Individual, Family, and Community Education
ETDs Education ETDs
Spring 5-8-2017
How Teachers Use Beliefs and Knowledge in
Changing Contexts: A Multi-Site Ethnographic
Study with Nicaraguan Multigrade Elementary
School Teachers
Tenley M. Ruth
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Recommended Citation
Ruth, Tenley M.. "How Teachers Use Beliefs and Knowledge in Changing Contexts: A Multi-Site Ethnographic Study with Nicaraguan Multigrade Elementary School Teachers." (2017).https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_ifce_etds/55
Tenley Ruth
Candidate
Individual, Family and Community Education (IFCE) Department
This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee:
Dr. Jay Parkes, Chairperson, Educational Psychology
Dr. Jan Armstrong, Committee Member, Educational Psychology
Dr. Tryphenia Peele-Eady, Committee Member, Language, Literacy and Socio-Cultural Studies (LLSS)
Dr. Ruth Trinidad-Galvan, Committee Member, Language, Literacy and Socio-Cultural Studies (LLSS)
HOW TEACHERS USE BELIEFS AND KNOWLEDGE IN CHANGING CONTEXTS:
A MULTI-SITE ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY WITH NICARAGUAN MULTIGRADE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
TEACHERS
BY
TENLEY RUTH
B.A., Community Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz M.A., Educational Psychology, University of New Mexico
DISSERTATION
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy Educational Psychology
The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico
DEDICATION
In memory of Billy.
On December 30, 2016, Billy began his regular “Directo” route with our neighbors, friends and acquaintances at 3:45pm, driving from Suchitoto to San Salvador. When he opened the bus door to let people board in San Martin 40 minutes into his route, three gang members shot him in the head from the street, leaving his wife a single mother and his two infants fatherless.
I dedícate this study to Billy, and all the other fathers, sons, uncles, brothers and their family members who have been victims of U.S. foreign policy that helped breed the violence unleashed between the Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 in Los Angeles in the 1980s; U.S. immigration policy that takes no responsibility for its role in thousands of Central Americans flocking to U.S. borders in search of amnesty from that violence; and the border patrol and ICE agents who illegally send them home to their death instead of providing them their legal right to a lawyer and hearing. While I finished this dissertation, there were months when up to 900 people were killed in El Salvador, a country of only 6.5 million that I call home. Billy became a number in a humanitarian crisis that requires all of us to be alert and alive, working together to demand and create change. So, Billy, rest in peace. You help me continue to work with others towards a better El Salvador, so your beautiful kids and everyone else’s can grow up in a more just, humane and caring world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was never alone during this over six-year effort. Participating Nicaraguan teachers, students, and their families made it possible – none of whom I will name to protect their confidentiality. Family, friends, colleagues and mentors in El Salvador and the U.S. helped me as well. Here I give special shout-outs to my academic mentors, colleagues and family. Dr. Terri Flowerday introduced me to the academic world of cognition, motivation and culture – and her passion for questioning widely accepted findings about teaching and learning. She was my first professor and academic mentor when I returned from El Salvador to get my masters. Dr. Jay Parkes was a mentor in statistics and assessment of and for learning. He invited me to join his research in dual language education when I was a dual language parent, a focus I continue to this day. For this study, he repeatedly encouraged me to identify the brick rather than write about the entire wall; I focused on a group of bricks in the wall as a workable middle ground.
Dr. Jan Armstrong consistently offered guidance, steering me to an area of research or researcher I had not contemplated. She applauded my insistence on a psychological focus in my qualitative research. Dr. Ruth Trinidad-Galvan and her ethnographic research with women in Mexico served as an inspiration. She reminded me in my previous case study research with Salvadoran teachers to stay with the data and not impose external (theoretical) frameworks before their time.
I give deep thanks to Cynthia Salas who skillfully administers the often unruly tentacles in our Department of Individual, Family and Community Education. Cynthia was critical to my continuing to the finish line. I can’t thank her enough. She and my family were my main emotional supports from masters to dissertation, full of friendly reminders as to why I should finish particularly as I felt like I no longer needed to, wanted to or could. I extend a big thanks to the UNM Graduate Resource Center, particularly Anna Cabrera. Anna read my first “drafty-drafts,” the most long-winded and meandering that reached 200-250 pages each. She gave helpful feedback biweekly for over a year.
My deepest love and thanks goes to my immediate family, Aurelio and Modesto. Their daily, absolutely unconditional and unwavering support helped us get through this
enormous project unscathed. They reinforced my resiliency to continue in the face of extreme challenge and discouragement, and they never hesitated to remind me to stop taking things so seriously – and to take much-needed breaks.
I never would have attempted this, stuck with it, and finished it without this combination of people who joined many others in support across three countries, two languages and many worlds.
HOW TEACHERS USE BELIEFS AND KNOWLEDGE IN CHANGING CONTEXTS:
A MULTI-SITE ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY WITH NICARAGUAN MULTIGRADE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
TEACHERS
by Tenley Ruth
B.A., Community Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz M.A., Educational Psychology, University of New Mexico Ph.D., Educational Psychology, University of New Mexico
ABSTRACT
This ethngoraphic study investigates how multigrade elementary school teachers in the central-northern mountains of Nicaragua developed and used shared societal, institutional and individual belief systems and knowledge to both understand and decide if, how, when and with whom to act upon the government’s values education mandates. To understand teacher use of overlapping beliefs systems, the research provided parallel ethnographic accounts of teachers’, parents’ and government officials’ interpretations and actions regarding values education. The findings suggest that teachers used a wide panorama of overlapping and often contradictory beliefs systems in addition to beliefs about teaching and learning in general and values in particular, values content, students and families. These broader beliefs systems included political party identity, beliefs about Nicaraguan
government leaders, religious faith, and patriotic sentiments, all of which the government embedded in the values curriculum. Teachers who used a small set of beliefs systems inflexibly tended to prioritize institutional beliefs and knowledge to guide their practice, particularly compliance. Understanding the beliefs systems and knowledge teachers drew upon – and how they negotiated societal and institutional beliefs systems and knowledge with their own – leads to a holistic and deeper understanding of individual teacher beliefs and how teachers use them with their knowledge in daily practice. Further research is necessary
into the panorama of beliefs systems teachers regularly negotiate in different content areas and settings, and how externally imposed beliefs systems and knowledge (e.g., through curriculum, policy and mandates) work in conjunction with individual teacher cognitions to guide teacher practice.
