Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46

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Teaching and Teacher Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate

Beginning to teach inclusively: An analysis of newly-qualied teacher

pedagogy in lower primary classes in Tanzania
Jo Westbrook a, *, Alison Croft b
a
Centre for International Education, School of Education & Social Work, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9RG, UK
b
Lewes, East Sussex, UK

h i g h l i g h t s

A study of 6 African countries found Tanzanian primary teachers were most inclusive.

Newly-qualied teachers saw various explanations for their learners' difculties.

Teachers had several strategies to help all children learn.

Lack of teaching materials and little relevant teacher education limit practice.

Current practice offers hope to develop ways of educating more disabled children.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Inclusive pedagogies to support children with disabilities in low-income countries have been neglected,
Received 16 October 2014 and viewed as specialised or optional within teacher education. In contrast, this paper presents details
Received in revised form of practices of newly qualied teachers (NQTs) in Tanzania that aim to help all learners to learn even in
3 April 2015
poorly-resourced schools. It argues that NQTs' positive attitudes and responsibility towards their stu-
Accepted 18 May 2015
Available online 10 June 2015
dents can be located in Tanzania's history and their early professional experiences, resulting in an
interactionist pedagogy that normalises inclusive practices. Learning difculties are relocated from a
medical model of disability to a concern with improving teaching and learning for all.
Keywords:
Attitudes
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Disabilities
Teachers
Beginning teacher induction
Education for all
Low income countries
Inclusive education

1. Introduction challenge internationally but one which an increasing number of

In the push to achieve universal access to education around the
world equity is held to be central and yet the Education For All
Global Monitoring Report highlights disability as one of the most
neglected disadvantages that children face (UNESCO, 2014a, 2014b,
p.31). Including disabled children in education is a signicant
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: jlw24@sussex.ac.uk (J. Westbrook), alisoncroft@gmail.com
(A. Croft).
1 wide and 6.4% in Africa (WHO/World Bank, 2011). The Education for
The UNESCO Global Monitoring Report assesses progress towards the inclusion
of all children across the world in education. In particular it has monitored progress
towards the six education goals for 2015, set at the World Education Forum in 2000
by participants from 164 countries.
countries is recognising. For example, by March 2015, 154 countries
had ratied the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities, thereby committing themselves in Article 24 to
ensuring that Persons with disabilities can access an inclusive,
quality and free primary education and secondary education on an
equal basis with others in the communities in which they live
(United Nations, 2006).
Data on how many disabled children there are is, however,
generally weak (Croft, 2013), although the World Disability Report
estimates prevalence rates among under-fourteens of 5.2% world-
All Global Monitoring Report notes that information on how and
how much disabled children learn in school is also extremely scarce

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2015.05.003
0742-051X/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 J. Westbrook, A. Croft / Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46
(UNESCO, 2014a, 2014b); the scant information that exists suggests
that many disabled children either never attend school or drop-out
of school early (Hunt, 2008). The Global Monitoring Report con-
cludes that teachers need support to end the learning crisis for
disabled children and others who are disadvantaged in schooling
systems. Teachers' training should therefore prepare them to sup-
port learners from diverse backgrounds using a wide array of
strategies (UNESCO, 2014a, 2014b, p. 239) to help them develop
inclusive pedagogy. This paper reports on research with primary
school teachers in Tanzania to explore what inclusive pedagogy
means to them and how they practice it. It aims to contribute to the
debate on how inclusive education can be realized, particularly for
disabled children in the many low and middle-income countries
where economic resources for education are limited and large
numbers of school-age disabled children appear to be out-of-
school.
In the social model of disability, disability is viewed as the
disadvantage that comes from society's response, or lack of
response, to a person's impairment. In contrast, in the medical
model of disability, the problem is located within an individual
and caused by that person's impairment (Albert, 2004). In other
words, disability is dened not as the direct effects of having a vi-
sual impairment but rather the additional discrimination that re-
sults if, for example, teachers have inappropriately low
expectations of a visually-impaired child's ability to learn. More
recent debates have dened disability as co-constructed by
impairment and context, i.e. as an interaction between disabled
people2 and their ability to function in a particular environment
(WHO, 2002). So, while a degree of visual impairment that can be
corrected by glasses might not be considered a disability for a
schoolchild growing up with access to well-resourced health and
education systems, it could constitute disability for a child in a low-
income country with no access to suitable glasses. Interactionist
perspectives put relatively more emphasis on the direct effects of
impairment than is found in most interpretations of the social
model and also foreground the diverse and uctuating nature of
disabled people's experiences (Ghai, 2002; Lang, 2007;
Shakespeare, 2009). Both the social and the interactionist model
of disability, however, leave space for society to counter the severe
economic and other disadvantages often associated with impair-
ment, for example, through actively including disabled children in
education (Morley & Croft, 2011).
Although action is needed at all levels to create a more inclusive
education system, what happens once children have reached
classrooms is crucial, and has been neglected until recently
(Alexander, 2008; Croft, 2010; Lavia, 2007; Miles & Singal, 2010).
For example, a rigorous literature review of what effective peda-
gogy looks like in low-income countries found that only 27 out of
489 studies included in the broad overview included a specic
focus on disability, with only two studies assessed as of sufciently
high quality for inclusion in the in-depth review, again indicating a
neglected area both in practice and in research (Westbrook et al.,
2013). Writing about Zambia, Chanda (2008) found that negative
attitudes towards disabled children and a lack of sensitisation to
their needs meant that such students were doubly disadvantaged
within classes where there was reliance on whole class and rote-
learning together with the backwash effect of pass or fail exami-
nations which controlled access to the next level of schooling (see
2
This paper uses the terms disabled children, disabled people etc. as these are
used by the UK Disabled People's Council which represents large numbers of
disabled people in the country in which it is written. In other contexts people with
disabilities is the preferred term, emphasizing that people with impairments are
people rst.
39
also Lynch et al., 2011). Similarly, Singal found that teachers from
India who did not believe that disabled students should be inte-
grated into mainstream schools created a learning environment in
which the [disabled] child was a part of the classroom, but stood
apart in many ways (2008, p.1525). Teachers' lack of training or
knowledge to deal with heterogeneous groups apart from repeti-
tion of material was a further barrier (Adeyemi, 2009;
Akyeampong, Pryor, Lussier, & Westbrook, 2012). Conversely,
Arbeiter and Hartley (2002) study from Uganda found that positive
attitudes in the whole school towards working with disabled stu-
dents were more important in changing practices than infrastruc-
ture, resources, or specialized teaching strategies. Miles (2009) also
found it possible to build on teachers' existing knowledge to pro-
mote inclusion in Zambian schools. Overall, ndings from the in-
depth review of 54 of the studies (within the above rigorous liter-
ature review) reiterated that when teachers held positive attitudes
towards their students in general their overarching teaching stra-
tegies became inclusive, such as:

