positioned as a bad student. Students who were not Akambas, and thereby in opposition to the majority of staff, students, and – most importantly – the deputy principal, were often considered lower class. These students (and sexually active, mostly female, students) were therefore constantly interrogated and positioned as illegitimate, Other, and sometimes even criminal. ‘Good students’ at Global possessed economic capital to pay their college fees, yet this meant coming from a social class that permitted them to do so. They displayed self-assertiveness, and had new cell phones and money to burn on trips to Nairobi. The colour-blindness in the Global TTC society was not about equality in the sense of equal rights, but about possessing equal opportunities for different outcomes, as in the American version of equality (Hervik, 2001). In this perspective, a person’s abilities and talents will match his or her social and economic capabilities (Sleeter, 1992, cited in Hervik, 2001, p. 42). In the Global TTC society, gender, ethnicity, and class came to matter. As mentioned, economically poor female students became marked as inappropriate, deceitful prostitutes when they exchanged sexual favours for food or college fees; lack of resources made male students fight

Fields reconstructed  215 in the dormitory over space, and developed into ethnic clashes which made students think of other ethnic groups as Other. The exclusive, small group of so-called high-class female students marked the rest of the numerical majority of female students as illegitimate through their expensive lifestyles, by consuming expensive cell phones, new clothes and trips to nightclubs in Nairobi. Students from lower social classes were displayed and intimidated as poor and rural when high-class students paid them to do their homework. Tutors and the principal abdicated responsibility for protecting vulnerable students and withdrew to the staff room and their offices. Equality among students sometimes meant survival of the fittest, where each person seemed master of his or her own fate, and social welfare became a private matter. Street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980), such as tutors and administrative personnel, played major roles in (re)producing the categorisation of students through either their active or passive engagement, when carrying out policies of education at a street level in classrooms, whether through interaction in the classrooms, in the offices or through everyday contact with students. In many cases, personal ideals and practices demonstrating a commitment to some, but not all, students were sacrificed to relieve pressures of an intense workload, inadequate resources and prejudices and uncertainty. Tutors, deans and principals had developed conceptions of their work and their ‘clients’ (the students) to narrow the gap between their personal and work limitations and the ‘service ideal’ (Lipsky, 1980), in this case national policies about providing holistic teacher education. But in some colleges, there were single individuals, such as committed deans or caring principals, who had not given up their ideal conception of their jobs; however, these individuals were often outnumbered by ignorant or authoritative staff, which made college a battlefield of opposing struggles. As previously discussed, though, the clients, that is students, did not totally acquiesce to the routines and devices that confronted them in the institution. However, some key patterns seem to have emerged to provide a broader outline of how we may come to understand teacher becoming in a Kenyan, and possibly a broader Southern, teacher education context: Reprimanding, controlling and moralising teacher education societies, such as Lexington, that are devoid of social dialogue tend to produce submissive and depressed subjects. Sometimes subjects (i.e. student teachers) comforted each other, but at other times, suffering took place in solitude. Teacher education cultures like Wummit, with some level of social reciprocity between subjects and across hierarchies, but where subjects were moralised according to categorisations of being ‘good students’ (Dahl, 2014b), tend to support an embracing yet noncritical understanding in student subjects. The power technologies at stake worked in a subtle manner to intensify silent control over student bodies. In private teacher education societies like Global, where rules and institutional discipline are substituted with freedom, money (or the lack of it) and autonomy, students are seemingly given space to vent their frustrations. At Global, freedom seemed restricted by material deficiencies, but some students learned invaluable experiences of struggling with the lack

216  Fields reconstructed of resources, for example because they had to find money for fees. Liberalism, however, is not freedom: it is just another form of ‘conduct of conduct’ and government through freedom (Dean, 2002). Dean (2002, p. 129) reminds us that liberal government is total since its programme of self-limitation is linked to the facilitation and augmentation of civil society. Each TTC represented a diversified culture, where subjects did not become the same persons, and gender, ethnicity, race and class played a role in subjectification processes. For some – often the young men – their position in these cultures represented a world of unlimited choice, chances and freedom; for many of the young women, the experience was double-edged. They were often exposed to offences and abuses by stronger and more experienced subjects in a context where power was related to economic ability, male authority and exercise of physical and symbolic violence. But female students were not victims; instead, they learned to use clever manipulation to gain personal merits, for instance the attention of a tutor or access to food, mattresses, or meal cards in exchange for homework help, companionship or sexual favours. Students were simultaneously losers and winners and differentially positioned in their everyday life, yet they were also positioned differently in the different college cultures of TTC.

Trajectories of person, profession and pedagogy Teacher education in Kenya is directed by books, classrooms, teachers, lectures, students, curricula, study plans, exams, evaluations, staff meetings, employment processes and forms of administration. It is driven by a Western-inspired, standardised curriculum concentrating on science, performance and hierarchy, but with other sociocultures, symbols and norms behind the façade, causing other forms of professionalism to surface. Teacher education in Kenya, as elsewhere, is not exclusively an organisational phenomenon, as we have seen in the previous chapters. It is also an institutional and societal phenomenon. It is a culture imbued by the westernised versions of the bureaucratic Protestant work ethic in one of the most Christian religious and Catholic corners of the world. It is an academic performative culture based, in particular, on cultural capital; a moralistic culture working on social capital; and a liberalistic culture working on economic capital, to use Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of capital as human values and assets (1986). How did students, at the personal level, learn to practise professionalism in these college cultures? How might their processes of becoming from college translate into practical, pedagogical processes in their future positions in schools? This study demonstrates that student teachers, tutors and TTC leaders were not passive recipients confined to and determined by hierarchical and resource-deprived structures or optimistic, inter/national westernised agendas of schools, education institutions and schooling; rather, they actively negotiated their lives at college, constructed meaning and made decisions

