The impossible dream: challenges in reporting an institutional ethnography of a government primary school in Ethiopia

[From Introduction] From 2000 – 2001 EC1 I worked as a teacher training coordinator at a government college in Tigray, Ethiopia with the international development organisation VSO. The government’s educational reform agenda sought to introduce participative evaluation and development planning in schools, and continuous professional development for teachers (Mitchell 2014). These reforms have been widely accepted by governments around the world and acquired the status of ‘global education policies’ (Verger et al. 2012), yet teachers and principals in Tigray questioned their relevance to the contexts in which they were working, and I too began to question the cross-cultural relevance of the values and relations implicated in these policies (Guthrie 2011; Tabulawa 2013). It was this perceived policy/context gap, and the under-researched nature of Ethiopian schools as social and educational institutions which provided the initial impetus for my current PhD research at a government primary school in Tigray region. I am developing an ethnographic case study which attends to the perspectives of the school community – students, teachers, parents and woreda [local authority] officials – to address the questions: - What and whose purposes are served by the school? And - How are the interests and agendas of different groups mediated by processes and structures in the school?