Giving feedback, paying inclusive and sustained attention to
students

Creating a safe classroom environment

Drawing on students' backgrounds and experiences
Integral to this inclusivity was the interactive and communica-
tive aim of these strategies, focusing on connecting with all stu-
dents. The specic practices that teachers then used such as group
and pair work, questioning or using teaching and learning materials
were more effective because they were embedded within these
fundamentally inclusive strategies. The signicant nding was
therefore not concerned with what practices are effective but how
and why teachers used individual practices, echoing Florian and
Black-Hawkins' 2011 research in Scotland whereby what is
important is not choice of practice or who it was directed towards,
but how teachers used particular practices so that they were rele-
vant for every student. Indeed, the review of the 54 studies suggests
that when disability is seen as something other, pedagogies that
do recognize such student diversity become themselves margin-
alized outside the mainstream notion of equity and inclusion
expressed in the Education for All agenda (where gender, ethnicity
and socio-economic status are more usually emphasized). If such
specialized pedagogy is additionally seen as difcult to attain
rather than being normalized and taking place daily in ordinary, if
crowded, classrooms in low income countries, then inclusive ped-
agogies are rarely researched and rarely included in initial teacher
education. Instead, where the teaching of disabled children is
taught to student teachers, this is often in separate modules
(Croft, 2006; Dart, 2006). If, however, the pedagogy that includes
disabled children is largely the pedagogy that helps all children
learn (Croft, 2010; 2013; Florian & Black-Hawkins, 2011), as we are
arguing in this case study on Tanzania, then policymakers need to
look beyond the idea that all that are needed are special teachers
for special children (Lewis & Norwich, 2005).3 There are many
arguments in support of the education of disabled children along-
side their non-disabled peers for as much as their schooling as
3
See Croft, 2013 for a discussion of the extent to which limited specialized
pedagogy might be helpful for some groups of children, for example for those with
sensory impairments, alongside more general pedagogy that recognizes their in-
dividual strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and their common needs as
children like any others. This does not imply however that a special school is the
only way of giving children access to specialist teacher knowledge. Specialist
teaching has been given after-school and during vacations, by attending a special
school for a limited period during a school career, in visits from a peripatetic
support teacher, or by attendance at a support unit within a mainstream school.
40 J. Westbrook, A. Croft / Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46
possible (see Croft, 2010 for a review). Among these, the scale of the
challenge of including disabled children in low-income countries in
successful learning is a compelling argument that the only cost-
effective solution is inclusive education (UNESCO, 2005). If the
estimate of 6.4% of under-fourteens in Africa being disabled is
roughly correct this would be a huge number of children to provide
special schools for. What is also signicant here, however, is that a
much smaller proportion of these children are thought to be
severely disabled (1.2% for those 0e14 years in Africa).4 Most
disabled children have less severe impairments, not all of which
will be educationally-signicant and they are therefore likely to be
found in the communities surrounding most primary schools. The
comparatively moderate impairments, such as minor mobility
impairment, that keep many children out of school in Sub-Saharan
Africa do not appear to have been considered in Urwick and Elliott
(2010) argument against inclusive education. They point to the
challenging conditions faced by even skilled teachers in imple-
menting inclusive pedagogy and cite studies that point to the
exclusive practice that appears dominant, particularly in Sub-
Saharan Africa.
This paper presents empirical data to indicate that generalising
teachers' practice in this way is unhelpful and indeed, viewed from
a different perspective, even inexperienced teachers in this study
are beginning to be inclusive. This case study presents an example
of what some newly qualied teachers (NQTs) are already doing
that is inclusive in nature, despite little input on inclusion from
their recent initial teacher education. The case study counters
dominant and decit views of teachers' attitudes and pedagogy and
in presenting a picture of what relatively-inclusive pedagogy looks
like in resource-constrained contexts, gives details of practice often
missing from such accounts (Westbrook et al. 2013; Florian & Black-
Hawkins, 2011).
2. Research design
The data analysed comes from a larger mixed methods research
project coordinated by the Centre for International Education,
University of Sussex between 2010 and 11, funded by the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Importantly for our argument, this
larger project focused not on inclusion but on how primary school
teachers were trained to teach early reading and mathematics in six
Sub-Saharan African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal,
Tanzania and Uganda). The conceptual framework drew on Shul-
man's work that identied the professional knowledge base for
teachers, made up of knowledge, understanding and practices with
a particular focus on pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman,