Keywords: teacher beliefs, teacher knowledge, multigrade elementary, values
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ... xiv
LIST OF TABLES ... xiv
LIST OF MAPS ... xiv
LIST OF PHOTOS ... xv
LIST OF ACRONYMS ... xvi
Chapter One:Introduction ... 1
Who is to Blame? ... 2
Rural Multigrade Schooling: Answering some Unanswered Questions ... 5
Values Education: A Foundation of Curricular Transformation ... 6
Beginning the Research: Positioning the Researcher ... 7
My Positionality as Interactive Repositionings ... 8
Position #1: I am a learner. ... 9
Position #2: I am an educational psychologist. ... 10
Position #3: Liberation struggles build solidarity, shared understandings. ... 12
A Spanish-language Study Translated into Mostly an English-language Text ... 17
A Reader’s Guide to this Study ... 17
Translations in footnotes. ... 18
Paraphrasing. ... 18
Spanish words in the English text. ... 19
Quotations. ... 19
Endnotes. ... 19
Spanish-English glossary. ... 19
Acronym listing. ... 19
PART ONE ... 21
Chapter Two:Teacher Beliefs, Knowledge and Practice in Multiple Contexts, A Literature Review ... 23
Definitions and Assumptions ... 24
Teacher Beliefs and Knowledge ... 26
Knowledge in education and teacher knowledge specifically. ... 29
Teacher beliefs-knowledge-practice relationships. ... 32
Teacher beliefs-knowledge-practice relationships in micro contexts. ... 42
Teacher beliefs-knowledge-practice relationships in macro contexts. ... 50
Multigrade Schools and Schooling ... 52
Conclusion ... 60
Chapter Three: Methodology ... 61
Conceptual Framework ... 62
Research Participants ... 67
Three Groups of Stakeholder Participants ... 68
Gatekeepers and Gatekeeping: Participants Entering, Leaving and Changing Roles ... 75
Research Methods ... 79
Input-output approaches: A methodological assessment ... 79
Four data collection methods. ... 82
Classroom participant observation. ... 85
Informal conversations and semi-structured interviews. ... 89
Primary and secondary documents. ... 94
Classroom and community artifacts. ... 96
Data analysis ... 98
Data analysis and interpretation, post-field. ... 105
Data analysis in cultural contexts and questions of validity. ... 111
Data organization and management ... 115
Limitations ... 116
Chapter Summary ... 118
PART TWO ... 119
Chapter Four:Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, the Most Beautiful of my Loves ... 123
Background ... 126
La Cascada de Aprendizaje or Waterfall of Learning: A Form of Governance ... 129
La Memoria Histórica: A Narrative for Social Cohesion through Participation for Change ... 134
Augusto Sandino, 1893-1934: A diminutive superhero to inspire and emulate. ... 137
National and local remembering of Sandino: Discourse, content and messaging. ... 140
The National Literacy Crusade, “Heroes and Martyrs for the Freedom of Nicaragua,”. ... 146
Converting the darkness into light: Prejudices and stereotypes of rural life. ... 150
The Crusade in contemporary times. ... 152
Caudillismo, Contrarianism and Loyalty ... 157
Caudillismo. ... 157
Contrarianism. ... 163
Loyalty. ... 165
Homogeneous Nearsightedness ... 167
Everyone is Spanish-speaking and from the Southern Pacific Coast. ... 167
When one-size-did-not-fit-all: Conflicting understandings catalyze resistance. ... 174
Chapter Summary ... 177
Chapter Five:Socio-Professional Settings ... 179
Background ... 180
Sensibilizando teachers to their role in the National Human Development Plan... 184
The Shared Responsibility Model. ... 186
The year of professional development and sensibilización. ... 190
Government beliefs about teaching and learning ... 195
Nicaragua’s crisis in education ... 202
International agreements focus on access and retention. ... 202
International education indicators: How Nicaragua measured up. ... 204
Education policies to tackle the crisis ... 207
Automatic promotion and student remediation. ... 207
Teacher understandings of assessment and automatic promotion. ... 211
Teacher understandings of remediation. ... 217
Using understandings to decide on practices. ... 219
Prioritizing quality over access. ... 231
Chapter Summary ... 241
Rurality ... 243
The Sub-Region of San José de la Montaña ... 251
The core participating schools. ... 253
Difficult work conditions... 256
Chapter Summary ... 257
PART THREE ... 259
Chapter Seven: Values Education: Shared and Contested Beliefs in Overlapping Contexts 264 Shared Beliefs Regarding Values and Values Teaching-Learning Processes... 267
“Everything moves from values.” ... 267
“Values make anything possible.” ... 270
A core rural value: Convivir or living in community. ... 273
“Christian values make us who we are.” ... 276
“Making homeland” (slogan) together: Proud to be Nicaraguan. ... 278
The family is where children learn values. ... 280
Many families fail to educate, contribute to “debauchery in everything.” ... 281
The GRUN had a minor, auxiliary role in values education – if any role at all. ... 286
GRUN Beliefs Regarding Values and Values Teaching-Learning Processes ... 287
Values in every school: Inundating teachers from top to bottom. ... 287
Inundate to saturate and assimilate: The continually flowing waterfall. ... 290
Values help develop “coherence among who we are, what we think and what we do” 292 Beliefs about teaching and learning in general, and values in particular. ... 297
Values versus academics or values and academics. ... 302
Contested Beliefs Regarding the GRUN’s Values Education ... 308
Organized political opposition to Ortega and his Sandinista Party. ... 309
Questions about GRUN claims of success: Propaganda or evaluation. ... 312
Chapter Summary ... 314
Chapter Eight:Transmitting and Receiving Knowledge and Knowledge Gaps in Values Education ... 316
Teacher experiences of the GRUN values waterfall: Inundation from top to bottom ... 317
Copying MINED text, Creating Uniform Plans ... 317
Group copying strengthened collegiality. ... 322
Group copying, collegiality and uniformity amidst constant change. ... 328
Being an expert copier helped withstand MINED contrarianism. ... 334
Teacher Experiences of MINED Transmission of Knowledge and Knowledge Gaps ... 337
Teacher Experiences: Local MINED Officials Transmitted Knowledge Gaps ... 339
Instructions. ... 339
Material resources. ... 341
Content knowledge. ... 344
National MINED Transmitted Knowledge Gaps ... 349
The diagnostic study. ... 351
Cross-curricular pillars. ... 365
Chapter Summary ... 375
Chapter Nine:Teachers Negotiated Competing Beliefs Systems regarding Values and Schooling ... 377
Values, Anti-Values and Values Teaching in the Academic Classroom ... 377
Combatting Anti-Values in the Classroom: Behavior Management as a Values Priority 379 Student anti-values behaviors in multigrade classrooms. ... 380
Teacher understandings of anti-values behaviors in classrooms. ... 388
Teacher practices addressing classroom anti-values behaviors. ... 394
Behavior management methods replicated through the waterfall. ... 414
Teaching values in an academic setting: Conflicting beliefs ... 418
“The talk.” ... 420
Preparing students for a school competition: Profe Emilia. ... 430
Presenting values definitions in a values assembly: Profe Liria. ... 434
Implement or Ignore Values Education Orientations: The Role of Political Party Identity. ... 437
Political Party Identity and Beliefs. ... 438
Negotiating political beliefs when implementing orientations. ... 447
Incorporating Sandinista Youth into schooling and school programs. ... 452
Teacher beliefs about politically charged values in orientations. ... 454
Chapter Ten:Conclusion ... 459
Researching teacher beliefs in relation to how they develop provides new insights ... 459
Shared societal beliefs systems were integral to individual ones... 463
Understanding institutional beliefs systems helps understand individual ones ... 464
Understanding beliefs as they relate to knowledge and knowledge gaps ... 468