Fields reconstructed  217 and performed within the structures they were given (see Holland et al., 1998b). Viewing them as victims or masters made little sense. They seized and articulated the educational reality in far more diverse, pluralistic and creative ways than educational planners articulate and politicians could possibly imagine. Institutional becoming followed personal tracks, too. Life stories recounting the different ways that individual students made their way through college show how much each trajectory is determined by abilities to cope with, accept, become motivated by and find free space in the institutional scenery, similar to what other research about lifelong learning of teachers has demonstrated (Clark, 2010; Clark and Rossiter, 2008; Dahl, 2015b; Goodson and Choi, 2008; Goodson et al., 2010). Students’ personal life tracks through college show one part of the story about teacher becoming, but do not tell us whether personal potentials and pasts might have unfolded in other directions if institutional processes had not intervened. Social processes and processes of becoming are not easily predicted, since many variables are at play; but the analyses presented in Chapter 5 may offer us valuable insight into a way of rethinking teacher education as the nexus of personal, communal and institutional becoming. We can only make (informed) assumptions about how pedagogical practice for the many thousands of teacher candidates who leave TTCs each year later will evolve in their professional working lives in primary schools. ‘Professionalism’ is, as mentioned, a broad term covering many aspects of professionals’ work. This section therefore discusses professionalism in relation to aspects of pedagogy, the personal self and institutional processes of becoming focusing on three important professional themes that permeate many aspects of teachers’ work: ‘professional judgement’, ‘professional responsibility’ and ‘sense of belonging’. These concepts are consistently and continuously debated in the pedagogical and professional literature, and may link personal aspects to the profession and the context of becoming. The three concepts are discussed in relation to how they are cultivated and emerge in different cultures of teacher education. The first concept, ‘professional judgement’, is a competence or capacity often mentioned in relation to how pedagogical practice is carried out. There is no commonly agreed understanding of what constitutes professional judgement in the literature, but the concept is often used in practice-related discussions of professional work (Grimen and Molander, 2008) as something that connects theory and practice (Kant, 2005, p. 35). Professional judgement is a concept that highlights the centrality of being a professional and carrying out professional tasks: If pedagogical tasks were characterised by what could be called ‘professional certainty’, there would be a body of knowledge that could qualify teachers to solve these tasks (Grimen and Molander, 2008), and the tasks in a specific profession could be performed in a systematic and mechanical way that could be communicated to others. This is not the case. Professions like pedagogues, teachers, doctors and psychologists, among others, constantly juggle different analyses and

218  Fields reconstructed understandings of how to make decisions and take action in a given situation or to address a specific problem. Situations and problems in professional practice are often characterised by great complexity or, rather, uncertainty as to what is the best practice to employ. Certainty does not exist in professional work, and this necessitates reflections on how professional judgement is learned and takes place, since it is a competence or a capacity that all professionals need to practise to some extent. Being able to make a professional judgement may be more crucial in fragile state systems where there is less structure and less systematic professional support from government agencies and colleagues. In Kenya, many newly qualified teachers enter village schools in remote rural areas, where they are mostly left to themselves, to a handful of teaching colleagues, and thus to their personal, professional judgements. In other words, they become tied to a specific institution and a practice field, in which particular circuits of meaning influence how judgement is developed and performed (Hjort and Weber, 2004). Korthagen (2017) argues that teacher education must build on a more ‘realistic’ approach (p. 393), which include student teachers’ persons, their orientation and affairs (p. 88). Some studies have argued that professional practice and judgement is also cultural and based on figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998b). For instance, Baszanger (1997) described how health personnel in different hospitals in an American setting used different versions of medical practice in their everyday work. According to Dahl (2019a), student teachers’ development of professional judgement in Danish teacher education institutions is closely tied to their personal trajectories through college and to personal acknowledgements of institutional norms and culture, in which institutional standards of ‘what a good teacher is’ is transformed and knitted into the individual student’s professional self. This indicates that professional judgement is not tied to learning skills-based knowledge and pedagogical fix, but rather to developing a conscience of professional and personal judgement that includes the whole person. Being in an academic workaholic socioculture like Lexington seemingly left little space for students to develop professional norms for deciding in teaching, which might be based on something beyond academic knowledge. But more importantly, students became stressed, tired, depressed, unsure of themselves and finally appalled as they regressed under the institutional demands and academic pressure. Psychic energy was used on relating to the pressure and withholding a core of personal integrity. Little ground for exercising professional judgements was held, since this had not been learned at college. Lexington offered little room for personal growth apart from the natural science discourse of performance, hierarchy and evidence. Studying at Wummit meant growing up with social ties and attachments, sometimes comforted but often controlled and adjusted. The culture inflicted norms and standards for ‘good’ human behaviour, but more importantly,

Fields reconstructed  219 categories of ‘misbehaviour’. Students learned to decide based on moralistic norms of what good behaviour was supposed to be. Parent tutors, class parents, ethnic meetings, a good-willed principal and an overinvolved deputy principal provided psychic space for students to be mirrored and to idealise significant others, and thus to develop personalities with strong cores and abilities for feeling empathy for others, which might be useful in future work with school children. But Christian differentiation, moralistic puritanism and institutional discipline for students who could not comply with the moral norms of the place compelled students not to critically reflect on what happened to and around them. Global was an institution that was not academic, not social, and not moralistic. Instead, money ruled the place. But students in this seemingly laissez-faire culture were given space for development. This space provided room for reflection and development of more critical competencies. Students had time to discuss and interact with their peers in age-appropriate and natural ways: to enjoy and become frustrated with life, hindrances and opportunities around them. But there were no guiding parents to support them in their newly won freedom. Their attachments were to each other. They seized the place and their profession in more interactive ways than their fellow students at the two other TTCs in this study, since they were given space for it. Learning to position oneself in the institutional context and the society as a whole, and learning to reflect on one’s role and way of being in this society might be better predictors for undertaking professional judgements, since faith in oneself means not giving in to dominant ideas about what schooling is. The second concept is ‘professional responsibility’, which focuses on ethics in professional work, relating to questions regarding for whom, for what and how professionals are responsible. Solbrekke and Englund (2011, p. 852) argue that responsibility relates to ‘a conception of the moral and social ideas of classical professionalism, in which the meaning of community and solidarity is related to a conception of the “public”’. Professional responsibility means to base choices and actions on aspects related to persons rather than to standardised contracts, financial matters or political decisions. Professional responsibility must therefore be rooted in a genuine professionalism rather than being defined by current governance structures. Professional responsibility is therefore situated in judgement rather than in standardised contracts; it exercises trust instead of control; it is based on moral values and not economic/legal rationales; and it is a relatively autonomous and essential aspect of professional practice and not merely feeling obliged to comply with employers’ and politicians’ decisions (Solbrekke and Englund, 2011, p. 855). Butler (cited in Højgaard, 2015, p. 292) argues that, in a social world, we are exposed to and vulnerable compared to the other (person), since relations – for instance a professional relation – are unavoidable for us, may or may not happen against our will. An ethical vision about responsibility therefore

220  Fields reconstructed includes understanding responsibility as something that is a consequence of ‘relationality’; that is, a consequence of our fundamental connectedness to others (Højgaard, 2015, p. 292).