1986). The research then hinged on establishing this knowledge
base expected of teachers during their preparation and comparing
this with what newly-qualied teachers (NQTs) with up to three
years' experience in schools actually know, say and do. As such, the
research lent itself to an interpretivist paradigm, but one that also
drew on post-positivism in recognition of the possible fallibilities of
the quantitative data. Full ethical approval for the research was
gained by the University's Ethical Review Committee. Research
questions reected the sequence inherent in the design:
1. How do pre-service teacher education programmes prepare
trainee teachers to teach reading and mathematics in the early
grades?
2. How do trainee teachers develop their understanding of
teaching reading and mathematics to early grade students?
4
Source: Table 2.2 (WHO/World Bank, 2011) based on Global Burden of Disease
estimates for 2004.
3. How do newly qualied teachers teach reading and mathe-
matics in their rst few years of teaching?
Four contrasting teacher training colleges in each country were
selected on a geographical basis (rural, urban and peri-urban) and
in Tanzania one of the four colleges was also selected to represent
the increasing numbers of private teacher training colleges. Six
schools were selected in each host district of the participating
colleges, specically where NQTs were employed. In each country,
qualitative data comprised of documentary analysis of initial
teacher education (ITE) curricula, observations of taught sessions
and interviews carried out with tutors and trainees at the colleges
and NQTs in schools. Quantitative data was derived from ques-
tionnaires that sought to establish their knowledge and pedagog-
ical content knowledge via scenarios and assessments and
completed by all trainees at each college and NQTs.
Videoed observations of lessons in reading and mathematics
taught by the NQTs were followed by forensic interviews that used
the lesson just observed to stimulate discussion around the
knowledge, understanding and specic practices the NQTs used in
their teaching, and how and from where this specic knowledge
base or competences was derived. Interviews began by asking
about the lesson objective, rationale for strategies or teaching aids
used, and student responses. Examples of questions asked were:
When you used X method to add numbers, was this typical of how
you were trained at college or did it come just from your experi-
ence?; How do you ensure that all are following you in this large
class? and What advice would you give to a college tutor for
teaching trainees? This case study draws on the Tanzanian quali-
tative data set from the interviews with 39 NQTs (following 18
reading lessons and 21 mathematics lessons). Data were coded and
sorted using a system of hierarchical categories, most centrally
drawing on Shulman's (1986) view of teachers' knowledge.
The authors' different relationships to the data should be noted:
Jo Westbrook worked with the Tanzanian research team led by
Professor Eustella Bhalalusesa, collecting some of the data reected
here. The interviews were carried out in Kiswahili, possibly a factor
in the richness of the data produced, and translated by members of
the Tanzanian team. Alison Croft then analysed the Tanzanian NQT
data with the benet of a background in disability and lower pri-
mary teaching and teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa. It is
therefore a collaborative case study in many senses.
Limitations arise in that this paper draws primarily on a small
data set from Tanzania rather than the wider project data, but it is
precisely in the nuances of the qualitative data that the ndings
emerge as so interesting. A further limitation is that due to time
constraints it was not possible to return to the participant teachers
and ask them for more explanation on interesting points raised. The
open-ended interview style aimed to address this as much as was
possible in one interview.
3. Tanzanian context
Post-independence Tanzania saw a 98% increase in gross
enrolment in the rst wave of Universal Primary Education (UPE) in
1977e78 under President Nyerere's Socialist agenda of Education
for Self Reliance (King, 1984). This huge increase required accel-
erated teacher training with an emphasis on participatory, child-
centred pedagogies that included disabled children, linked
disability to poverty and ousted English over Kiswahili as the lan-
guage of instruction in primary schools (and now to be extended
into secondary schools) (Barrett, 2008; Omani, Mbise, Mahenge,
Malekela, & Besha, 1983; O-saki & Agu, 2002; Taylor & Mulhall,
1997). Such early and widespread UPE (in the post-Colonial Afri-
can context) may have produced longer term benets for the
 J. Westbrook, A. Croft / Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46
children and grandchildren of those rst-generation learners from
the 1970s by making education into a generally known public good,
despite the rapid decrease in enrolments soon afterwards as a
result of inadequate infrastructure and resources (Sabates,
Westbrook, & Hernandez-Fernandez, 2012).
Today's Tanzania has a population of around 47 million, 44% of
whom are under fteen years of age (National Bureau of Statistics,
2015) thus providing the basic education system with a consider-
able challenge. Recent developments include a rise in preschool
enrolment so that around 40% of children spend two years in a
preschool attached to a primary school (UNESCO, 2011). The recent
Global Monitoring Report further states that between 2000 and
2007 1.5 million additional children were learning basic numeracy
and literacy, and that many more children with learning difculties
have enrolled since primary school tuition fees were abolished
