Addressing VUCA vulnerability through the role of teaching assistants

Catherine Ige and Helen Chatburn-Ojehomon offer an African perspective

While Think Tanks such as the Education Endowment Fund claim that Teaching Assistants (TAs) are a high-cost, lowimpact intervention in schools (EEF, 2017), evidence of the overall impact of TAs on learning and teaching is currently lacking. Mansaray (2006) argues that ‘[T]he TA role is a form of boundary work, which involves bridging, mediating, and transgressing many of the hierarchical, symbolic, cultural and pedagogic status boundaries (eg teacher-pupil, home-school, etc) reproduced within schools’ (p 171). Although some approaches to education, especially those that emphasize efficiency and productivity, might not recognize as important the school culture and pastoral roles that TAs have, when effectiveness is not measured by efficiency and control but by human development and participation (Cameron & Quinn, 2011: 53), these roles of the TA are important and essential. While expatriate teachers in international schools come and go, TAs often provide continuity for schools and stability for students. Long-serving host country national TAs help maintain school culture and history, though there is oftentimes a barrier in organizational advancement for host country national TAs working in African international schools. We work at the only authorized International Baccalaureate

(IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP) school in Nigeria, Ibadan International School. It is our experience that TAs have always played in important role in our school, and that TAs are essential members of many African international school communities. Recognizing the role of the TA in an international school is an action that promotes social justice.

In Nigeria, a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – or ‘VUCA’ – terrain has been characteristic of the environment in which we have worked since our Pre-K to 12, not-for-profit private international school was established in 2003. Our environment experienced even more VUCA turbulence from the mid-2010s when several key events directly impacted operations at our school. These turbulent events included: • the rise of the terrorist group Boko Haram, which began to threaten schools directly, as evidenced by the kidnapping of the Chibok Girls,

the steep downturn of the Nigerian economy which led to financial sanctions and made it difficult to access foreign currency,

several workers strikes which closed schools for weeks at a time, and

the Ebola crisis which killed thousands across West Africa leading to mass school closures.

These events forced us to re-evaluate our approach to strategic planning, as the practices common in other international schools became increasingly out of reach in our VUCA environment. In particular, attempting to recruit teachers internationally drained our resources. As the VUCA environment unfolded, we experienced candidate dropout, abrupt resignations, and job abandonment. To us, the most important qualities for PYP teachers have always been intercultural understanding, knowledge of inquirybased pedagogy, and enough broad-based knowledge to understand and develop transdisciplinary learning experiences in the classroom. Internationally-hired teachers always had these requisite professional skills and capabilities. Their open-mindedness about coming to work in Nigeria often manifested itself in high intercultural intelligence, and their presence had the added benefit of increasing the diversity of the school. Like many other international schools in Africa, we experienced pressure from our parent body to hire expatriate teachers, who often symbolize internationalism and are seen as bringing in modernized teaching and learning techniques in their teacher’s bags. While we often questioned such blind confidence in expatriate teachers, and recognized it as a form of racism, we understood the pressure we experienced.

As we acclimatized to our VUCA reality, however, our eyes were opened to our TAs as a solution to the instability we were facing. Hiring TAs as teachers meant less initial training because the TAs were already familiar with the PYP’s inquirybased, transdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning, and recruitment could be achieved from within the school community. This led to recruitment strategies for TA positions which ensured that all newly-hired TAs had minimum qualifications of a teaching degree and an area of specialty

or experience, which also helped to diversify the professional skill set of our staff as a whole. By 2017, 27% of our PYP teachers were previously TAs at Ibadan International School, and by 2019 that number has increased to 44%. Our new TA hiring practice has transformed the TA role at our school into an apprenticeship. This has required teachers to take on the role of mentor for their TAs and build leadership as an organizational quality throughout the school. While we felt this was a positive shift, these additional expectations were not embraced by all teachers, and additional professional development and support were needed to ensure the teachers were equipped to accept more leadership in their roles. Initially, we also experienced push-back from parents who needed a great deal of reassurance to understand that host country nationals were just as equipped as expatriate teachers to be IB PYP school teachers. We saw this as an opportunity to promote social justice in education and break down some of the stereotypes of who and what an international school teacher might be or might look like.

The school’s new approach promotes the understanding that teaching and learning is a shared responsibility of all members of the school community, in line with the ‘developmental’ and constructivist approach which has been described as a characteristic of transformative or positive school culture (Firestone & Louis, 1999: 305), and which is also in line with the philosophy of the IB PYP (IBO, 2009, 2017). What we have discovered is that in our ‘VUCA vulnerability’, with strong leadership we have been able to open the door to international teaching for many of our strong host country national TAs. This has built our organizational capacity, protected us from future VUCA shocks, promoted social justice in education, and changed the face of who can be an authentic PYP teacher in our community.

By 2017, 27% of our PYP teachers were previously TAs at Ibadan International School, and by 2019 that number has increased to 44%.

References

Cameron K S & Quinn R E (2011) Diagnosing and changing organizational culture: Based on the competing values framework. John Wiley & Sons. Education Endowment Foundation (2017) Teaching and Learning Toolkit. Retrieved from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/resources/ teaching-learning-toolkit/ Firestone W A & Louis K S (1999) Schools as cultures. In Murphy J & Louis K S (eds) Handbook of Research on Educational Administration, 2nd Ed. [pp 297-322] IBO (2017) Primary Years Programme. Retrieved from www.ibo.org/ programmes/primary-years-programme/ IBO (2009) Making the PYP Happen: a curriculum framework for international primary education. Cardiff: IBO Mansaray Ayo A (2006). Liminality and in/exclusion: exploring the work of teaching assistants. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 14(2): 171-187

Catherine M Ige is Head of School, and Helen Chatburn-Ojehomon is Deputy Head of School and PYP Coordinator, at the Ibadan International School, Nigeria.