Alternative explanations for (lack of) teacher change ... 470
A case for contextualizing over simplifying ... 472
Practical Implications ... 473
Teacher professional development. ... 473
APPENDICES ... 475
APPENDIX A:La Culpa de Todo en la Educación ... 476
APPENDIX B:Nicaragua’s Education Crisis in Tables and Graphs ... 478
APPENDIX C:Interview questions in English and Spanish ... 482
APPENDIX D:Teaching Values as Academic Content: One Lesson ... 490
APPENDIX E:Profe Regalia, Assembly Talk, Spanish ... 492
APPENDIX F:First Lady Murillo’s “Live Pretty” Campaign Guide ... 493
TRANSLATION GLOSSARY OF SPANISH TERMS ... 499
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Gatekeepers and Doors they Opened and Closed during Fieldwork, 2012 and 2013. ... 77
Figure 1: A graphic depiction of Ortega’s National Human Development Plan, 2012-2016 ... 120
LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Key characteristics of multigrade schools in research and in Nicaragua…………..53
Table 2. Location descriptions of each participating school………68
Table 3. Teacher participants: Ten core participants from five multigrade schools and the nucleus high school………..72
Table 4. Family participants: Those with whom I had many informal conversations and whom I interviewed ………....74
Table 5. Number of days of classroom and profesional development participant observations by teacher and school semester……….….114
Table 6. Interview information by participant name, school, setting, date and length……..92
Table 7. The nine cross-curricular pillars and a brief summary of their 36 components…..367
LIST OF MAPS Map 1. Nicaragua’s physical location on the Central American isthmus, World Atlas. ... 170
Map 2. Nicaragua’s economic activity, University of Texas. ... 171
Map 3. Nicaragua’s Land Utilization and Vegetation, ... 171
LIST OF PHOTOS
Photo 1. “Nicaragua will be free as long as it has sons that love it.” ... 141
Photo 2. Poem to Sandino ... 141
Photo 3. Larger-than-life statue in the nation’s capital, Managua. ... 142
Photo 4. Sandinista Youth do literacy census. ... 153
Photo 5. Environmental league in a Managua classroom. ... 154
Photo 6. The Minister of MI FAMILIA presents to Level 1 national educators. ... 193
Photo 7. State training of level 2 educators (replication)... 193
Photo 8. First Lady Murillo’s Basic Guide to her “Live Pretty” Campaign, Jan/2013. ... 264
Photo 10. Eating the school meal ... 356
LIST OF ACRONYMS
ALBA Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America EFA Education for All (UNESCO)
EGRA Early Grade Reading Assessment
FSLN Frente Sandinista para la Liberación Nacional Sandinista Front for National Liberation
GRUN Gobierno de Reconciliación y Unidad Nacional Government of National Reconciliation and Unity MDG Millenium Development Goal
MINED Ministerio de Educación Ministry of Education
MINED INFORMA Ministry of Education INFORMS (on-line articles) NGO Non-governmental organization (non-profit implied) NGEO Non-governmental educational organization
PLI Partido Liberal Independiente Independent Liberal Party
PNDH Plan Nacional de Desarrollo Humano
National Human Development Plan (NHDP)
TEPCE Taller de Evaluación, Planificación y Capacitación Educativa Education Evaluation, Planning and Training Workshop UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund
Chapter One Introduction
This is a study of how teachers use societal, institutional and individual belief systems and knowledge (and negotiate knowledge gaps) in multigrade elementary schools in central Nicaragua. I examine how participating rural teachers grappled with a constantly changing, top down and mostly verbal values education program that was critical to the government’s curricular transformation and community organizing efforts. While contributing to literature on teacher beliefs, the study constructively critiques the Nicaraguan educational system and its role in helping form and influence teacher practices – particularly those it denounced as outdated. Though Nicaraguan government officials, many teachers and most families blamed teachers for the education crisis (citing “bad” or “unmotivated” teachers), this study seeks to understand the crisis from a different vantage point: a psycho-social perspective that analyzes how overlapping societal and institutional belief systems related with those of individual teachers and impacted their practice.
The study points to some of the many benefits to embracing a multi-layered psycho-social perspective. It demonstrates how a multi-dimensional and multi-sited analysis can provide a comprehensive and inclusive understanding of teacher practices rather than refer to generalized blame, biased judgment and simple dichotomies (i.e., good teacher/bad teacher). It also suggests approaches regarding how professional development can identify overlapping belief systems and understandings – including those of participating teachers – to bridge them with new knowledge and practices.
In a pointed commentary of a global movement that seeks to evaluate classroom teachers individually and out of context using questionable statistical procedures, the study demonstrates how a teacher’s individual beliefs and knowledge that policy makers profess to measure through standardized test results of student learning cannot be understood statically but rather within the richly contextualized backgrounds, environments, cognitions,
relationships and interactions that comprise teaching and learning in daily practice. Essentially, to gain a more realistic and extensive understanding of relationships among teacher beliefs, knowledge and practice one must include societal and institutional influences on teachers that teachers negotiate and at times adjudicate, including external (policy and curricular) mandates and professional development imposed upon them.
Who is to Blame?
Profe Adriana taught science for seven years at a private urban high school in the central Nicaraguan mountains before the Sandinista government tapped her to become Assistant Principal at San José de la Montaña High School (SJMHS) in 2007. “I don’t have as much experience as my colleagues,” she admitted. “Some of them have over 30 years, and I only have 14!”1
Like all high school administrators and most elementary school principals, Adriana and her colleague Profe Rosibel (the principal) were Sandinista political appointees in positions “of trust.”2
The Ministry of Education (MINED) tasked them with the
responsibility to ensure the communication and supervision of all government mandates and orientations at their school and among all twelve multigrade schools that formed their school nucleus. Adriana explained that her colleague Rosibel moved from over thirty years teaching elementary school to an administrative position in high school because “they sent her here,” referring to MINED and Sandinista party leadership. “She did not have a choice.”3 Rosibel’s stint as Principal at SJMHS was abbreviated by a rebellion organized by the majority anti-Sandinista, pro-Liberal Party teaching staff at the high school. In late August 2013, the
MINED designated Adriana acting principal and then permanent principal three months later. The SJMHS school nucleus included a total of 57 first to eleventh grade teachers. Adriana was the main facilitator of the nucleus. She described her relationship with
multigrade teacher members as “mostly administrative and logistical. We do not enter into the pedagogical part at all.”4
The last Tuesday or Wednesday of each month, she attended a municipal-level Education Evaluation and Planning Workshop (TEPE5) where she received orientations to communicate to teachers along with a meeting agenda she was to follow in that Friday’s Education Evaluation, Planning and Training Workshop (TEPCE6
) with the classroom teachers in her nucleus. Adriana transmitted MINED orientations she received from her superiors to those under her purview in the nucleus.
