ABSTRACT

Becoming Somebody in Teacher Education explores the realities of contemporary teacher education in Kenya. Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it views the teacher training institution as a space to grow, become and be shaped as teachers in complex moral worlds.

Drawing on a rich conceptual and theoretical vocabulary, the book shows how students in these teacher education institutions constantly negotiate and confront the complex constructions of ethnicity, gender and class, as well as moral, religious and academic issues and a lack of resources encountered in the different institutional cultures. It outlines a complex array of concerns affecting student teachers that shape what professional becoming means in a stratified and diverse culture.

This story of the process of growing up and becoming a professional teacher in an African setting will appeal to researchers, academics and students in the fields of teacher education, organizational studies, international education and development, social anthropology and ethnography.

chapter 1|49 pages

Fields of teacher education

chapter 2|34 pages

‘No time for us’

Struggling for success to become professional, urban middle class

chapter 3|33 pages

‘I have someone’

Community learning in social space

chapter 4|42 pages

‘I am someone’

Self-display in capitalism and reversing the social order

chapter 6|22 pages

Fields reconstructed

Teacher education at a crossroad