Teaching in Developing Countries

Teachers in developing nations face numerous obstacles in the pursuit of their profession. Many developing nations do not have enough teachers to cope with the rising demand for education and the increased number of students in classrooms. Teachers in developing nations often do not possess college educations and many more have no pedagogical training. Even educated and reasonably well-trained teachers often have students in their classrooms who speak multiple languages or have disabilities, and these teachers are usually ill-equipped to instruct these students. Practical issues such as a lack of teaching resources, facilities, or transportation often plague teachers in developing countries and hinder their effectiveness. Even with the best of intentions and the most passionate commitment to teaching, teachers in developing countries have many barriers that significantly hinder them from providing quality education to their students.

Keywords Developing Country; Developed Country; Education for all; Globalization; International Teaching; Pedagogy; Primary Education; Secondary Education

Overview

The years 2005–2014 have been declared the United Nations Decade for Sustainable Development. UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Social, and Cultural Organization) and the United Nations have set a goal of Education For All (EFA), aiming to see all people in the world have access to a primary education by the year 2015. Because of the UN and UNESCO's vision, hundreds of countries around the world are making the education of their citizens a high priority, and multiple organizations and individuals are working to see this goal accomplished.

Much of this focus on education stems from a humanitarian perspective: education equips people for employment, helps eradicate poverty, empowers people, removes barriers such as gender discrimination, and is one of the primary factors in reducing suffering and improving people's lives. Countless philanthropic-minded organizations, individuals, and governments have recognized the powerful impact education has in people's lives. Increased globalization of our world and the flux in the labor market means that education is becoming more crucial for employment. Increasingly, the world's population needs to become educated in order to compete in the job market and be flexible enough to adapt to constant changes on the job and in life.

The increased demand for education creates a parallel demand for teachers, and both demands present a tremendous number of challenges to world education. Many nations, particularly developed nations, will be faced with large numbers of teachers retiring in the next decade, and filling the spots left by these experienced and qualified teachers will be a challenge. Developing nations in general will not see mass amount of teachers retiring in the future; their teacher quantity concerns stem more from rising rates of school enrollment and a lack of teachers in general.

Lack of Qualified Teachers

Developing countries are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to teacher quantity. Obviously, potential teachers need to be well-educated with sound backgrounds in pedagogy in order to qualify for teaching positions. However, in many developing nations, higher education levels among citizens remain low and there simply is not a large number of people who are educated enough to be teachers. The challenge in many developed nations is finding educated people who are interested in becoming teachers: for developing nations, the challenge is often educating interested people in order that they may become teachers.

Unfortunately, as the demand for education increases around the world, desperate governments too often fill their teaching ranks with people that are not qualified as teachers. In the face of the increased demand for quantity of education, quality of education often falls. Vegas (2007) stated that "Children in developing countries have the lowest mean test scores in international assessments of student learning, and they often show the largest variation in test scores as well" (p. 220). While poor education dispensed by under-qualified instructors is better than no education at all, low-quality education robs students of many of the benefits a high-quality education brings.

Additionally, teachers in developing countries may possess secondary and tertiary education but not have any specific pedagogical training prior to beginning a teaching position; nor do they have continued teacher education support and training available during their teaching careers. Of particular importance is a broad pedagogical approach: Atlbach (1987) said, "Virtually no one advocates providing teachers with education in their subject specialties alone — all stress the importance of a distinctive training specifically for teaching" (p. 326).

Other Challenges

Even if teachers in developing countries are properly educated and trained, logistics and other issues can affect their quality of teaching. A high ratio of students per teacher has a direct effect on the quality of education students receive, and high student/teacher ratios are common in developing countries. Low teacher salaries may mean that teachers must take on additional jobs and have less time to devote to teaching, and low salaries can tempt teachers to look abroad for better paying positions. War can destroy school buildings, and poverty can prevent school infrastructure from being built. Lack of school supplies hinders education, and lack of access to technology prevents students from accessing educational resources and keeps them from becoming technologically savvy. Hunger interferes with learning, remote schools and poor roads make it difficult for teachers to get to their schools, and disease kills teachers and students alike.

