Monthly Archives: November 2013

Reflections on Smith 2005

A clear paper, albeit unreasonably strewn with acronyms, regarding the problems of where aid money is best directed. Reports the trend away from Technical Assistance (TA) and direct project support – seen as too directive. Sector Wide Approaches (SWA) and Direct Budget Support (DBS) are now favoured, allowing recipient governments to direct the funds and make their own capacity building decisions, so reflecting increased ownership of programmes.

Smith concludes however that recipient governments aren’t too good at these high level processes and that little of this high level spending actually results in building local capacity, which is the only place it is really effective.

Concern that achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDG) may actually be hindered by the redirection of aid money to high level. Do we want better education by colonial methods or worse education by delegating spending to recipient government control?

Reflections on Wise

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Wise talks about the imposition of legislation on schools. He features two problems:

The tendency of (western) schools to chase targets to the exclusion of other objectives of education – the teach to test or teach to OfSTED syndrome
The problem of disconnection of means and ends where means are specified without process to achieve the desired ends or ends are specified without obvious means to achieve them. He calls this hyperrationalisation

The first is in a way the opposite of the problem addressed by Jansen – who complained that host governments do not chase targets. The second is more in line with Government Aid reality – that ends are specified for which the means or process do not exist.

Reflections on Barrett and Jansen – studying theory or practice?

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The papers by Barrett and Jansen came from different directions with a huge gulf in their sense of pragmatism.

Barrett is research for its own sake. Introspective, indulgent, semantic – indeed anything but practical. When one eventually gleans some meaning out of the flowery language, there is some sense in the analysis of personality type among teachers and how it governs their teaching behaviour – but it doesn’t take us anywhere. There is a broad conclusion that, for progress to be likely, it has to build on teachers’ experience and their sense of their role but I think we might have guessed that!

Jansen by comparison is ruthlessly practical. He demolishes the development education target setting process from conceptual, methodological and organisational points of view and concludes that the process is more to do with meeting the political needs of donor and donee than any expectation of targets being met. The only disappointment is that he does not offer advice on a better path, only concludes that target setting does drive some beneficial action.

My own preference would be to talk about reference data rather than targets and about “straw-men”* rather than firm propositions. Individual situations can then be mapped against the reference and a framework for action devised that can replace all or part of the straw-man. That would achieve the same progress in a more meaningful process with more likelihood of local buy-in.

* A “straw-man” proposal is US parlance for a model proposal that is intentionally simplistic and designed to be changed and improved but triggers focused discussion more effectively than a blank sheet of paper.

Commentary on Bartlett

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Lesley Bartlett (2007) The comparative ethnography of educational projects: youth and adult literacy programmes in Brazil, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 37:2, 151-166, DOI: 10.1080/03057920601165421

Having lived and worked in Brazil this article interested me in how closely the findings mapped onto my own experience. I had previously learned languages at school over long periods using traditional “autonomous” methods. I started learning Portuguese in this way but rapidly found that I could not understand or communicate with only this base. To enable communication in the real world required idioms and conversational speech in relevant contexts. I realised I had to make an initial choice – to be accurate or to be fluent. Because I had little requirement for formal written output, I (implicitly) chose fluency, to be able to be understood and to influence people.

This created interesting reactions. My well educated staff would frequently correct my grammar. After I had talked to staff as a group people would confide “we knew what you meant”! However, people in the local community could understand me reasonably well and taught me lots of idioms which certainly would not reach the textbooks! This highlights the significant contrast between language as a badge of education and status and language as a means to communicate – very much Bartlett’s point.

Interestingly however, the traditional method is the one which has persisted better. I still remember more French vocabulary and grammar than I do Portuguese – which may say more about the structured way in which my particular brain works than anything to do with the better way to teach and learn language.