since 2002. Two-thirds of primary pupils complete the seven years
of primary school, propelled partly perhaps also by the policy of
automatic promotion at Standard IV (UNESCO, 2014a, 2014b, p.
204). However, only 50% of Tanzanian students go on to the four
years of lower secondary, even fewer attend higher secondary
school and national examination results are very low (UNESCO,
2011). Pre-primary, primary and secondary education are largely
government funded, but families have to contribute up to a quarter
of the costs and 13.4% of children, mostly rural, remain out of school
(UNESCO, 2011). The increase in enrolments this century has
stretched physical and human resources leading, for example, to
large classes; the pupil/teacher ratio in 2011 was 57:1 although the
pupil/trained teacher ratio was 313:1 (UNESCO, 2014a, 2014b 5).
This compares to an average for Sub-Saharan Africa of 28:1, and
60:1 respectively (ibid).
In common with other countries in East and Southern Africa,
special education in Tanzania commenced with special schools
founded by missionaries in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1982 the rst
government special school was established (Mpofu, Oakland, &
Chimedza, 2007). Current provision, as reported by the Ministry
of Education and Vocational Training's Special Needs Education
Unit, consists of 29 special schools, 239 units attached to main-
stream schools and also specialized teachers working with disabled
children in mainstream schools (MoEVT n.d.). There is much
involvement of non-governmental organisations, both national and
international, who provide additional services and in some cases
collaborate with government on projects such as helping develop
inclusive schools (ADD, 2015). Tanzania has continued as an early
adopter of policies and practice on inclusion, for example, the Pri-
mary Education Development Plan for 2007-11 specied inclusive
education as the main approach for educating disabled children
(Lehtom aki, Tuomi, & Matonya, 2014; Polat, 2011; UNESCO, 2011).
Nevertheless, a year into this plan, a large-scale household
disability survey (Ruyobya and Schneider, 2009) found that only
38.4% of primary-aged children with disabilities attended school
and of all children in school only 0.4% were identied as having
special needs or disabilities (Lehtomaki et al., 2014). However, as
Lehtoma ki et al. (2014) point out, teacher education was slow to
respond to this policy; the two year residential teacher training
program has no mandatory module on inclusion although such
modules are offered as professional development for serving
teachers. School pupils who have completed the basic education
cycle of 11 years and have minimal levels of certication can enrol
on the teacher training program to become Grade A teachers,
learning subject and pedagogic content knowledge, or teaching
5 6
Statistical Tables Long Form. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/
themes/leading-the-international-agenda/efareport/statistics/statistical-tables/
(accessed 25/3/15).
41
methods, and professional studies throughout both years, plus a
mandatory module on Early Childhood Education, all assessed
through examination. At the end of each year there is a Block
Teaching Practice (BTP) of ve weeks with one tutor visit for each
trainee and the observed lesson evaluated.
Compounding this mostly theoretical curriculum, tutors have a
university degree in Education but rarely primary teaching expe-
rience, and tend to rely on lecture or demonstration with little
student participation, constrained by trainee numbers of over 55
per class and limited study materials. In contrast the revised Tan-
zanian primary curricula for reading and mathematics require
teachers in schools to use participatory methods. The general
prole of the NQT taken from the larger data set of 254 survey
respondents showed that 99.5% had completed 12 years of school,
making them relatively well educated (along with NQTs from Kenya
and Ghana). They tended to be older, too, over 30, with 9.5% having
prior teaching experience of Standard6 I to III and originating from
all regions of the country because of the central government policy
of deploying teachers where needed. It was, however, quite difcult
to nd NQTs working in the lower primary classes in Tanzania
because schools generally allocate these classes to the most expe-
rienced teachers. Many NQTs also stated that they disliked teaching
the youngest children, partly because they felt unprepared to do so
from their training, partly because the school policy was to use
more experienced teachers, and perhaps also because of the lower
status given to teachers of the youngest children. The majority of
the classes observed were therefore Standard III to IV of up to 100
pupils of differing ages,7 socio-economic backgrounds, educational
experiences and achievements.
4. Research ndings
The main ndings of the wider study in the six countries
showed that teachers' college tutors taught in a set sequence with
little recognition of the learners themselves, as if in an idealized
classroom, with the sequence generally reproduced by the trainees
on teaching practice and as NQTs in the classroom (Akyeampong
et al., 2012). However, a signicant nding was that NQTs and
more experienced teachers in Tanzania were aware of, discussed
and practised inclusive teaching strategies noticeably more than
teachers in the other ve countries. Their practices do not resemble
the differentiated strategies and individualized education pro-
grammes used with students in countries with more human and
material resources but instead focus on including all learners rather
than segregating by ability or disability. This paper therefore ex-
