Rural-Based Primary School Teachers’ Inculcated Servant Leadership Skills and their Enhanced Capacity of Addressing Rural Education Challenges through Edu-Heroes Initiative in Tanzania

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reports the findings of a qualitative tracer study that was conducted for teachers in 13 rural-based primary schools in Tanzania. These teachers had benefited from a leadership training dubbed “Edu-heroes Initiative.” The project had been designed to enhance rural primary school teachers’ capacity to address rural education challenges through servant leadership. The tracing aimed to document their improvements evident in the actions they took in their respective rural schools, which were considered as primary units of analysis. The initiative had six phases – planning for training, participants’ selection, initial face-to-face training, participants’ deployment, and online post-trainings for a year, continuous data collection, and data analysis and report writing. Through thematic analysis, the tracer results show that the leadership trainings offered the necessary servant leadership skills to rural-based primary school teachers, who demonstrated enhanced capacity in finding local solutions to rural education challenges soon after their deployment. They engaged and created constructive connections with their students and other stakeholders in the pursuit of lasting solutions to the problems facing rural education. The article, therefore, recommends for scaling up of such continuous professional development to empower all rural-based teachers, with their innovative ideas deserving special attention and support from educational leaders and local communities for relevant and sustainable schools’ improvement