The Good News

This is not to say that the quantity and quality of teaching in developing countries is without merit. There are qualified teachers in developing countries that are doing an outstanding job of providing high-level education to their students. The increased globalization of the world means that countries can seek abroad for qualified teachers and the teaching profession is becoming more mobile. Technology brings many important pedagogical resources to remote areas of the world. Numerous organizations are seeking to provide funding, training, and resources for teachers in developing nations.

Education is becoming a reality for more and more of the world's people. Literacy rates are improving, primary and secondary educational achievement is increasing, and fewer children and adults must face a life devoid of any educational opportunity at all. Much of these success rates are the direct result of committed, dedicated teachers working in extremely difficult circumstances and with very few resources at their disposal.

Further Insights

The need for teachers worldwide is acute and growing. UNESCO (2013) has stated that 1.6 million new primary teachers and 3.5 million middle school teachers will be needed worldwide in order for EFA to be achieved by 2015; by 2030 those numbers rise to 3.3 million and 5.1 million, respectively. The need for teachers is especially great in developing countries. For example, about two-thirds (2.1 million) of the new primary school teachers needed by 2030 will be needed in sub-Saharan Africa (UNESCO 2013).

Difficulties in Recruiting

Recruiting such an large number of new teachers will be a huge challenge. Developing countries face specific challenges in recruiting teachers. Teachers need to be educated, and a significant percentage of the population in developing countries goes without even a primary education. Those who possess secondary or postsecondary education are even rarer, and unfortunately, there are many people teaching in these countries that do not have the education background they should.

The lack of qualified teachers has a direct impact on the quality of education a country can offer. Vegas (2007) said that the state of education in developing countries often resembles the state of education in impoverished and urban school areas in the U.S., except that in the developing countries the urban schools are usually the best and most preferred by teachers, partially because many teachers are single women who prefer the relative safety of cities. If the best and most valued teaching jobs in developing countries are comparable to inner city school districts in the U.S., it is clear that the situation teachers in developed countries face is particularly dire.

Vegas (2007) also said that many developing countries are stuck in a quandary: on one hand, they are increasing their standards for teachers and teaching credentials. On the other hand, their governments are shutting down teacher training institutes due to lack of funding and hiring temporary or unqualified teachers in order to meet the growing demand for education. Contractual teachers are becoming increasingly common in developing countries

Para- & Contractual Teachers

Pandey (2006) pointed out that India's National Policy on Education and its Education Commission have identified teachers as the primary issue influencing quality of education. However, India is seeing a rapidly increasing number of para-teacher (contractual) educators in the school system. Most of these para-teachers in India are local people who are recruited for their ability to interact with the community and students as they work alongside government-appointed teachers; they usually work in the same setting and perform the same duties as regular teachers but are paid less and have different conditions to their employment. India currently has half a million para-teachers.

One reason these para- and contractual teachers are becoming more popular is cost; Vegas (2007) notes, "In many developing countries, teacher salaries make up a large share of total public education spending — as much as 95 percent of total education costs" (p. 221). Salaries are a large aspect of teaching; they influence the quality and preparation of the people who are attracted to teaching and the length of time they stay in the field as teachers (Vegas, 2007). In the past, those individuals with the education levels that qualified them to be teachers typically had few career options outside of teaching to choose from. Today, individuals who have skills in science and technology are in high demand in the job market and can often receive better-paying jobs than teaching offers (Van Kraayenoord, 2001). To be competitive, teaching positions need to offer comparable salaries, but the education budgets of most developing nations are strained as it is. Para- and contractual teachers are a more cost-effective way of filling teaching ranks.

Special Needs Education

Teachers in developed nations need proper pedagogical training, but special needs education is also needed in many developing countries. Unfortunately, many developing nations are unable to adequately educate their citizens who do not have special needs, let alone those citizens who require physical and development accommodations, particularly because special needs education requires more human and financial capital (Hallahan, 1998). According to Hallahan (1998), "There has been a tendency for developing countries to view special education as a luxury" (p. 124). Cultural perceptions of physical and educational disabilities also aggravate the situation, as those with developmental issues are often shunned in developing countries. Physical disabilities also present a challenge to pedagogy and accommodations need to be made for students who are physically limited. This is a growing problem because improvements in medicine have kept people alive that were born with physical ailments or have incurred injury due to machine and industry work accidents (Dart, 2006). These individuals are part of the culture and need to be educated, but their special needs make this a difficult challenge.