plores the Tanzanian NQT data in more depth. The following sec-
tions present an analysis of NQTs' responses when they were asked
how they help children when they do not understand or nd
learning difcult and how they learnt the strategies they used. The
pedagogy expressed in their answers is analysed using the frame-
work developed in the rigorous literature review of looking at
teacher attitudes, strategies and practices (Westbrook et al., 2013).
4.1. Teacher attitudes and understanding
Two teachers in the present study discussed the personal
qualities of teachers who help children when they nd learning
hard, describing such teachers as exhibiting patience, commit-
ment, heart, love, devotion and as able to be motivating. Another
teacher made a comment that suggested a positive attitude
Standard I is equivalent to Grade 1.
7
Classes are mixed-age because children often start school over-age or under-
age.
42 J. Westbrook, A. Croft / Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46
towards a teacher's role in ameliorating difculties in learning; a
good teacher has the ability to innovate and change teaching
strategies and help the pupils not to nd the subject difcult.
There was a clear understanding of the need for curricular
progression with one teacher explaining that teaching has to begin
from simple to complex but also a realisation that some children
were oundering at the very start of their schooling. Teachers
expressed a tension between making sure that children have learnt
and keeping up the pace needed to cover the relatively-ambitious
syllabus, for example:
The ability of pupils to understand is also widely different
compared to situations where one teaches a more manageable
class. It is also very difcult to know and control the rate of pupils'
learning and levels of their understanding unless I check every
pupil and this always demands too [very?] much time and can
affect my ability of following the syllabus.
There are indications of frustration here which might sound
unreasonable - surely it is a teacher's job to do these things - but
when one looks at the size of the classes (often over a hundred
children) the scale of what is demanded of these newly-qualied
teachers of young children becomes much clearer. A positive
attitude to the task of teaching a large class of children with
different abilities and ages can easily be eroded without the
encouragement of seeing that those children are learning as a
result of one's efforts.
NQTs offered various explanations as to why some children have
difculty learning. Teachers' understanding and levels of awareness
here are signicant as they point to the kind of solutions they will
seek in response to such difculties. Some teachers talked about
children who have difculty at the moment, children who learn
differently per day, rather than apparently holding an essentialized
view of slow learners. Others, however, spoke of children as faster
or slower learners: pupils have different ability in learning and
understanding some pupils understand faster than others and
some were active others are slow learners. This contrast between
active and slow perhaps suggests a view that academic ability is at
least partly constructed through participation and effort but more
probing in an interview would be needed to explore this further. A
couple of teachers talked about naughty children when asked
about children who had difculty learning: You don't get a class
free of naughty and difcult students, do you? but did not discuss
whether this unwanted behaviour was the result or the cause of
difculty with learning.
Four teachers spoke of children having no experience of pre-
school as a cause of difculty in learning; some schools had pre-
schools attached while others did not. One teacher, at a school
without a preschool, mentioned the problem of pupils being un-
derage and having never attended a preschool. The teacher noted
that this age group were also more likely to be absent. This chimes
with descriptions in studies elsewhere of a group of intermittent,
sometimes unregistered, underage learners who add to the crowds
in the lower grades in schools without a preschool (Croft, 2006;
Marshall, 2003). As preschool provision grows, however, as it is in
Tanzania, it is important to note that differences between those
who have and have not attended potentially creates a new source of
diversity among students for teachers to attend to.
Social circumstances were also seen as often making it difcult
for children to make good progress in school. Lack of parental
commitment or support for education was mentioned, which
teachers said led to families not buying pencils, textbooks and
notebooks for pupils. Sometimes this was attributed to the socio-
economic environment or the poor living environment of the
family. Teachers noted that some children were required to work
after school and were therefore not able to stay after school for
extra lessons, or were sometimes absent due to work commit-
ments. Some children were also seen as disadvantaged when they
lived with grandparents, perhaps when their own parents had
died.
Aside from the characteristics or circumstances of children
discussed above, the NQTs frequently mentioned school factors as
causing difculties with learning. Automatic promotion from one
grade to the next was seen to cause problems in Standard 2 and
beyond as children had not grasped the previous year's syllabus,
and had poor background in the lower grades. Classroom con-
ditions were also often cited as a signicant limitation on learning,
particularly lack of teaching and learning materials and large
classes. Teachers described large groups trying to share a book (for
example, 18 books for 114 pupils), the difculty of obtaining