Photo 6.2  Pupils doing group work in a primary school during students’ teaching practice.

When preparing professionals for professional responsibility, it is therefore important to consider the formative aspects of professional becoming, for instance how institutional norms, functions and social practices acknowledge an individual sense of responsibility. Professional work requires agents who can balance the opposing claims of responsibility and accountability (Solbrekke and Englund, 2011). Individuals who have been controlled, sanctioned or, conversely, left in a vacuum will probably be less likely to balance opposite claims than individuals who have exercised professional judgements, for instance during their teacher education. On the other hand, students who become critical and who can envision alternative action possibilities, and maybe do so in social spaces of attachment and feeling belonging to others, might be better prepared to perform professional judgements that build on ethical visions about professional responsibility as something embedded in our connectedness to others. The point is that different college cultures potentially provide different grounds for the emergence of professional responsibility. The third concept is ‘sense of belonging’, which may shed light on how the college culture produced motivation and commitment for the teaching

Fields reconstructed  221 profession among students. ‘Belonging’ is a concept that may help address teachers’ motivation and emotional attachment, that they feel at home and feel safe (Yuval-Davies, 2006), and that they are emotionally committed to membership of the profession (Davies, 1990), understanding themselves as teachers and feeling a sense of commitment to the teaching profession. ‘Belonging’ contains the term ‘longing’ (Khawaja, 2013), suggesting a kind of desire, drive or call. Feeling ‘called’ to be a teacher (Hansen, 1995) or feeling one has a specific mission in teaching (Korthagen, 2004) are related conceptualisations reflecting the importance of teachers’ drive or positive motivation in relation to the profession. Drive, motivation, calling, commitment – and thus a sense of belonging as a teacher – may be of particular importance for teachers in countries like Kenya, where the professional work is characterised by a lack of resources and challenging working conditions in terms of often-variable ministerial support. Baumeister and Leary (1995, cited in Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2011, p. 1030) describe the need to belong as a fundamental motivation for human activity, but research on teachers has not systematically examined teachers’ sense of belonging in relation to the school where they teach (see Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2011). Meanwhile, some studies have argued that the ability to develop feelings about teaching as a personal, ideal-driven mission (Korthagen, 2004) directs students’ professional undertakings in positive ways. Students developed different senses of belonging to the teaching profession, depending on the institutional socioculture at the specific TTC and on which groups they felt attached to – although individual students’ tracks through college mattered too. For instance, many Lexington students thought of teaching as a stepping stone to something better. Many Lexington students did not see teaching as a goal in itself and had no great desire to become teachers, instead looking forward to completing their exhausting and angst-ridden studies. Wummit students tended to develop an understanding of teaching as a calling and a valuable end goal in itself; Wummit students came to feel that the college was their place and teaching their profession, living in social spaces filled with positive, personalised relations. Global students had a somewhat indifferent attitude when starting their studies, but, regardless of whether they viewed teaching as a last resort, as something they did to pass the time or as a second chance to get their life back on track, their senses of belonging, of fitting in, changed during their time at college. Most Global students arrived at college with an indifferent attitude towards teaching, some of them unsure about their future or disillusioned with their lives, and college became a way of finding a direction in a life that was seemingly going nowhere. There was a degree of homogeneity at the institutional level, with distinct ways of viewing the profession and a certain sense of belonging characterising students situated in each of the college cultures. In the spaces between these broad and generalised categories, students followed individual tracks.

222  Fields reconstructed

Photo 6.3  Pupils from a primary school during students’ teaching practice.

Concepts like professional judgement, professional responsibility and a sense of belonging to the teaching profession are just some of a range of categories that can help in comprehending how developing teaching professionalism extends beyond the mere acquisition of limited scholastic knowledge. Surveying the landscape of teacher education in Kenya, and beyond, different institutional contexts provide different psychological and sociocultural contexts for professional becoming. In other words, living and growing up in cultures like those at Lexington, Wummit or Global not only shapes teachers in different ways, but also provides different foundations for teachers’ processes of becoming and development of a professional self.

Reconstructing teacher education: lessons For many people, particularly in the South, education provides hope and an opportunity for a better life. This book has explored the ways teachers become professionally and personally equipped for the demanding, complex task of teaching children by approaching professionalisation in a different way from that of most previous studies of schools, teachers and teacher education. The focus has been on teacher education in a sub-Saharan, more specifically a Kenyan, context; however, the book’s findings are also relevant beyond this particular context. The book contributes to an understanding of different ways in which institutions are shaped by and shape particular ways of being and becoming that is also relevant to teacher education institutions outside Kenya and the African continent, as well as to life in other institutions, both educational and within other sectors. It tells a story that fights familiarity and does so in ways that are very different from the visions of