Other Barriers

Those who teach in developing countries often have to cope with multiple languages and dialects without having the bilingual training they need. Additionally, they are usually required to teach beginning literacy in the mother tongue of their students while teaching communication in the dominant language and the curriculum of the school program in both. For example, in Mozambique, Portuguese is the official primary school language, although 214 indigenous languages are spoken across the country and only a quarter of the population speaks Portuguese. Among teachers, most of them do not speak Portuguese natively and therefore must teach in a language that is not their mother tongue (Benson, 2004).

Even when qualified teachers fill teaching slots in developing countries, there are still numerous challenges they encounter within the school system. A study of the primary schools of fourteen of the least-developed nations revealed that the conditions in nearly all of the schools "were not conducive to effective teaching and learning" (Postlethwaite 1998, p. 289). Some of these problems were high student-teacher ratio (40 to 70 students per classroom were common), decrepit school buildings, lack of textbooks and supplies, and no libraries.

Health issues also affect teachers and students. HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis continue to be global scourges. According to the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (2004), approximately one million people die from malaria and over 1.6 million die of tuberculosis per year. Tuberculosis is especially a problem since it is spread through sneezing, coughing, or saliva exchange, and teachers, especially primary teachers, work in close proximity with people. Diseases kill students as well as teachers and further aggravate the shortage of quality teachers.

Transportation can be a big challenge for teachers in developing countries. Benson (2004) spoke of the "Wednesday teacher" syndrome, suffered in places such as the Bolivian Andes and characterized by teachers who are so burdened with transportation problems, illness, or administration duties that they can only get out to rural schools in the middle of the week. Additionally, Benson (2004) said that students in Mozambique often have only two- or three-hour school days and must miss many days due to teachers frequently striking over low salaries.

There are numerous other problems faced by teachers in developing countries. While developments in technology and medicine will help overcome some of these problems, such as disease and lack of resources, other issues such as poverty levels among students and lack of basic supplies such as textbooks represent deeply embedded issues that will not be easily resolved. Governments also have significant challenges such as how to equip people to become teachers and keep teacher salaries at a competitive level. As education is becoming more crucial to the people of the world, finding quality teachers and overcoming barriers to quality education will be just as crucial.

Viewpoints

Lewin and Stuart (2003) state bluntly that "in many developing countries teacher education was under-theorised, practice was often not demonstrably effective, and existing systems were unable to provide the numbers of qualified teachers needed to meet the demands of universalising primary education associated with the commitments made to Education for All" (p. 691). This rather bleak assessment came from the Multi-Site Teacher Education Research project (MUSTER), an initiative dating back to the 1990s which studied how well teachers in Trinidad, Tobago, South Africa, Lesotho, and Ghana were equipped for teaching before beginning their professions. This project showed that overall, countries strongly believe that prior training is needed for new teachers, but there is surprisingly little research performed that gauges how effective this prior training might be. Problems with lack of research are compounded with issues of schools being reluctant to adapt to change and the high costs associated with prior training for teachers.

Para- and contractual teachers are becoming more common, and the general consensus seems to be that this is a negative trend. Pandey (2006) said that India's increased use of para-teachers is troublesome, because much of the use of these teachers stems from the fact that they are cheaper than regular teachers. There are qualified individuals who can fill teaching slots, but it is much more cost-effective for the state to continue to hire para-teachers on an honorarium basis. More para-teachers filling teaching ranks typically results in falling student scores, more teacher absenteeism, and less focus on the part of governments and school systems on finding good quality permanent teachers (Vegas, 2007).