certain real objects as examples, the cost of making teaching aids,
the difculty of marking all pupils' books and keeping up the pace
of the lesson, and the difculty of circulating round a very crow-
ded room: I got discouraged and decided to help only those at the
front. Students who sit within the active zone in the front achieve
higher test scores than those elsewhere so that unfair advantage is
given by default to those nearest the teacher i.e. those who
perhaps have the motivation and mobility to get those seats in the
rst place (Bhattacharjea, Wadhwa & Banerji, 2011; Hardman,
Abd-Kadir, & Smith, 2009).
The NQTs sometimes saw the content of the curriculum as the
source of pupils' difculties. It was described as complicated and
unrelated to pupils' lives so that pupils get confused they simply
forget and so need much repetition, for example when carrying
the ten in arithmetic:
this is the topic that is complicated as I have even used too much
time reaching it unlike other topics. Once addition of numbers is
understood then everything follows through....pupils got confused
when they added by carrying numbers from tens; this is always a
complicated concept to them.
In this case the NQT did not relate learners forgetting to a
failure to understand the need for carrying; arguably, a child who
really understood place value (perhaps through experience with
money) would not regularly make this mistake and would not
therefore need to rote learn the algorithm through repetition.
Again, pupils might have much more experience of marking the
time of day through the angle of the sun to the ground, or perhaps
through the digital time display on mobile phones, than through
analogue clocks and watches:
it appears as if they easily lose telling the time concepts the
subject is very new to them they will get used as we go on expe-
riencing Pupils understand when they learn things they are used
to doing in their daily lives.
The NQT who described the problems of teaching arithmetic
also talked of the myth about mathematics being a very difcult
subject leading to a dislike of it and consequent lack of attention in
class. The NQTs showed clear knowledge of their learners' back-
grounds, drawing on this to make the curriculum accessible where
they could.
In conclusion, the NQTs saw their young students' difculties
with learning as having a wide variety of causes, and often these
problems were not located within the child, but in their social or
educational circumstances or in the interaction between children
and a curriculum that related little to their daily lives. The views of
many of the NQTs therefore seem to t with social or interactionist
models of disability and thus allow room for interventions by
 J. Westbrook, A. Croft / Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46
teachers to support greater progress in learning by the children in
their classes.
4.2. Teacher strategies
What stood out as noteworthy from the data was the overall
strategy of these teachers of paying attention to their learners,
assessing and remediating their difculties. These strategies have
elsewhere been considered sorely absent from teachers' practice in
sub-Saharan Africa (Akyeampong et al., 2012; Westbrook et al.,
2013; Hardman et al., 2009). In response to a specic question,
teachers agreed that there were children in their classes who could
not read or write at all. Teachers were sometimes specic about
the number of pupils who had problems learning, for example,
noting that 15 students in a class were not able to read, or there are
a few cases of pupils who are slow learners in mathematics, there
are about 7 pupils while another said that about 12 pupils were
slow learners in mathematics.
Repetition was a strong theme in the data with several NQTs
raising this as a common strategy, making comments such as, to
make all pupils understand the lesson needs to be taught several
times. More specically, one teacher noted the importance of
revision at the beginning of a lesson as a second chance for those
who did not understand before. Another teacher covered the same
topic twice using textbooks by two different publishers so that
pupils had two chances to understand from material presented in
slightly different ways. The repetition of explanation and practice
exercises was sometimes given in informal after-hours remedial
classes when children were asked to stay behind for extra help. As
one NQT put it, in fact the only weapon we have is to give them
extra exercises.
Another stated:
I will probably have to repeat this lesson several times to my
satisfaction that they have understood. However, some did un-
derstand and they know how to add time.
This latter comment again hints at the tensions in teaching
pupils who learn at different rates. Another reported that a solution
to helping children who were having difculty learning was the
provision of special classes that demand some pupils to learn alone
rst before joining other pupils in the classroom. This was the only
suggestion that the solution to children's difculties with learning
was to teach them separately, albeit for a limited time.
NQTs discussed several ways by which they assessed how much
the children in their classes were learning. Questions to check if
they have been following were specically addressed to naughty
children, to those who can't read, to learners who often struggled,
and to those who were frequently absent. Talking particularly about
those who could not read one teacher said:
I have about 15 in my class. When teaching and asking questions
they are rst to be considered for questions so that they are cor-
rected right on the spot!
Teachers also discussed how they tried to circulate around the
class and mark the written work of as many children as possible as