1 Yo no tengo tanta experiencia como mis colegas. Algunos de ellos tienen mas de 30 anos, y yo solo tengo 14! 2 De confianza
3
La mandaron para acá. No tuvo elección ninguna.
4 Desde el núcleo, nuestra relación con las escuelas multigrade es más que nada administrativa, sobre cuestiones
logísticas. No entramos en la parte pedagógica para nada, de ninguna forma.
5 Taller de Evaluación y Planificación Educativa
In a March 2013 TEPCE, Adriana led the monthly reflection by reading aloud a text provided to her in the TEPE. An excerpt is below:
I want to share with you an imaginary dialogue among different members of the education community. It’s called, “Who is at Fault for Everything in Education?” It begins with a teacher talking with her colleagues.
- The Ministry of Education is fully to blame – said one.
- No, my dear Sir – the Minister of Education said, while leaving a cabinet meeting. – Our teachers are fully to blame. They do not comply with the 200 days of classes mandated.
- Lies! – said a union member as she fixed a date for the next strike. – The Minister of the Economy is to blame because he doesn’t care about the education budget.
- That is incorrect – said the Minister of the Economy. – Educators are to blame because they only think about their three months of vacation and going to San Juan to eat enchiladas and rosquillas.
- Infamy! – a teacher said, fumbling with her last coins to get home from school. – The principal is to blame because he doesn’t defend us.
- That is not true – the principal said, as he attended to a mother complaining about a teacher at his school. – Parents are to blame because they do not control their
children and make them study.
- That has nothing to do with it! – said a parent watching a popular television game show. – The television is to blame because it stuns and confuses kids.
- You are wrong! – said a host on a children’s television program as he read errors on the cue cards behind the cameras. – Teachers are to blame because they have no imagination.
- Calumny! – said a teacher as she photocopied the same planning from four years ago. –Congress is to blame because the education system is wholly outdated. - Not true! – A Congressman shouted. – Kids today are to blame because nothing is important to them.
- You all are crazy – said a student as he lit a cigarette in the classroom. – The blame for everything in education lies with the adults because they give us bad models. - Not true! – said a mother. – The politicians are to blame because they do not offer opportunities or a future for toda
y’s youth.
- Stop! – said the watchperson at the local high school, sitting at the gate and checking people going in and out. – I know who is to blame for everything in
education: The blame lies with someone else. The other is always the one to blame!7
As Adriana read the text, teachers laughed and shook their heads at different parts, particularly when the union member fixed a date for a strike and the teacher copied her planning year after year. When Adriana finished reading, more than a handful of teachers offered their thoughts on the many actors in education, how students and teachers suffered under the current system, and how they were all responsible. They agreed they should stop blaming “the other” and that everyone should take more responsibility.
The approach I take in this study mirrors their reflections in many ways. In each chapter, I identify and analyze different kinds of influences on teachers, their understandings, beliefs, knowledge and practices. I draw upon the reflection’s message which in turn related to a popular Nicaraguan government slogan (“Education is a shared responsibility”) and model: “The Shared Responsibility Model.” These multiple and constantly interacting layers of beliefs and knowledge in teachers’ daily lives required a long-term ethnographic
commitment.
To achieve my goal of understanding how teachers understood overlapping societal, institutional and individual beliefs and knowledge – and how they used different
combinations of them in their practices – I engaged in two parallel ethnographic efforts. Two years of field work, a third year of documentary analysis, and two more years of analysis, interpretation and writing allowed me to map out shared societal beliefs, Ortega government beliefs, and individual teacher beliefs regarding values and values education in and out of schooling, as well as other related beliefs about teaching and learning, governance, education, and more. My analysis in schools and classrooms with teachers, students and parents was deepened by understanding beliefs systems that reverberated in and out of the classroom and influenced teachers personally and professionally; these included commonly shared “Nicaraguan” beliefs (e.g., Christian faith, patriotic beliefs) and beliefs raised by the government (e.g., political party identity, Christian faith, patriotic beliefs, beliefs about teaching and learning, beliefs about specific Sandinista values).
7
Rural Multigrade Schooling: Answering some Unanswered Questions
Profe Adriana was one of ten core teachers with whom I worked and got to know during two years of participant-observation field work in the San Jose de la Montaña region. This core group of teachers represented a microcosm of the socio-professional world in which multigrade teachers worked in Nicaragua. Though multigrade education is the primary modality of formal schooling for millions of rural children around the world – and only one for most rural Nicaraguan children – it is woefully under-studied and misunderstood. Policy-makers, government officials and educators routinely denounce bad or unmotivated teachers for the rote learning that prevails along with a documented fraction of mandated instructional time. Little is understood from multigrade teachers’ perspectives even though the teacher is an expert on her profession. There is little institutional or societal reflection, and virtually no extensive analysis, on the many macro and micro influences that contribute to a country’s often sub-standard multigrade education.
In Nicaragua, this ignorance was exacerbated by an historic and institutionalized marginalization and denigration of rural life and schooling. Rather than confirm or deny the veracity of the many aspersions toward multigrade schooling and teachers, this study seeks to understand multigrade teachers and teaching by understanding psycho-social influences on their practice. As studies have shown, rote learning and reduced instructional time was el pan
del dia in all the multigrade classrooms. In Nicaragua, it became more pronounced in
unigrade rural high school. Where I deviated from most existing research was in the analysis and explanation of this trend: I found that many factors contributed to and reinforced how teachers taught in multigrade schools, from teacher experiences as students, teacher preparation, professional development, institutional policies and expectations, curricular materials, and shared societal beliefs. When taken together, these influences provide a much stronger explanatory framework than the standard denouncement of “bad or unmotivated teachers.”
An urgent question aired repeatedly by Central American governments, multi-lateral agencies and development organizations working in education was why teachers continue to use rote, memoristic, purely transmission methods of teaching and learning when the
constructivist revolution was introduced in the mid-1990s. The same simplistic answers were repeated time and again: bad and unmotivated teachers, teachers without vocation, teachers
without values. I attempt to answer this question from a different angle: by understanding the combinations of beliefs and knowledge teachers use as they make decisions in their practice.