Fields reconstructed  223 educational planners and politicians. Teacher education does something else to students other than teaching them skills, capabilities and the use of pedagogy. This book portrays education institutions as organizations that develop their own ways of life and mentalities. They constitute different spaces of being and becoming for students that not only differ in their composition, but hereby produce diverse and layered experiences for their students. In this experience, the individual, the communal and the institutional processes of becoming become intertwined, producing new modes of professional becoming. Among student teachers, the becoming of the professional self is imbricated in place, and in different sites. Throughout their years of study, from entering to leaving a TTC, students change their ways of appropriating and engaging in the teaching profession, for many in a positive direction. Teacher education institutions are home to a variety of college cultures containing different layers and levels that influence students. Students become someone and somebody as crowds, as groups and as persons in each of these different cultural universes. At a collective level, institutional frames demarcate individual spaces of possibility for being and becoming. Students engage in college cultures that may have different logics and rationalities – in this study, bureaucratic, social or laissez-faire, respectively. These are cultures where students become depressed, come to feel surrounded or come to exhibit their professional and personal selves, respectively. Inside these cultures, various groups of students also produce differences in selves based on distinctions between social groups and categories such as social class, gender, ethnicity and various other groupings and positions. Furthermore, students’ individual trajectories through college also signify how their appropriation of the teaching profession occurs, and how their professional self is shaped. At each of the colleges, it was possible to identify a number of overall professional tracks and paths within the institutional culture whereby students appropriated and learnt to relate to the profession. Exemplified by the empirical material, the analysis demonstrated that in a bureaucratic culture, students tended to see teaching as a stepping stone to something else; in a social culture, students came to understand teaching as a calling; and in a laissez-faire culture, teaching for many students represented a last resort, a way of passing time or a second chance to obtain an education. However, the ways in which students realised the tracks available to them was also highly individual. This book has explored the social and cultural variety in college cultures within teacher education and how it affected student teachers’ processes of professional becoming. We saw how each teacher education institution constructs specific circuits of meaning, logics and moralities that can be compared only by emphasising the contexts and rich details of social and cultural life and its artefacts. Insufficient resources, bureaucracy, historical context, processes of othering and the interpellation of social categories of gender, ethnicity and class related to power, group-dynamics and individual trajectories construct and shape the professional self and the institutional culture. Teacher education does something to its participants. They become someone

224  Fields reconstructed and somebody, but not always in the ways intended by policymakers and educational planners. Some of the public teacher education institutions provide a public service to citizens in a potentially totalitarian and controlling way while enforcing bureaucracy and a competitive, performative approach. However, students in these structures do not subject themselves fully to institutional authority. Even though the college curtails their freedom and gives them little chance of developing an alternative life track than that provided by the institution, they long for and attempt to construct lives that diverge from the institutional norms. Yet discipline takes different forms. At other public teacher education institutions, control is still central, but it takes a more moralistic, for instance paternalistic, form, balancing efforts to nurture and care for students, being empathetic with students and cultivating their capacities to learn to be with others yet at the same time restricting individual thinking. Other institutions encourage students’ independence and seemingly, but only seemingly, do away with discipline: authority and social control emerge in new forms, creating distinctions between genders and hierarchical positions, and constructing new alliances. For many students, the learning space at such institutions teaches students to think critically and act independently, thereby facilitating well-reasoned resistance to conventions and authority; however, some fall by the wayside. We now know that teacher education does something else to students than solely teaching them a specific and narrow skillset and capabilities for communicating knowledge in class: teacher education imbues meaning among participating subjects; it changes individuals at a collective level amid the multiplicity of college culture; inside these cultures, various groups of students resist, comply, neglect, withdraw and find their individual tracks through college. Teacher education produces a layered experience of the professional self – the self is imbricated in place, space and persons. And institutions are themselves shaped by the actions of individuals and groups as they shape particular ways of being and becoming for students. Westerners craved for replicating their versions of democracy in African contexts. More than six decades of international, nongovernmental aid has invaded Southern education targeting democracy, but there has been little discussion about what content, methods, organisational structures, processes of becoming and so on could fulfil this vision. Number of schools, enrolment, drop-out rates of pupils, pupil–teacher ratios, and access to books and resources have filled the discussion, leaving little place for other kinds of discussions, for instance, of teachers’ personal and professional becoming, identity and self-processes, institutional cultures as ‘spaces of possibles’, curricular content and professional judgements and responsibility that target elsewhere rather than bring more discipline into the classroom. This has led to greater differentiation and erosion in the once-noble teaching profession. More natural scientific knowledge, money, bureaucracy and technology does not necessarily generate capacities to solve societal problems, which develop in often unpredictable, unstable and chaotic ways. Nor does it produce citizenship in populations who can live and work for healthy democracies. We

Fields reconstructed  225 need to develop critical thinking and capabilities to fantasise about other world orders. But we also need to imagine other people and their needs, to include some kind of multiplicity and diversity. This is a precondition of a society where many live together and where many, not the few, decide. Teacher education in Kenya, and probably the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, is not the homogeneous bastion it was a few generations ago in the colonial era. It is not the uniform defender of national values rooted in nation-building, nor does it bring happiness, more democracy and better quality of life. Undoubtedly, ‘more of the same’ will not automatically bring better lives, more welfare, security, stability, democracy and contentment to the masses. Teacher education imbues meaning in participating subjects. Students find a way of appropriating and engaging in their future profession during their years of study at TTC. This can bring a positive change, even if most students do not opt for a particular career as teachers. We also know now that it is not the curricular knowledge, but rather the informal learning, the hidden curriculum, the tacit institutional norms and logics, and the social spaces and attachments that particularly bring about change and paths of becoming for the subjects, at the level of self and at a professional level. Classroom teaching is emphasised, co-curricular activities are added and moralism and discipline are accentuated in the hope of producing role models and ‘society makers’ that will make a difference on a continent characterised by diversity. But something else is forgotten: we need another way of thinking about teacher education, where attention also concentrates on the spoken and the unexpressed, on the subjects and their persons, on personal, social and cultural formation, but also the material and contextual world, on collective and individual formation in higher trajectories of society and TTCs as spaces for student teachers to become someone and somebody. So, where the less visible portions of the politics of the institution, the person, pedagogy and the teaching profession are dwelt upon.

