INTO CLASSROOM: TEACHERS AS REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONERS

Abstract

This is an interactive paper which deliberates the changes brought about in a community-based children's programme through the teachers. The teachers adopted action-based research to identify and solve their pedagogic concerns. It was through reflective teaching and learning praxis that oriented the (para)teachers to classify, identify and strategize their major classroom problems and solve them. The paper attempts to describe these strategies and processes of teaching-learning that are reviewed and modified by the teachers. These enabled teachers to become empowered ‘practitioners’ within their social context. The paper examines “sustainability” in terms of the transformation in the status of the teachers within their own classrooms. It also examines how empowering teacher; who has a grassroots position in the community programme could bring up and promote sustainable development for the entire educational programme. The paper presented is a culmination of field-based research study tittled Elementary Education Teachers Research Network (EETRN) undertaken at a nodal agency by the authors. The study presented the ethnographic accounts of classroom interactions. This paper intends to unfold and navigate through the intricacies of how the teachers engaged in the process of reflective teaching and research