By design, the key questions I address involve theoretical and applied concerns simultaneously. In Nicaragua, I wanted to learn how teacher knowledge, beliefs and practice interrelate in different and constantly changing contexts. Teachers negotiate a maze of stakeholders, policies, curricular materials, belief systems and knowledge that change each day, each school year, and year after year. Their current belief systems and knowledge – and those swirling around them in the school community, among education officials and policy makers, and embedded in curricular materials (to mention a few) – are rooted in history and future aspirations. Teacher practice emerges in relation to how teachers understand and negotiate these multi-level systems of beliefs and knowledge. Rather than judging if one way is better than another, or defining a single path or combination, I seek to understand the different ways teachers approach and engage these overlapping beliefs in changing contexts and settings.
Values Education: A Foundation of Curricular Transformation
Through my field work, I identified four main areas that, according to teachers and MINED officials, comprised the bulk of a teacher’s work: values education, plans and planning, math and language arts. I sought to understand relationships among belief systems, knowledge, knowledge gaps and practice in each of these areas before comparing them. Because so little is investigated and known about multigrade teachers’ lives and decisions in rural Nicaragua, I struggled with how to address the prototypical qualitative quandary of balancing description and analysis. In my first renditions (drafts), I provided dense description with abundant quotes as a nod to participating teachers and the importance of highlighting their often muted and at times silenced voices combined with an official disinterest in their rich experiences and perspectives. An academic mentor censored this decision, characterizing the text as uninteresting and contributing nothing to scholarly understandings (and admitting she had not read it). I struggled to combine sufficient description with analysis that leaves room for readers to make their own conclusions, ideas and possibilities from the data, description and analysis I provide. I also divided my work into four separate studies (on values education, planning and instructional time, math and language arts) to provide justice to this description-analysis combination.
This study, then, is the first of the four I mention above. It looks exclusively at the fundamental component of the Ortega government’s curricular transformation: Sandinista values education. Values gave relevance to academic content and helped ensure students graduated with a commitment to their community and the nation. Values also were
instrumental in encouraging adult family members to benefit from government projects and join government campaigns to restore rights and work together towards a better future.
To understand teacher practice in relation to values education, four questions guided my work. How did teachers understand and assess teaching values? How did they understand and facilitate student learning of values? How did they distinguish or assess when student learning of values was happening or not? How did teachers use and communicate these understandings? As I came to understand teacher understandings and practices, I found that their individual beliefs and knowledge in the present were tightly related with societal and institutional beliefs and knowledge about values. I had to examine how teachers understood these “other” beliefs and belief systems that some teachers shared, some rejected and almost all negotiated when they received values orientations from government officials. These negotiations were critical to how teachers decided if and how to implement mandated values lessons and activities throughout the school year.
Beginning the Research: Positioning the Researcher
The idea for this study grew out of my life in Central America during the war in El Salvador, its reconstruction after the U.N.-negotiated Peace Accords, and my work with urban and rural teachers since that time. The teachers, students and families with whom I worked for more than 20 years formed me and contributed to who I am as a mother, partner, woman, teacher, researcher, educational psychologist, and community member. Miller-Cleary (2013) writes about hybridity in one’s identities and hybrid border crossers,
describing people who learn to negotiate combinations of identities they develop as actors in different cultural settings or sub-cultures within one mainstream culture. Through my life in the U.S. and Central America, in and out of academia, I have developed a hybridity that helps me survive and thrive. In academia, I draw upon my commitment and guiding faith in
community, organization, struggle, and social justice (not mainstream academic values) to guide my research, service and teaching. My spiritual commitment to walk with the poor as we make change together, inside and out, in small ways and on larger stages, guides
everything I do. In the next section, I explain this positionality and how it evolved in Nicaragua.
My Positionality as Interactive Repositionings
I use my numerous vantage points or “bundles of identities” (Miller-Cleary, 2013) as complementary resources that influence each research design, how I think and act in different settings, the relationships I form in addition to how they form, their quality, length and purposes. They also influence the relationships I do not pursue. In most qualitative work, the researcher is the principal instrument and multiple positionalities contribute to the meanings I co-create with participants and documentary data. But they do not act alone. My personal positioning is proportionate and enmeshed with positionalities people externally prescribe upon and about me, my work and my family. For this study, the interdependence among myself, the Nicaraguans with whom I interacted daily, and my academic mentors was critical to the relationships I pursued and developed (and those I did not), as well as the meanings and understandings I developed over time and wrote about in this study.
I want to underscore several lessons I have learned from my hybridity. I act from a belief that each of us is culturally formed and socialized in an ongoing and never-ending process. Hybridity endows me with a constant reminder and awe that there are many ways to understand the same thing. This contributes to my interest in contextual nuances over
universal truths, the latter proudly disconnected from culture, history and local or indigenous knowledge. It guides my interest in competing narratives and nuances in people’s shared beliefs, knowledge and behaviors.
My hybridity informs my belief that context not only matters, it is indispensable to all human meaning making – including teaching, learning and research. Context – including physical settings, actors and an array of often conflicting and overlapping psycho-social beliefs and knowledge – is an essential part of how we create meaning, using language, interactions and relationships. Hybridity allows me to negotiate identities to celebrate, grieve, think, work and otherwise live in distinct contexts (and cultures) – including knowing how and when to bridge, separate or particularize identities and beliefs. It guides me in placing context front and center to understand cognitions in relation to actions.i
Hybridity is a blessing that helps me see and appreciate differences, and act
coherence is often riddled with contradictions, and even contributes to them. It has allowed me to see, for example, how efforts to homogenize often rely on differentiation and
marginalization in the name of homogenization. Hybridity also helps me evaluate how who I am and how I think, believe and act changes over time. It has helped me learn through listening, observing, thinking; through interaction, communication and reflection, and mostly self-reflection. This has segued seamlessly into qualitative research and ethnography. It also has convinced me to never try to speak for others.
Taken together, all these lessons and consequences of hybridity remind me I cannot ignore, simplify or devalue context, and that multiple perspectives provide insights otherwise untapped. Below, I provide several examples of my positionality that were particularly salient to this final product. I follow each with a brief description of interrelated positionalities by others, which I call repositionings. I leave a full discussion of the
reciprocity among one’s positionalities with external repositionings by others to a separate forum.
Position #1: I am a learner. My primary position in this study was as a learner. I
sought to co-construct meaning with those around me, focusing on their words, feelings, and understandings. I collected data from multiple sources in an effort to understand the many perspectives swirling around multigrade teaching and learning, perspectives that contributed to individual teacher beliefs and knowledge and how teachers used different combinations of these in their practice. My conscious positioning as a learner in most aspects of my life began first as a survival skill before becoming a way of living, teaching, and researching. For this study, my learner stance helped me survive and maneuver complicated and often
overwhelming environments. As a learner, I constantly gave thanks for the unprecedented opportunity Nicaraguan teachers and community residents gave me to learn more about the myriad challenges teachers (and students) face in classrooms throughout Central America. These were similar to challenges I faced for years in Salvadoran classrooms with teachers and MINED officials – and never had the time to analyze and fully understand. As a learner, I was able to look forward to working in classrooms each day despite challenges that
regularly tested my skills and ability to persist. With this incredible learning opportunity, I hoped my research in Nicaragua, with my experience in El Salvador, could contribute to national and international conversations about education challenges in Central America.