Appendix Student teachers’ background and socioeconomic status

Table A.1  Place of origin – student teachers Place of origin

Number of students (%)

Rural area/scattered housing Town (fewer than 1,000 inhabitants) City (1,000 inhabitants or more) District capital city Capital city

65.6 17.4 3.5 11.7 1.7

Table A.2  Gender – student teachers Gender

Number of students (%)

Male Female

46 54

Table A.3  Number of children – student teachers Number of children 0 1 2 3 4 or more

Number of students (%) 77.0 12.8 6.8 2.5 0.9

Table A.4  Marital status – student teachers Marital status

Number of students (%)

Single (%) Married (%) Widowed (%)

80.3 18.8 0.1

Appendix  227 Table A.5  Educational background – student teachers Educational background – highest level

Number of students (%)

Secondary school Technical certificate Business/college certificate University degree Other

90.9 3.0 4.8 0.1 1.1

Table A.6  Teaching experience – student teachers Teaching experience

Number of students (%)

None Primary schools Other than primary schools

39.6 52.8 7.3

Table A.7  Parental educational background – student teachers Educational background – highest level No formal schooling No formal schooling, skilled worker Primary school Secondary school Shorter school certificate Technical school certificate Other college certificate College diploma University degree Parent deceased/do not know parent

Number of students (%) – father’s educational background

Number of students (%) – mother’s educational background

18.2 9.8

24.8 7.1

19.4 17.2 2.3 4.7 17.1 4.5 3.8 3.0

28.5 21.8 3.9 1.4 8.8 2.5 0.8 0.4

228  Appendix Table A.8  Parental employment – student teachers Employment

Number of students (%) – father’s employment

Unemployed/at home Manual/unskilled worker, own small-scale business Skilled worker Officer worker Civil servant (public/private) with college certificate Private sector with university degree Father deceased/unknown

Number of students (%) – mother’s employment

27.5 32.4

44.3 38.4

7.3 4.2 22.8

2.9 2.8 10.6

2.6

0.7

3.1

0.4

Table A.9  Student teachers’ opinions by academic year on whether they would still choose to become teachers if given a second chance Opinion about still choosing to become teachers, if given a second chance Yes No Don’t know Did not answer

Number of first-year students (%)*

Number of secondyear students (%)**

63.6 32.3 3.9 0.1

65.1 31.6 3.3 0.0

* % of first-year student population. ** % of second-year student population.

Table A.10  Perceived major challenge at TTC – student teachers Perceived major challenge Fulfilment of academic and professional demands Getting enough funding Coping with the living conditions Adjusting to the idea of becoming a teacher No major challenge Adjusting to the rules and regulations at TTC Being without family and friends Do not know

Number of students (%) 40.3 37.6 7.8 5.5 4.3 2.4 1.1 1.1

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Index

academics: elite 172; failure 151; performance 73, 82, 86, 164; success 76 Africa 5 African education 6 aggression 174 Ajzen, I. 36 Akamba 85, 88, 109, 143, 184, 187, 193 Andersen, N.A. and Kjær, P. 33 attachment theory 170, 171

Bowlby, J. 27, 170, 171 Boyden, J. 10, 55 Braille typewriter 86 Bruner, J. S. 205 Buchert, L. 7 Bullough, R. V. 180 bureaucracy 82; apparatus 55–64; protestant work ethic 216; rationality 82; street-level 31, 70, 165 Butler, J. 3, 67, 93, 173, 208

Ball, S. 8 Barth, F. 32 Bateson, G. 152, 161, 173 Bauman, Z. 205 Beck, A. T. 173 becoming 159–203; conceptual 160–163, 170, 199, 211–217; institutional 22, 172–179, 203, 211–217; personal life tracks 183–188, 193–198, 211–222; processes of 22, 199–203, 211–213, 216–222 belonging 217; sense of 81, 101, 108, 139, 157, 158 Bennaars, G. A. 157, 207–208 Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. 33 blurred genres 30 Board of Governors 18, 60 body language 64, 76 Bourdieu, P. 20–22, 25–26, 31, 36, 39, 45, 52, 83, 133, 143; and Passeron, J.-C. 12, 20, 78, 209; capital 36; charisma 143; cultural capital 132; dominant agent 83, 213; doxa 154; feel for the game 39; field 21, 33, 140; habitus 22, 26, 31, 64; positiontaking 26; practice-logic 26, 45; relations of reciprocity 116; social capital 133, 188; space of possible 33; symbolic capital 139; symbolic value 72; symbolic violence 57

capital: cultural 136, 148, 163; definition 36; educational 20, 76; social 133, 188; symbolic 135, 136 capitalism 117 categories 27; social conceptualisation 27 childhood 55; stolen 55 Christianity 18; colonial education 18; forgiveness 176; missionaires 16; religious and moral categorisation 27; religious education 207; Ten Commandments 91; values 91; western civilisation 16 citizenship 210 Clark, M. C. 163 class councillor 103 Cochran-Smith, M. 9, 12, 72 co-curriculum 54, 77, 85, 163 cognitive schemata 173 college: community 53, 85; design 55, 71; rules 56, 79; see also teacher education; teacher education institution college culture 12, 201, 205, 213, 220, 223; sociocultural universes 199; see also institutional habitus; space of possibility; street-level bureaucracy Collins, P. H. 58, 103, 137, 152 colonial: education 7, 16; past 18, 94, 207, 225; pedagogy 16, 207; see also colonialism

246  Index colonialism 207; British 6; definition 7; French 6; missionaires 16; the South 7; systems 6; teacher education 16, 18, 51 colour blind: approach 106; society 213, 214 Commission for Africa 206 community: communality of feeling 115; sense of 85, 95 community of practice 36, 212 comparison: ethnographic 47; issues of 46–49; social 108 competence: action 35, 156, 192; bureaucratic 82; cultural 35; Freirean 36; national aims of education 30 conflict: cultural 147; resolution 147; social 147 conscientization 10, 192 Continuous Assessment Test 114 Coombs, P. H. 5 corporal fight 165 counterculture 80, 134, 135 Crawford, R. 21 creativity 80, 157, 158 cultural surplus 161 culture: definition 6; youth 83; see also college culture; local moral worlds curriculum: academic hierarchy 54; arts 209; ascendance of science 72; foreign 7; science 54, 72 Dahl, K. K. B. 5, 34, 48, 82, 192, 215, 218 Dahrendorf, R. 4 Davies, B. and Bansel, P. 57 Davies, B. and Harré, R. 22, 27, 95 Dean, M. 157, 158, 216 deep hanging out 45 defence mechanism 171, 172, 175, 177, 182 Delamont, S. 4 Deleuze, G. 22; and Guattari, F. 23, 200 democracy 6, 69, 88, 207, 209 depression 172–175 deputy principal 85, 88 deschooling society 10 differential treatment 114 diploma disease 114 dirt 152 discipline: bodily 58, 94; institutional 64; silent 58 dominance 135, 137 dominant matrix 175 Dore, R. 114

