Community school teacher education and the construction of pedagogical discourse in Papua New Guinea

Pedagogical discourse in Papua New Guinea (PNG) community schooling is mediated by a western styles education. The daily administration and organisation of school activity, graded teaching and learning, subject selection, content boundaries, teaching and assessment methods are all patterned after western schooling. This educational settlement is part of a legacy of German, British and Australian government and non-government colonialism that officially came to an end in 1975. Given the colonial heritage of schooling in PNG, this study is interested in exploring particular aspects of the degree of mutuality between local discourses and the discourses of a western styled pedagogy in post-colonial times, for the purpose of better informing community school teacher education practices. This research takes place at and in the vicinity of Madang Teachers College, a pre-service community school teachers college on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The research was carried out in the context of the researcher’s employment as a contract lecturer in the English language Department between 1991-1993. As an in-situ study it was influenced by the roles of different participants and the circumstances in which data was gathered and constituted, data which was compatible with participants commitments to community school teacher education and community school teaching and learning. In the exploration of specific pedagogic practices different qualitative research approaches and perspectives were brought to bear in ways best suited to the circumstances of the practice. In this way analytical foci were more dictated by circumstances rather by design. The analytical approach is both a hermeneutic one where participants’ activities are ‘read like texts’, where what is said or written is interpreted against the background of other informing contexts and texts, to better understand how understandings and meanings are produced and circulated; and also a phenomenological one where participants’ perspectives are sought to better understand how pedagogical discursive formations are assimilated with the ‘self’. The effect of shifting between these approaches throughout the study is to build up a sense of co-authorship between researcher and participants in relation to particular aspects of the research. The research explores particular sites where pedagogic discourse is produced, re-produced, distributed, articulated, consumed and contested, and in doing so seeks to better understand what counts as pedagogical discourse. These are sites that are largely unexplored in these terms, in the academic literature on teacher education and community schooling in PNG. As such, they represent gaps in what is documented and understood about the nature of post-colonial pedagogy and teacher training. The first site is a grade two community school class involved in the teaching and early learning of English as the ‘official’ language of instruction. Here local discourses of solidarity and agreement are seen to be mobilised to make meaningful, what are for the teacher and children moments in their construction as post-colonial subjects. What in instructional terms may be seen as an English language lesson becomes, in the light of the research perspectives used, an exercise in the structuring of new social identities, relations and knowings, problematising autonomous views of teaching and learning. The second site explores this issue of autonomous (decontextualised) teaching and learning through an investigation of student teachers’ epistemological contextualisations of knowledge, teaching and learning. What is examined is the way such orientations are constructed in terms of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ epistemological and pedagogical alignments, and, in terms of differently conceived notions of community, in a problematisation of the notion of community schooling. The third and fourth sites examine reflective accounts of student teachers’ pedagogic practices, understandings and subjectivities as they confront the moral and political economies and cultural politics of schooling in School Experiences and Practicum contexts, and show how dominant behaviourist and ‘rational/autonomous’ conceptions of what counts as teaching and learning are problematised in the way some students teachers draw upon wider social discourses to construct a dialogue with learners. The final site is a return to the community school where the discourse of school reports through which teachers, children and parents are constructed as particular subjects of schooling, are explored. Here teachers report children’s progress over a four year period and parents write back in conforming, confronting and contesting ways, in the midst of the ongoing enculturation of their children. In this milieu, schooling is shown to be a provider of differentiated social qualifications rather than a socially just and relevant education. Each of the above-mentioned studies form part of a research and pedagogic interest in understanding the ‘disciplining’ effects of schooling upon teacher education, the particular consequences of those effects, what is embraces, resisted and hidden. Each of the above sites is informed by various ‘intertexts’. The use of intertexts is designed to provide a multiplicity of views, actions and voices while enhancing the process of cross-cultural reading through contextualising the studies in ways that reveal knowledges and practices which are often excluded in more conventional accounts of teaching and learning. This research represents a journey, but not an aimless one. It is one which reads the ideological messages of coherence, impartiality and moral soundness of western pedagogical discourse against the school experiences of student-teachers, teachers, children and parents, in post-colonial Papua New Guinea, and finds them lacking