Woolley (2003) said that there are growing numbers of teachers from developing nations finding their way to classrooms in other countries, primarily developed ones such as Britain and the U.S., usually because of better job offers. Seven thousand South African teachers were recruited to teach in Britain from 1990 to 2000. However, this creates numerous problems, and one of the first is that these developing countries are already suffering from a lack of teachers — South Africa needs 242,000 teachers to fill roles by 2015. Many of these teachers who come from developing nations are poorly trained but are usually given the most challenging and unwanted teaching posts in the developed country. Usually these teachers are not in their host countries long enough to connect with students and become effective as teachers.

Although special needs education often is neglected in developing countries despite its importance, Dart (2006) said that Botswana is taking steps to ensure that all its teachers have some training in special needs education, as specified by Recommendation 95a of its 1994 Revised National Policy on Education. In practice, education students of the Molepolole College of Education in Botswana have 70 hours of exposure to special needs pedagogy over a three-year study course. One benefit of this exposure is increased sensitivity to disabled people — many students surveyed at the college said that prior to the exposure, they harbored cultural perceptions of disabled people as cursed, demonized, and unable to learn — the special needs pedagogy helped them be much more sensitive and open to the needs and abilities of those who have disabilities. However, this program is not without its challenges; the college has roughly 220 students per teacher.

Teaching ratios and a lack of teachers obviously garner much concern, but of equal importance is a lack of teaching resources. Many students in developing countries don't even possess basic supplies such as writing implements or paper. Atlbach (1987) said that something as simple as ensuring that all students in developing countries had high-quality textbooks could help make up somewhat for a lack of teacher quality and quantity.

Conclusion

In the end, it is clear that there are many devoted teachers in developing nations who are working diligently to provide their students with the best education possible. However, these teachers are significantly hampered by poor preparation, a lack of resources, little to no continuing education, and difficulties such as transportation. Additionally, these teachers often must cope with students who speak a variety of languages or have special needs without the resources needed to properly teach these students. If Education for All is to be promoted and reach its goal of all people in the world having access to a primary education, the teachers of the world, particularly those in developing countries, are going to need a tremendous amount of assistance, training, and increase in numbers.

Terms & Concepts

Developing Country: A country with a relatively low standard of living, income per capita, and gross domestic product (GDP).

Developed Country: A country with a relatively high standard of living, income per capita, and GDP.

Education for All: An initiative of the UN and promoted by UNESCO which strives to see all people in the world have access to a primary education by 2015.

Globalization: The continued interconnection of the world through the spread of democracy, technology, and financial interchange.

Pedagogy: The method or approach one uses in teaching.

Primary Education: Equates to grades 1st through 6th. .

Secondary Education: Equates to grades 7th through 12th .

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Hallahan, D. P. (1998). International perspectives on special education reform. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 13, 123–127. Retrieved November 29, 2007 from EBSCO online database Education Research Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=6682086&site=ehost-live

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Pandey, S. (2006). Para-teacher scheme and quality education for all in India: Policy perspectives and challenges for school effectiveness. Journal of Education for Teaching 32, 319–334. Retrieved November 29, 2007 from EBSCO online database Education Research Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=21894403&site=ehost-live

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Suggested Reading

Barrs, J. (2005). Factors contributed by community organizations to the motivation of teachers in rural Punjab, Pakistan and implications for the quality of teaching. International Journal of Educational Development, 25, 333–348. Retrieved December 4, 2007 from EBSCO online database Education Research Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=17653819&site=ehost-live

Mativo, J. M. (2005). The challenge of teaching technology in a developing nation. Tech Directions, 65, 22–25. Retrieved December 4, 2013 from EBSCO online database Education Research Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=19221434&site=ehost-live

Riley, K. (2004). Schooling the citizens of tomorrow: The challenges for teaching and learning across the global North/South divide. Journal of Educational Change, 5, 389–415. Retrieved December 4, 2007 from EBSCO online database Education Research Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=15430993&site=ehost-live

Schiefelbein, E., & McGinn, N. F. (2013). Interim report on survey of teaching practices in developing countries. Electronic Journal of Educational Research, Assessment & Evaluation, 19, 1–13. Retrieved December 4, 2013 from EBSCO online database Education Research Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=88839147