dorm councillor 103 dorm elders 103 double bind 152; definition 173; structural 173 Douglas, M.: human meetings 32; institution logics 82, 83; pollution 152; pure and impure 151; space of possibility 159 doxa: definition 154 Dreier, O.: decentred approach 21; everyday life conduct 162; life trajectory 179; participation 24; worldly psychology 21 dysthymia 172 Eastern Africa 6, 12, 17 education: African 6, 9, 168, 207; access 210; ascendance of science 72; background of student teachers 20; Christian religious 207; civil 16, 154, 155; class reproduction 78; colonial 5–16, 21, 208; critical education theory 36, 206; cultural 11–12, 205; deschooling society 10; the Education Act 18; Freirean 10; gift of 4; history in Kenya 7; inclusive 86; indigenous 6, 17; moral 90, 96; moralistic health 94; morality 21, 25; narratives 5; philosophy of 6, 8, 206; politics 25, 31; postcolonial 10, 16; private 18, 209; quality 1, 8, 14, 18; quality education 9, 11, 14; rush 114; the South 1, 2, 8; strands of 8; student background 20; students’ parental background 20; Sustainable Development Goals 8; teacher education in Kenya 17 Education Act 18 Education for All 6–8, 206, 207 educational: credentials 51, 55, 68; failures 19, 55; fix 208; image 136; politics 7, 205–211; student background 20; students’ parental background 20 empowerment 10, 208 entertainment prefect 74 Eraut, M. 171 Erikson, E. H. 26 Eshiwani, G. S. 16 ethics 40; professional 15, 220; protestant work 164, 216; value nihilism 157 ethnicity 27, 62, 64, 103, 108, 109 ethnographic validity 37, 45, 47 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 46

Index  247 everyday conduct of life 162 everyday life: learning theory 161, 167 family values 103 Festinger 108, 147 field 33 fieldassistants 42–43 fieldwork 37–49; ethics 40; material 47; positionality 37, 39–41; representation 37–39, 48; subjectivity 37, 39 figured worlds 161, 202 filtration 104 Fjord Jensen, J. 168 formation: norm 147; students 166 Foucault, M. 27, 33; Christianity 91; conditions of possibility 33; panopticon 55; pastoral power 91; power 33, 165; power technology 22; self-governance 59; subjectification 27 Free Primary Education 6 free room 33, 168, 192 freedom 95, 134, 135, 157, 167; gendered 167; pockets of 78 Freire, P. 10–11, 36, 100, 192, 208 Fuller, B. 5, 10, 204, 207 gatekeeper 3 Geertz, C. 5; blurred genres 30; deep hanging out 38, 45–46; modernity 47, 208; near and distant 5, 38, 46, 48; thick descriptions 46 gender 167; categories 27; class elders 103; colonial education 207; destabilisation 93; freedom 167–170; morality 92, 208; researcher 43; segregation 96; subjectification 216; trouble 93 gift of education 4 Glaser, B. G. and Strauss, A. 38 good students 214 Goodson, I. 162 Grimen, H. and Molander, A. 29, 217 grounded theory 38 habitus 25–26, 64; definition 25–26; institutional 31–33, 82, 115, 156 Hanushek, E. A. 9, 12 Harambee: definition 6 hardship resistance 199 Hargreaves, A. 1, 4, 2, 9, 180, 210 Hart, R. A. 35 Hattie, J. 9, 13 Heller, A. 153, 161, 163

Hellesnes, J. 206 hidden curriculum 10, 182; definition 182 Hjort, K. and Weber, K. 19, 218 Holland, D. C. 2, 12, 75, 161; and Eisenhart, M. A. 12; Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D. and Cain, C. 12, 161, 217, 218 Holzkamp, K. 27, 162 Horowitz, H. 170 Hylland Eriksen, T. 43, 108 Hundeide, K. 34, 115, 145, 162, 177 identity 23, 200, 213; cultural 137; formation 161, 163; professional 29, 180, 202; social 178 Illich, I. 10 immorality 93, 134; see also morality institutional: administration 90, 92; authority 80; becoming 22, 199–203, 211–216; control 79, 92, 93; culture 205–216; discipline 90, 164, 166, 201; habitus 31, 33, 82, 115; hierarchies 82; logic 31, 32, 82, 83, 115; norms 122; rationality 82, 115; rules 122; values 122 international donor communities: philosophies of education 8 International Monetary Foundation 7 intimate relations 79 James, A.: and Prout, A. 12; Jenks, C. and Prout, A. 206 Jarvis, P. 160 Jenkins, R. 35 Jensen, B. B. and Schnack, K. 192, 208 Kalenjin 183 Kant, I. 217 KAPB gap 36 Kenya: Christian church 16; colonial past 7–8, 16–18; educational history 6–8; history of teacher education 16–21; independence 7, 16; Institute of Education 206, 208; missionaries 16–17 Kenyan: Christian Council 17; national aims of education 206, 208; national aims for teacher education 18, 30; National Examination Council 17; primary syllabus aims 206; Teachers’ Service Commission 121 Kenyatta, Jomo 51 Kernberg, O. F. 170, 171