they went, so that they could address any misunderstandings as
they arose: After marking the exercise I think they understood
what they needed to do and used to get the answer. One aimed to
mark at least one question from each pupil's written work during
the lesson. Several teachers reported that they ask for a show of
hands to see how many completed an individual written exercise. It
is unclear from the data whether the focus is on how much the class
43
have understood or how much particular individuals have under-
stood, although the practice of asking for hands up for those who
have completed an exercise was also used to select those who had
to stay behind for extra help in order to learn the day's lesson.
4.3. Teacher practices
The NQTs described several specic practices to help pupils un-
derstand the material that they presented. NQTs reported using real
objects as teaching and learning aids to help make the curriculum
meaningful. During whole class teaching, another teacher described
how questions were addressed to higher achievers as an example to
others, for example, calling up a child to work out answers to
questions on the chalkboard. Conversely, one teacher described
using the error-prone pupils to work an example on the board,
expecting that they would make a typical mistake that all could then
learn from seeing this corrected. Both these practices assume
learning by appropriating the experience of another pupil rather
than from rsthand experience (Croft, 2006). On a more practical
note two NQTs mentioned directing certain children to sit in specic
places for extra teacher attention, so naughty children were seated
at front, or in a particular corridor where we can see them easily for
controlling them. One NQT mentioned team-teaching, where one
teacher led the lesson and the other circulated helping pupils full
required tasks. There was a sense that the NQTs were trying to
make the classroom a safe and encouraging place to learn in.
Lower primary teaching was believed to be more actions ori-
ented than words. Alongside the above assumption that learning
by appropriation was possible several NQTs also mentioned the
importance of involving pupils in some form of activity to motivate
them and support their learning, using phrases such as learning by
doing, engage them, involve them, and actions rather than
teachings. During the practice phase of the lesson, one teacher
reported setting up mixed groups of readers and non-readers so
that they can help each other, noting how fast learners pushed
along the others although some will catch up while some may not.
This practice was described as ideal but the shortage of books
meant that groups were sometimes too large, as high as twenty
pupils. The disadvantages of mixed groups were also noted by
another NQT when learners copy from others perhaps without
understanding what they are writing:
We have some cases where one pupil understands faster while
others remain sceptical, they therefore wait for fast learners to start
rst and sometimes copy from them.
Again reecting the strain of limited resources, teachers re-
ported allowing children with only one notebook to use this for all
subjects, and said that teachers sometimes buy stationery for pu-
pils. These practices help the learning of poor children whose
families could not buy what they needed for school.
4.4. How did teachers learn to teach inclusively?
The strategies and practices described in the previous section
imply teachers who are aware that in order for children to learn,
teaching must be an interaction between them and their learners,
but how did they learn to do what they do? The ideas of involving
children in the lesson, the importance of teaching and learning aids,
and correcting written work there and then rather than after the
lesson, were said to have been learnt at college. One teacher also
described learning at college the principle that teaching has to
begin from simple to complex. Coping with large classes and few
materials, being innovative and teaching condently were said to
have been learnt on the job. One teacher described learning from
44 J. Westbrook, A. Croft / Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46
experimenting based on reection on her previous practice. She
referred to her technique of manipulating counting lids8 at the
same time as the children did this as a demonstration of how to do
a mathematical operation rather than the children passively
watching her and then copying. She explained, This is just my own
invention and I nd it working, also this is a way of involving pupils
in learning by doing.
During the interviews NQTs made several suggestions for
improving their college teacher education programme; one suc-
cinctly argued that they need to nd other methods of teaching
because what is taught is not what is lived in schools. Suggestions
included matching what student teachers were taught to the cur-
rent school syllabus, and increasing interaction with serving
schoolteachers: teaching practices should allow students to learn
from school teachers and vice versa. One teacher specically
mentioned not being prepared to teach inclusively saying children
with special needs for example mentally retarded and other slow
learners are mixed with other normal pupils although I am not
trained to teach them. Finally, two teachers commented that the
opportunity to reect on and talk about their practice in the in-
terviews had taught them something about their teaching e it was
as if I was taking a course myself.
5. Discussion
Our data contradicts some research indicating that teachers in
Tanzania were not being prepared to meet student diversity
(Lehtoma ki et al., 2014) and the more general decit model of