From a vantage point as a learner, I also knew this study could contribute to a more nuanced understanding of education in different countries, including U.S. schools,ii because my attempt to understand formal teaching-learning processes by examining relationships among teacher knowledge, beliefs and practice can be beneficial across borders and school systems.
Repositioning: La Gringuita is a teacher. All the teachers and family members who
participated in this study positioned me as a teacher rather than a learner. In Chapter 3 I describe my roles as participant observer in classrooms, and how no teacher allowed me the luxury of straight observation for more than one day. When I lived in San Juan and Los Coquitos, my neighbors identified me as a visiting teacher, and many asked me to stay. When I stopped visiting Los Coquitos school, dozens of parents asked me why I no longer taught there. When I wrote notes in children’s notebooks when they had a particularly good day, mothers sought me out to tell me how much they appreciated my teaching their children at school. Many who knew I taught in El Salvador and the U.S. asked questions about
differences between their school system and those in the other two countries. My traveling teacher status held more strongly for most people who came to know me than my insistence that I was there to learn about their education system and teacher experiences. This
repositioning was related to a lack of knowledge regarding research and educational psychology, a positioning I look at next.
Position #2: I am an educational psychologist. I approached this study from the
position of being a U.S.-trained educational psychologist and researcher. This simultaneously helped and hindered my first year of work with Nicaraguan teachers. In the first months of my classroom observations, I found myself struggling with inner conflicts stemming from my focus on what I was not seeing and hearing combined with the violence and chaos that was part of every school day. I heard an inner voice reciting what I believed to be true about motivation, best practices, classroom management and learning-centered environments. I left my five-hour visits feeling overwhelmed and disheartened more often than not, and worked to turn those feelings into the quest for understanding from each teacher’s perspective.
Physiological reactions included headaches (most teachers complained of regular headaches), stomach issues, chronic exhaustion and, less frequently, shaking/trembling. My torment came mostly from the incredible lost potential I witnessed, the many missed learning/teaching opportunities, and how students were systematically marginalized and virtually condemned
to another generation of functional illiteracy and poverty by the very system that proposed their self-development. I learned that I needed time-outs from the classroom to ponder, write (more than field notes), and simply meditate to regain my strength and return to the
classrooms. Everyone around me – teachers, students and parents – reminded me that these classroom environments were normal and expected. This helped me remember that my mission was to understand that belief and so many others that had nothing to do with my own.
When my beliefs and knowledge began to muddle my mission I developed a sort of internal buzzer to remind myself: you are here to understand the multigrade classrooms from teachers’ perspectives around their practice. I trained myself to ask a constant question, “Why does the teacher feel she needs to act/interact this way?” and “What does she say and why” or with those people and not others. I learned to catch myself as I imposed my own teacher, educational psychology, and justice frames of reference on what I saw and observed among teachers, PD facilitators, and government officials. Some days were more difficult than others. When I observed what I perceived to be unethical interactions during data collection, I sometimes discarded my participant-observer role and intervened as Tenley, educator, mother, parent, human being. Though I will not report these ethnical issues publicly,iii they contributed to my understandings. And when I analyzed these moments, my primary role as learner prevailed: I asked what can I learn from these interactions rather than judge those involved.iv The more I practiced this positioning, the easier it became.
Repositioning: She is a gringa from a U.S. university. I soon realized that one of the
many things I needed to understand about Nicaragua was the ramifications of most people knowing little about research. Some dismissed research as imperialist, others as scientific without values. I learned how to conduct more responsible research in this context than the U.S.-IRB process that systematically disrespected local norms in multiple ways. For example, the UNM IRB refused a waiver of signed consent and mocked a suggestion to respect local decision-making mechanisms. It insisted instead on individual consent and thumb prints with a third party signatory acting as witness. This proved humiliating to some parents while angering others. It ignored and devalued the Nicaraguan emphasis on
community over individual decision-making, and provided one more example of “Yanqui imperialism” (and U.S. interference) in Nicaragua. The IRB’s insistence on child assent
actively disparaged Nicaraguan parental authority and normal adult-child interactions in which the adult is in charge. Its primordial assumption embedded in every procedure that potential participants, young and old, understand research enough to consent or decline was severely faulty.
In Nicaragua, a tiny intellectual minority of Nicaraguans based in Managua (who studied mostly in Europe) knew about research. Fewer used it – notably not the government. Most research was done by multilateral agencies about policy, and pointed to the many deficits Nicaragua suffers being the second poorest country in Latin America. The
government collected loads of data, but rarely disseminated it publicly. This caused some (mostly in the opposition) to question if the GRUN was unable or unwilling to analyze and use the data it collected. It was an important question because the few times the MINED cited percentages they were either inaccurate (when original numbers were provided) or rounded (up most likely with no data to verify the tabulations).
In this context, my constant note-taking and questioning was something the Gringuita did for something at her university. People were interested in what I was doing, what I was finding, and why I was doing it, but among the teachers no one had heard of a doctorate and several were much more impressed with my masters than my pursuit of a higher degree. In response to this repositioning of myself as researcher, I developed extra consent check-ins with teachers and family members that included regular reminders that I was collecting data, and that they could say no to my requests for information or observation time at any time with no repercussions. My visits and work in schools would continue no matter what. This repositioning spurred my efforts to respect how knowledge in local populations is part of intricate belief systems and experiences that academia may not understand or recognize, or judge as ineffective, uneducated or irrelevant.
Position #3: Liberation struggles build solidarity, shared understandings. This
third position and repositioning requires more background and information than the previous ones, mostly because it falls outside any norm of U.S. culture and experience. It is based in something fundamental to Nicaraguan and Salvadoran realities: how liberation struggles and war change every person involved while changing an entire nation. Most Latin American countries have a healthy aversion to war after surviving dictatorships and civil wars that have ravaged their respective countries and personally touched every family. The U.S. wages and
funds many wars, none on its own soil in decades, and none in conjunction with one of the most powerful nations on earth. That experience has personal effects (and positionings) that I will describe briefly below (I add information to endnotes for readers interested in more details).