248  Index Kikuyu 109, 110, 146, 183 Kisii 189 Kleinman, A. 25, 82 know-how 161 Kohut, H. 27, 170, 175 Korthagen, F. A. J. 24, 126, 180–182 Ladson-Billing, G. 29 laissez-faire: conceptual 157; leadership 157; pedagogy 168 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. 25 LaPiere, R.T. 182 Lave, J. 161, 203 Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 36, 45, 114, 161, 211–212 leadership: authoritarian 163; human resource 112; informal 92; laissezfaire 157; management 64, 87; mediation 123; termination of 92 learning: accommodative 161; as democratic possibility 36; as participation 35; contextual 25; crisis 9; cultural 10, 25; culture 160; implicit 15, 182; informal 170; narrative 162; organisational 2, 22; processes 160–161, 163; professional 181–182; rote 2; situated 23; social 36, 113; through participant observation 45; transgressive 161; see also pedagogy Leavers’ Bash 80 Levine, A. 13 LeVine, R. A. and White, M. I. 25 Levinson, B. A.: Foley, D. E. and Holland, D. C. 11, 12; and Holland, D. C. 10 Lewin, K. 3, 111 liberalism: and freedom 216; classical 156; colour-blindness 214; definition 156; neo 156 lifestyle: modern 6, 148; pastoral 139, 177; western 138, 148 life trajectory 34, 181; ruptures 163, 184; transitions 163 line of flight 23, 69, 200 Lipsky, M. 31, 70, 165, 207, 215 List of Shame 67 local moral worlds 25, 82; see also morality love 149–153, 194 Luhya 146, 184 Luo 108, 109, 143, 146, 196 Main, M. 170 Malinowski, B. 45, 47, 48

management 64, 92, 98, 112, 143; mediation 123; termination 92 materiality 115, 156; staff room 70 matrix of domination 58, 152 mayor 59, 62, 88 Melhuus, M. 38, 46–48 Millennium Development Goals 7 Millon, T. 27, 171 Ministry of Education: teacher education aim 18, 206 Minuchin, S. 171 missionaries: British 16, 51, 84, 94, 207 mock exams 73–76 modernity 47, 136, 205 MOEST 18, 30 moods 71 moral: decay 56, 135; values 55, 91, 214 moralism 92, 94, 116, 134, 214, 219 morality 94; definition 25; profession 29 morning assembly 67, 92 narrative 5, 46, 162, 181; learning 162; of education 5 national cohesion 208 Nilotes 110 nobility 55, 94 North: philosophy of education 6 Nussbaum, M. C. 209 Nygren, P. 35 obedience 78, 94; training 115, 177 Objective Achieved Method in Teaching 154 opportunity situation: definition 34 organization 4–6, 22–23, 30–34, 221–224, 181–184, 187–188, 190–191 othering 58, 137, 201, 208; definition 108 Otiende, J. E. 5 pain 171, 172 panopticon 55 parents 19, 20, 227 participant observation 44 participation 160–163; and positionality in fieldwork 39–44; and observation in fieldwork 44–46; as deep hanging out 45; as relational work 170; Bourdieu, P. 26; Dreier, O. 24; figured worlds 161; genuine and token 35; Hart, R. 35; legitimate peripheral 36; life trajectory 162; researcher 38

Index  249 pastoral life 114 pastoralism 91, 177 paths to professionalism 179–199 pedagogy 35, 73–76; civil education 154, 155; class swopping 111; classroom 9; colonial 16, 207; conceptual 21–37; conditioning 102; critical 10; drill 73; empowering 208; Freirean 11; humanising 208; ideals 3; laissez-faire 168; lecture 73; mediation 115; moralisation 55, 93; obedience training 115; objective achieved method 154; of difference 207; of the oppressed 10; peerlearning 168; personal lecturer 113; political 11; teaching practice 182; trajectories 216–222 performance: academic 72 person 27–29; collapse 184–187; conceptual 24 personality 171, 172; change 173, 180, 191; conceptual 171; professional 180 personhood 24 Phelps-Stoke Commission 17 Phoenix, A. 63, 201, 208, 211–213 physical exercise 73 pleasure 75, 171, 193–196, 201 politics 30, 205–211; conceptual 30, 21–37; donor community 7; Education for All 6, 7; educational 7; Free Primary Education 6; indigenous education 6; Kenyan administration 17; North and South 5; of education 9; western education 6 position: actors 82; position taking 26; positionality 37, 41; positioning 27, 137; researcher 39, 40; students 67; tutors 82 poststructuralism 22, 27 power 69, 70; administrative 61; colonial see colonialism; definition 27, 33; empowerment 10; Foucauldian 33, 165; liberalism 156; negotiation among staff 62; negotiation among students 59; negotiation during fieldwork 41; pastoral 91; powerful students 135; South-North imbalances 10; struggles 60; technology 22; totalitarian 58 prefects 88, 103 Presbyterian Church of East Africa 51 pressure: emotional 70 primary teacher education: certificate 17; distinction 73–76

principal 52, 58, 60, 65–66, 85, 86, 96 Print, M. 182 private schooling 15, 18, 156, 205, 209, 210 privatisation 208; in education 209 processes of becoming 28, 159–203; see also becoming profession 28; conceptual 28; definition 4, 19, 28, 29; legitimacy 29; semi 19, 29; teaching 1, 30, 116; see also professionalism professional: authority 82; becoming 179–199, 199–203; belonging 217; ethic 220; identity 180; judgment 217; responsibility 217, 219, 220 professionalism 28, 73–76, 116, 163–170, 179–199, 202, 212, 216, 219; conceptual 28; definition 4; paths to 179–199; teachers 179–191, 199–193; tutors 111 Protestant work ethic 164, 216 Prout, A. and James, A. 11, 23 psychodynamic 170; theory 27, 170 punishment: corporal 165; eye-for an-eye 69; student council 90; students 54, 56, 63, 69, 145, 146; tutors 58, 65 Putnam, R. D. 133, 188 quality education 1, 8, 11, 156, 210; definition 9 race 27, 213 racism 174, 214 rationalisation 172–175 rationality: bureaucratic 82; social 115 relations: intimate 55, 58, 79–80, 96, 105, 116, 149–153, 168; personalised 113, 114; social 113, 166 representation 37–39, 48 researcher: bias 39; positionality 40, 41; resocialization 43; roles 43, 39; subjectivity 39, 41 Rogoff, B. 145, 160, 177 role model 90, 153, 166 rural areas: fieldassistants 42; fieldwork 39; parental background 20; pedagogy of the oppressed 10; students’ backgrounds 19, 210; teacher training college 84–116, 197; teachers 1, 3, 19–20, 218; tutors 71, 109, 146, 148, 215

