Impossible fictions? : reflexivity as methodology for studying women teachers' lives in development contexts

This thesis interweaves issues of feminist methodology with theories, policies and practices of gender and development, around a central focus on women teachers' lives. It addresses the position of women teachers in relation to theories and practices of gender, education and development. It examines appropriate research methodology for working with, understanding and interpreting the lives of women teachers in Karachi, Pakistan. Drawing on the multiple traditions of feminist narrative inquiry in the field of education, and on the methods and forms emerging in alternative forms of ethnographic practice, the study is a situated one. Lived experiences are foregrounded, and time, place, context made explicit. Interview, discussion group and fieldnote data are collected whilst working with women teachers in Karachi, Pakistan. After an unexpected departure after September 11, 2001, additional questionnaire data are collected from a distance.The thesis is a study researching women teachers' lives but also a critical reflection on the dominant development practices in which research takes place. As text it constitutes a form of feminist practice in and of itself. It analyzes the lived, and embodied experience of teaching, learning and researching, and rewrites this into the predominantly male-dominated literature and theory of education in development.In the traditions of feminist inquiry, the study is also oriented towards change for women. Given the stated importance of gender equity, and especially the attention to girls' education of the international development community, the study has important implications for the ways that development planners think about women teachers, and design programs and policies for them. Shifting attention from natural nurturing and caring abilities of women teachers, to subjective issues of relational power dynamics, and to the individual and collective positionings of women's bodies within institutions and organizations, this study places women's lived experience as central to theories of pedagogy, curriculum, educational leadership, and to research in gender, education and development