For much of my twenties, I supported a citizen’s movement in El Salvador that sought to create a new El Salvador in the midst of brutal repression by a death squad oligarchy. At first, my role was to raise funds for the unarmed movement in coordination with several U.S. organizations fighting our government’s enabling of indiscriminate repression against civilians, including priests, U.S. and Salvadoran religious sisters, and thousands more. I worked first from San Francisco (five years) in the largest movement in the U.S. in the 1980s – in solidarity with the people of Central America. As U.N. brokered negotiations and each side moved slowly towards ending the war, I moved to San Salvador to open an office for the same U.S. agency, funding and reporting on self-development efforts in urban and rural communities, supporting institution-strengthening in non-governmental organizations, and consulting on municipal and microregional (multiple municipalities) projects. As reconstruction ended, I moved into a coastal ex-war zone with 14 communities of mostly ex-combatants. I worked in adult education and then elementary schools in three ex-war zones in rural El Salvador, living in the coast and a northern region for the following eight years.
This experience of close to twenty years – plus the five years of professional development with Salvadoran teachers that I continued annually while in the U.S. – helped me understand many aspects of Nicaragua’s revolutionary history and Ortega’s remolded “Christian, Socialist, Solidarity” revolution. At the same time, since each country’s revolutionary ideological foundations, actors and histories are different,v the Salvadoran experience – including the beliefs and knowledge it helped me form –acted like blinders as I tried to understand Nicaraguans’ unique experiences. I learned how to identify when my perspective interfered and how to rein it in, how to use my cross-cultural hybridity as an asset and stop when it became a liability.
For example, in El Salvador I lived and worked mostly in rural communities. I came to know the joys, sorrows, challenges and advantages of living in small, relatively isolated communities where the greatest resource was convivencia, living in community and relying
on your neighbor. This experience contributed to my insistence on working in rural multigrade schools in Nicaragua and the ease with which our family lived in rural
Nicaraguan settings. At the same time, my rural life in El Salvador did not prepare me for differences I found in central Nicaragua. In El Salvador, I identified and unlearned ignorant (U.S.-based) stereotypes against “illiterate” adults. I developed a deep respect for each person’s intellectual capacities and myriad knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs as I
worked with adults who had little to no formal schooling. This experience did not prepare me for the Nicaraguan belief that a person who does not know how to read, write or do basic math is “nobody” and one who does is “somebody.” Historically, Nicaragua’s intellectual elite has held powerful sway in politics (right, left and center) along with Catholic Church leaders. Sandino and many Sandinista leaders grew out of a tiny intellectual class and a formally schooled urban population. El Salvador’s revolutionaries, on the other hand, came mostly from rural areas where most people never had the opportunity to attend school or learn to read or write due to the war and oligarchic leaders. Illiterate Salvadorans are a product of the country’s history, period.
As I learned about Ortega’s history, I shared some of the constant questioning by opposition figures of his motives and commitment to create the equitable society he professed to seek. I knew some of this came from my experiences in El Salvador. As I analyzed government documents more carefully once out of the field, I began to feel more echoes from my experiences in El Salvador than clashes. For example, my experiences in El Salvador changed who I am, how I think, what I believe, and how I act – exactly what First Lady Murillo professed to want to accomplish through her Campaign, “Live Clean, Live Healthy, Live Pretty, Live Well!” How the government attempted to implement personal transformations was completely different from Salvadoran ways, but some foundational ideas were quite similar. Below, I describe several of the personal transformations important to this study.
Societal change builds on personal transformation, and war changes everything. In
El Salvador, I transformed personally by actively participating (what Ortega called
“protagonism”) with others in a grassroots movement built on the idea that change required a prolonged struggle at local, regional and national levels. This transformation was not
wholly social, based on life and death (literally), hope and faith in humanity, working
together and other shared values. This work contrasted with the militarized setting around us in which powerful leaders used soldiers and death squads to terrorize and silence people, particularly those who spoke out against the status quo and created viable alternatives against all the odds. Leaders and participants alike were targeted for torture and disappearance, usually death. Thousands were displaced from their homes, treated worse than domesticated animals, and yet they not only maintained their hope and faith, they continued their arduous work in the face of death. I had never experienced anything close to that reality in the U.S. The experience was similar in Nicaragua, before and during the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s.
I learned several things through the war and these transformational experiences that are important to this study. I learned about terror and the powerlessness one feels in the face of institutionalized government repression and brutality. I worked with many people who had overcome that terror, changed it to conviction and the unwavering decision to not be silent and to show an alternative was possible by building it in the midst of war. I learned how empowerment was tied to maintaining one’s dignity in the midst of many indignities, and what it meant when someone tried to take your dignity away from you. I learned about risking one’s own life while kindling a collective ideal – and never losing hope. I saw how responding to inhumanity, hatred and violent insanity with hope, love, faith, resistance and action lay at the heart of personal, family and societal transformation. I came to know the power of revolutionary mysticism, a spiritual understanding and sentiment that motivates the transformations and actions I describe above. Not only do I know that these things are unknown to most U.S. citizens, I know they are deemed unscientific and not worthy of including in education research. I also recognize many of these experiences and values in Ortega’s policies, projects and campaigns – and in many Central American teachers’ lives.
I also understood how U.S. leaders (and citizens) used a patriotic veneer of righteousness, human rights and democracy, and simplistic anti-communist rhetoric, to justify U.S. funding and other assistance in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians south of our border. None were U.S. citizens and most did not speak English. In sharp contrast to falsehoods espoused in U.S. rhetoric and discourse, people’s crimes lay in their refusal to be marginalized and impoverished for one more generation, to
be constantly sick and dying early deaths for wealthy landowners who served U.S. interests. They refused to contemplate their children suffering the same indignities to serve U.S. geo-political and economic interests. I saw how difficult it was for most U.S. citizens to believe that their country, and each of them through their tax dollars, was contributing to this
slaughter.vi U.S. citizens have no experience with national government repression that ignites resistance, mass near-death experiences that empower a movement – and its individual actors – to take ever bolder actions, or how protracted solidarity with others overcomes fear. Few know of the almost inhuman strength, vision and grace that comes out of repression, or how when a government kills a leader in a liberation movement that repressive action sparks hundreds and even thousands to become empowered or re-commit to continue the struggle for the common good. Nicaraguans understood these actions and interactions. They hold America and Americans responsible for their collective and individual traumas, and they cite the nefarious imperialist history in their school curriculum, in the privacy of their homes, on street corners and during bus rides.
Finally, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans know the power of historic memory and never forgetting those who lost their lives to make a better future, the brutality of marginalization and repression, or the power of liberation and organization in its stead. Again, there is nothing as visceral or heartfelt in U.S. experiences, despite the large U.S. role in these experiences. Historic memory and commemorations are both a survival response to
government repression against its citizenry and the many official lies told and a reminder to all that it can never happen again. Remembering is about giving voice and justice for those killed and silenced, finding inspiration for those who remain, and keeping the vision of a better future alive. It’s about respecting the long struggle and many sacrifices along the way in one’s own body, mind and soul. People who have not experienced these things have no compass or map on which to understand them, no way to feel the lifelong and profoundly deep impacts these experiences have on every person and an entire nation. This makes it easy to dismiss or deem them irrelevant, to misname them political shenanigans, or mock them as unnecessary – and not feel any responsibility. It makes it easy for researchers without these experiences to assume they are unnecessary to understand.
