Janinka Greenwood

In this chapter, we explore the concept of quality, effectiveness, and relevance in English language teaching in Bangladesh in light of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs offer a foundation for considering the quality of education. We examine challenges in teacher development for effective teaching, including required initial qualifications for English teaching, recruitment, registration, and professional development. We consider these in terms of current and future challenges for our teachers and students in the post-COVID-19 and beyond scenario in Bangladesh. Our approach is predominantly conceptual and discursive, but we also draw on published data from a range of existing studies and media reports. We conclude that English teaching needs to be relevant to learners and their context, and we argue that as a subject, English has the capacity to contribute to teaching learners the life skills that they need in the changing world. We also argue that developing a well-qualified and well-developed teaching force is one of the most essential steps. We suggest developing a strategic plan for recruiting teachers, developing a strong programme of pre-service teacher education, and offering sustainable professional development opportunities for in-service teachers.

This article reports on teachers’ experiences of ICT training in rural areas of Nepal. It discusses aspects of policy documents to help understand the Nepali educational context, before highlighting the challenges of establishing and maintaining infrastructure and professional learning opportunities across a country with challenging terrain and extreme environmental conditions. It then examines teachers’ perceptions in five rural primary schools about their experiences of training to use modern educational technologies in instructional activities. The findings indicate that none of the teachers received training in the use of ICT in their initial teacher education and that the Government has allowed non-governmental organisations to provide ICT infrastructure and training for rural schools and teachers. Although this is a small study, it offers insights into the gap between policy and practice and highlights the contextual challenges of Nepal’s attempts to operate on a global educational level as well as the challenges for teachers.

This paper, by a Bangladeshi and a New Zealander, brings together narrative inquiry studies of the leadership initiatives in two quite different rural schools, in Bangladesh and New Zealand respectively. The schools are in communities that might be considered as significantly underprivileged, and generationally alienated from education, within their own countries. Those communities, however, have richness of different kinds. The schools have explored and found ways of connecting with that richness and their experiences can offer ideas to others in diverse locations, including the urban. Both cases are sites of an adventurous approach to meeting the needs of their students. Both illustrate how a rich learning environment can be created when the needs, aspirations and resources of the local environment and community are investigated, attended to and utilised. The paper reports the context and innovations in both schools. In doing so it highlights the dangers of homogenising national curricular concepts that ignore the importance of place and the emplaced identity of communities. It questions where a deficit lies: is it in the local rural community and its school or in national,and global systems thinking that ignores the significance of the local and particular? It also suggests that the place-based approaches in these two schools offer useful contributions to some of the challenges of education – in urban as much as rural settings - in a world that faces possibly extreme change.

The current National Curriculum 2012 of Bangladesh recommends all four skills of English language education to be assessed in school and public exams. In the curriculum, there is a suggestion to evaluate the listening abilities of students through a formative assessment throughout the year at schools. The marks of the listening assessment need to be counted with the other three skills while grading students’ English language papers for the secondary level in the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examination. However, the existing exam evaluates only reading and writing tasks. Although various attempts are underway to reform the current language assessment procedure by including listening and speaking skills, nothing has come out in concreate so far. With this article, I provide expert insights into the challenges of listening assessment with the goal of helping policymakers and the secondary school teachers. In-depth interviews with policymakers and secondary school teachers and (n=16) are qualitatively analysed to gain reflection into the existing challenges to assess listening and how to make the assessment procedures. The findings and discussion of the article propose a conceptual framework that can be helpful for the teachers and policymakers to deal with the challenges.

This paper explores the interplay of control and trust in a cross-national and cross-cultural professional development course. It examines the differing expectations of the overseas high-ranked education officials who were the students and of the course teachers, particularly in terms of: approaches to control of content and of interpersonal interactions; the cultural contexts in which the attitudes were shaped; the effect of the participants’ professional roles, particularly of their perceptions of accountability and power; the complex, continuing and yet shifting, interplays of control and trust and the ways these interplays impacted learning within the course. It proposes the concept of operational trust as a way to consider the relationship that developed. While the situation examined is situated within a particular context and reflective of the participants involved and therefore non-iterative, the discussion highlights patterns of interaction and gives rise to tentative theorisations with implications for other cross-cultural or cross-national teacher development projects.

This article explores the importance of place within doctoral research. It considers place as localised, experiential, interactional, embedded in history and discourses, and often multi-faceted and fluid. With a focus on the field of education, it argues that doctoral students need to navigate between the university, the place of study and the local context which is the field of their research, and that such navigation will enable them to explore the tension between the usefulness of global, critically developed (and sometimes homogenising) scholarship and the situated realities and needs of their local context. Drawing on the work of five doctoral students, it examines how they have contextualised their projects in the values, social and economic conditions, histories and aspirations of the sites of their fieldwork. It argues that such identification, exploration and description of place allow the students to lift the smudge of sameness, and allows the reader to better understand the meaning of the research.

This article reports the second stage of a study examining an academic partnership in which Bangladeshi doctoral students in a western university focus their research in the grounded context of Bangladesh and investigate the processes for change. After briefly outlining the previous published stage which examined the academic trade in higher education with developing countries, the article builds on the concept of fair academic trade to critically reflect on the development of a doctoral learning community, a publication project and three specific doctoral studies. The methodological approach is one of participatory action research, with focus on critical reflection on practice.

The study in one country to support the development of education in another is a regular event in the field of contemporary tertiary education, and it is likely to grow as developing countries accelerate their educational development projects and as Western universities seek international student funding. This article reports the case study of a specific teacher development project and examines the degree to which local development goals were met (or not) within an overtly international study experience, and uses the context and findings of the case to develop a discussion about fair academic trade. Because the stake holders in cross-national education are not univocal, it uses a number of different critical lenses to examine the findings and explore the complexities of the learning contract and its outcomes. It then offers a working model that nominates key elements for fair academic trade, and briefly reports on further collaborations that are growing out of the case study.

The music industry in the 21st century uses digital technology in a wide range of applications including performance, composition and in recording and publishing. Much of this digital technology is freely available via downloads from the internet, as part of software included with computers when they are purchased and via applications that are available for some mobile phones. Such technology is transforming music and the way people approach many traditional music activities. This paper is about transformative practices that are underway in some secondary school music classrooms. Practices are being shaped by the culture of the schools and the students that they recruit. We describe the perceptions and practices of nine music teachers in four New Zealand secondary schools with regard to digital technology and how they are changing their work in their classroom. Data collection techniques include interviews, observation and a questionnaire. The data were subjected to two stages of thematic analysis. Grounded analysis was used to allow the teachers' voices emerge. This was then followed by the application of five themes identified in the literature on pedagogic change prompted by teachers' adoption of digital technologies.