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Title Lost in Translation: Why the Structures of Formal Schooling are not Translating in Rural Ghana
Full text http://hdl.handle.net/1807/17583
Date 2009
Author(s) Segura, Corinne
Abstract School is a set of political and historical constructions that are supposed to convey certain meanings, values, attitudes and lessons. Some of the basic structures of the Western based school are child-centred teaching methods, individualised testing methods and fixed time structures which embody and imbue certain values of creative thinking, individualism, competitiveness and efficiency. This paper looks at the ways in which these structures, or rules of schooling are not translating in rural Ghana. They are failing to follow these structures of the implicit curriculum and what is "produced" in the classroom "is far from what was intended" by the donors and government (Coe 2005, 6). By renegotiating the structures, people in rural Ghana renegotiate the values, creating new meanings in the spaces the state generates. The acts of non-compliance read as a critique of the official values of schooling, although they do not 'argue on the same terms'. We will argue that the development response continually fails to address the problems because they approach it as a managerial problem when in reality it is a contextual problem - the structures of the formal schooling system do not fit into the contextual reality of rural life in Ghana.
Subject(s) Education; Ghana; International Education; Anthropology/Ethnography
Language en_ca
Type of publication Thesis
Repository Toronto - University of Toronto
Added to C-A: 2014-07-14;18:31:50