Researching in “Unstable Places” (Greenhouse, Mertz & Warren, 2002) or “Violently Divided Societies” (Smyth & Robinson, 2001) requires positioning and understandings of
these contexts. They often conflict with academia’s judgments about what is researchable, or what constitutes scientific and thus valuable beliefs and knowledge. They are also out of reach for many who have not experienced them. The lesson here is that they are integral to Central American life, teachers and education – and they are integral to this researcher. I include them in this study.
Repositioning: “Yanqui empire,” “Yanqui imperialism” and “the family of gringos.” My son and his father were both born in El Salvador and speak Spanish as their
first and preferred language. My husband fought all 12 years in the Salvadoran civil war, a liberation struggle that occurred during the same decade as its sister revolution by the
Nicaraguan Sandinistas. These identities and experiences were trumped in no uncertain terms by my presence in our family. With one Gringa, the three of us became the gringo family.
As a family, we suffered fairly steady harassment by government officials and some neighbors who regularly voiced anti-gringo sentiments. This was in line with a general rejection by Nicaraguans of what they and Ortega called “the Yanqui empire” and “Yanqui imperialism” that they were sure had kept Nicaragua in poverty since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. I knew some of U.S. history in Nicaragua before beginning the study, and came to understand and feel it more deeply while collecting and analyzing data in the fieldvii and even more once back in the U.S. doing more detailed analyses.
A Spanish-language Study Translated into Mostly an English-language Text
I collected data during this study in Spanish, did ongoing analysis in Spanish and English, and wrote the final products in English. This bilingual effort requires some notes and resources for readers, including an explanation regarding Spanish translations, the use of certain Spanish words in the text, a list of Spanish acronyms, and other language decisions I made in an effort to ease the English reader. A reader’s guide follows.
A Reader’s Guide to this Study
I collected data in Spanish with some fieldnotes sprinkled with my English shorthand. I analyzed most of my data in Spanish (with very few translations), and wrote in Spanish and English. Using the enormous amount of data I collected (and generated) from almost 150 days of classroom and teacher PD observations, over 30 hours of interviews and many dozens more of informal conversations, and over 1800 articles and primary source
committee members, my immediate audience. Below, I explain my translation decisions and other guideposts for readers.
Translations in footnotes. This is an English-language dissertation for a mostly
monolingual dissertation committee. For this document, I translated quotations from participants and documents from Spanish to English. I then had a bilingual speaker whose first language is Spanish review my translations. Since translations rely on multiple levels of meaning and context, they are rarely literal. Some words carry several possible meanings or translations. I infrequently added a synonym for this kind of word in the translated English text in parentheses. For words that require more explanation, I provide one in the text (e.g., sensibilizar, convivir) and in the glossary at the end of the document. For the most part, I placed the original Spanish in a footnote on the same page on which the English translation appears in the text. Due to space limitations, i placed extensive original Spanish quotations in appendices with a footnote to indicate their exact location.
My English translations rarely include “ums,” pauses or repetition unless these were integral to the meaning of conversation content. These sounds and repetitions ubiquitous in natural speech often distract readers from the person’s message when on the written page. I made these edits to help readers focus on the content of what people said, making as few changes as possible.
Paraphrasing. In certain situations and for several different reasons, I paraphrased
what people said. While I taught, while I observed certain moments during PD, and while in informal conversations, I rarely took word-for-word notes. I used jottings. During recess, PD breaks or immediately after a conversation, I expanded on my jottings. I also paraphrased common ideas and phrases to call attention to their generality in society or among a certain population (e.g., teachers, Sandinista leaders). I paraphrased teacher critiques of the
government when I could not find a public critique to represent the private one. This was one way to protect the identity of the teacher. I also paraphrased when I had long or disjointed explanations that were not confusing to me (because of our many conversations) but that did not provide a concise quotation that would be understandable to most readers. Though some researchers (including one academic mentor) are dismissive of paraphrasing, I found it necessary and helpful – and in no way affected the findings of this study.
Spanish words in the English text. I italicized Spanish words that I kept in the
English text. These words have no literal translations and their descriptive translations cannot be repeated each time they appear. They often represent complex concepts that have few English equivalents, like convivencia and sensibilizacion. They may also have no English equivalent, like Danielista or Orteguista. Other words like orientacion appear as the translation of orientation because it straddled two meanings: order (from above) and orientation.
Quotations. I delineated three kind of quotations described below.
1) Quotations from documents are indented with the same spacing as the rest of the text, and they are not italicized.
2) Quotations from classroom observation field notes, interview transcripts and informal conversations directly with me are indented with single spacing, and are not italicized. 3) Excerpts from field notes are indented with single spacing, and are italicized.
Endnotes. I placed extra information – extensions of analyses, additional examples
and citations – in endnotes for each chapter.
Spanish-English glossary. I added a glossary at the end of this document to aid the
monolingual English reader.
Acronym listing. Because people use acronyms liberally in Nicaragua (and El
Salvador), I do so in this text. I provided a list of acronyms before this chapter for easy access to their Spanish meaning and English translation.
An introduction, three sections, and a conclusion. I divided the presentation of this
study into three sections or prats, each with their own brief introduction. Part One (chapters 2 and 3) describes theoretical and methodological frameworks that guided me in my research design, data collection and analysis in the field, and out-of-field analysis, interpretation and writing. Part Two (chapters 4, 5 and 6) describes and analyzes overlapping macro contexts that affected and influenced participating teachers on a daily basis, from the government and Ministry of Education. This is part of my ethnographic effort to understand the government and its beliefs, knowledge and practices – and how these related with those of classroom teachers. As part of this broad psycho-social setting in which teachers worked, I include descriptions of several socio-professional and physical settings as well. The majority of the
data presented in this section is documentary, with observations, interviews, conversations and artifacts informing the analysis.
Part Three (chapters 7, 8, and 9) describes relationships among societal, institutional and individual beliefs and knowledge as they related with teacher practice specific to values and the government’s values education. This section is the complementary ethnographic effort that focuses on individual teacher beliefs, knowledge and practice. It is rich with school and classroom data – a more traditional ethnographic presentation.
The tenth and final chapter is the Conclusion. Here, I bring together the findings from the parallel ethnographies to celebrate the knowledge gained through this psycho-social emphasis of overlapping beliefs systems and how teachers use them over time in different combinations. I also briefly look at practical implications for professional development.