250  Index Samoff, J. 206 Sanjek, R. 37 Schein, E. 30 Schnack, K. 192, 208 Schön, D. A. 19 schooling 3; literature 11; non-Western 171; western 79, 171 Schutz, A.: and Luckmann, B. 24, 104 searching processes 163, 165–170 self-government 76 self-technologies 164 selves: becoming 170; depressed 172–175; exhibited 177–179; surrounded 175–177 semi-profession 19 Serpell, R. 19, 55 settlers: British 6; Dutch 6 sexual: abstinence 58, 116, 166, 212; abuse 152 sexuality: categorisation 27; dominant matrix 58; double bind 152; extra marital relations 54; family values 103; female students 92; gender categories 92; gender markings 93; HIV/AIDS 134–135; intersecting categories 201, 213; intimate relations 56; (mis)behavior 93; morality 214; premarital 92; relations 54 Sherif, M. 108, 147 shuffling 58, 61 Sifuna, D. N. and Otiende, J. E. 16 situated knowledge 7, 48 situated learning 23, 36, 212 smooth space 23, 200 social: capital 188; categories 213; categorisation 27, 108, 213; change 10; class 214; conduct 39; decline 184–187; field 21; identity 178; inequality 209; justice 10, 110, 209, 210; learning 10, 36, 161; organisations 32; reproduction in schools 12 social learning theory 36, 161 sociocultural: production of schooling 5–7, 10, 11–12, 199–203 space for possibility 33, 34, 67, 159, 163–170, 172, 199, 200, 211–213, 216 sports day 77, 172 Spradley, J. P. 45 staff room 71, 86, 148 Stambach, A. 206 status: teaching profession 19, 20, 55; students’ negotiations 152

Stern, D. N. 27, 170 Strathern, M. 47 street-level bureaucracy 31, 70, 165, 207, 215 striated space 23, 200 Structural Adjustment Programme 18 structural racialism 174 students: alcohol abuse 104; background 20, 211; body 59, 88; bosses 126–127; class elders 103; commitment 157, 158; council 61, 88, 90, 143; councillor 88, 91; culture 79, 80; depression 172, 174; dominant agent 60, 132, 135; dysthymia 172; educational background 227; elite 135; ethnic identity 103; everyday life 78; freshers 169; girlfriends 134, 152; good students 214; handicapped 116; high-classes 126, 128–134; idealisation 175; impaired 86; inappropriate 214; inclusion 99; indiscipline 78; marital status 226; mood 173, 201; motivation 184, 186; number of children 226; officer 87; parental demographic background 20; parental education background 210, 227; parental employment 228; paths to professionalism 179–199; perceived major challenge at TTC 228; place of origin 226; pleasure seeking 177; pregnancy 54, 61, 79; principled 126, 134–135; resistance 78, 79, 83, 213; respect 91, 185; romances 56, 80, 92, 132; segregation 135, 152; self-realisation 193–196; social identity 136, 213; substance abuse 104; suspension 57; teaching experience 227; untouchables 126, 127–128; youth culture 135 subjectification 22–27 subjectivity 27 subordination 59 sub-Saharan Africa 4, 6–9, 222, 225 surveillance 55 Sustainable Development Goals 8 symbolic violence 57 Tajfel, H. 108 Tanzania 6 teacher: nobility 20, 152; professional identity 101, 180; professionalism 1, 28, 179–199; professionalism in Kenya 19; quality 9, 12

Index  251 teacher education 13, 87, 215; admission 55; colonial 5–7, 10, 16, 18, 21; entrepreneur 158; history 5–7, 16, 21; international policies 7; Kenya 16, 17; literature 5, 12, 14; North 30; postcolonial 7, 16; private 18; South 30; sub-Saharan Africa 14 teacher education institution: admission 12, 84; hardship area 71; private 209; public 50, 84, 209; restructuring 55; students’ body election procedures 62, 88 teacher professionalism 28, 73–76; definition 4 teachers: calling 184, 187–188, 190, 221; career 186; in African schools 8; last resort 184, 191–193; pedagogical skills 9; passing time 191–193, 196; practice 130; quality 12; rural areas 3; second chance 181, 186, 191–193; stepping stone 181–182; see also teacher; teacher profession; teacher professionalism; teaching teacher training see teacher education teacher training college 4 teaching profession 175; acceptance of 185, 186; acknowledgement of 202; belonging 179–181, 199, 221; dignity 17; history of 17; legitimacy 29; moral aspects 168; narratives 162; relations to 160; rural areas 1; status and prestige 19, 20, 55; stepping stone 198; students’ motivation for 188 the feeling business 176 the North: definition 1; philosophy of education 8 the South 7; definition 1; education 1, 5, 8, 10–12; teacher education 12–16; teachers 12 tuition: do-it-yourself 156; fees 54, 210; guiding and counselling 96; objective

achieved method 154; project group 154; see also tutors tutors 71–73, 109–115, 147–149, 215; and the principal 65, 158; building rapport 42; competition among 72; councellors 96; culture 146; drill 73; educated elite 82; female 137, 146; guidance and councelling 45, 134; housing 55; humiliation 65,145; impaired 86; in bureaucracy 82; in fieldwork 41; intimate relations 134; moralism 92; parent tutors 219; pedagogical practices 73, 75; punishment 65; pursuing academic success 72; role models 189; sense of community 116; Sports Day 77; staff at college 51; staff room 70–71; street-level bureaucrats 207; teamwork building 112; work life 112; see also tuition Ubuntu: definition 6 Universal Primary Education 6 unorthodoxy 145 Van Maanen, J. 176 verbatim principle 45 viable life 67, 173 violence: symbolic 57 WCEFA 6, 207 Weber, K. 69, 82, 218 Weber, M. 164 Wenger, E. 26, 160, 161, 211 Willis, P.E. 2, 12, 80, 187 Winnicott, D.W. 170 workaholic 218 World Bank 7 youth culture 76, 78, 138, 152 Zittoun, T. 163