primary teachers in sub-Saharan Africa. While the concept of in-
clusive education in ITE was somewhat unclear, requiring inter-
pretation (Lehtoma ki et al., 2014, p.34) the NQTs in our data
seem to be positively interpreting that concept and have become
inclusive by being inclusive (Walton, 2011, p.243). NQTs did not
generally indicate negative beliefs about their students; indeed,
their positive overall attitudes towards their learners seemed to
include all, with little evidence of teachers potentially marginal-
izing learners through low expectations of their ability to learn.
Rather they sought to create safe classroom environments where
they paid attention to their students, developed various practices to
address their learning difculties and drew on their backgrounds.
As such they took on a can do, capabilities approach (Le Fanu,
2014) that assumed that they could help these children learn.
An important question is why the Tanzanian teachers in the
wider study demonstrated more inclusive pedagogy than in the
other countries. Public awareness of all children's fundamental
right to education has historic roots in Tanzania from Nyerere's
government of the 1960s and may have supported the NQTs in
grasping the concept of inclusion more rapidly than their peers in
other countries. In addition, data from the larger project indicated
that, in contrast to the other countries, Tanzanian NQTs working in
lower primary grades were generally apprenticed to more expe-
rienced teachers by teaching alongside them before teaching the
youngest children independently. Some of these older, experienced
teachers either went to school or were trained during the late 1970s
when Education for Self-Reliance was at its peak (Bhalalusesa,
Westbrook, & Lussier, 2011; Sabates et al., 2012)). Another factor
that could have supported the development of more inclusive
pedagogy was the dominant use of Kiswahili (a national language
familiar to many children) as the language of teaching and learning
at this level. Compared to other countries in the region where less
familiar languages such as English are often the language of in-
struction, there was therefore greater potential verbal interaction
8
Counting lids are bottle tops used as counters.
between teachers and pupils that enabled NQTs to notice and
attend to students' needs. The implications of this for other coun-
tries are twofold. Firstly, that although universal primary education
might be achieved in ts and starts with some periods of falling
enrolment, understanding of the need for education for all might
nevertheless be quietly growing in this process, providing long-
term support to the eventual achievement of education for all
students, including disabled students. Secondly, while the language
of instruction issue is complex in many post-colonial societies,
research needs to continue gathering evidence on the pedagogy
that is possible when students and teachers share a common uent
language (Brock-Utne, 2010) and on the effects of language policy
on disabled children, perhaps particularly those with learning dif-
culties and those with hearing impairment.
Methodologically, the richness of the data is likely to come
partly from the open-ended interview process that is nevertheless
grounded in the nuances of a lesson just taught (see also Croft,
2002), partly from interviewing in a shared uent language and
perhaps also from discussing in the language in which the lesson
occurred, given that the teacher was perhaps largely thinking in
that language during teaching. How teacher learning in one lan-
guage inuences teaching carried out in another language is an
interesting area of potential research of relevance to primary
teacher development in many linguistically-diverse post-colonial
societies.
Our data shows that the current structure of schooling could
however provide more support for inclusive pedagogy. As well as
large classes and shortage of teaching and learning materials, the
NQTs also struggle with the centrally-mandated curriculum.
Although there is currently automatic promotion from one grade to
another, there still appears to be a whole class pace of learning
assumed as with a grade system (Alexander, 2000; Croft, 2010). In
order to keep the class together the data shows that some lessons
are repeated during school hours and some children are taught
after hours to catch up. Repetition is therefore now day by day,
rather than for a whole year. This form of differentiation may be
more exible, and less likely to trigger a child dropping out of
school than repeating a grade, but raises the issue of who is allowed
to stay behind as some children might be needed at home (girls) or
to work outside the home (boys). What is also not clear is whether
parents are expected to pay extra for these repeated lessons as can
be the case in Uganda (Toohig, 2014) thus excluding children from
poorer families. And what if repetition is not enough? There are
some hints of presenting material in different ways e for example
reviewing material using a second textbook e but curricular ex-
pectations remain the same for all students with additional help
pushed to the margins outside core school hours (Otukile-
Mongwaketse, Mangope, & Bawa Kuyini, 2014).
While we would not want to risk expectations that are too low,
at what point do the expectations of the curriculum regarding
breadth of content and pace of learning need to be adjusted in order
to include all (Prichett, 2012). The student-centred exible pace of
learning in education models based on Colombia's Escuela Nueva
might offer a productive way forward here (Kline, 2000). Whether
teachers' understanding of an interactionist view of learning dif-
culties would break down in the face of more severe difculties is a
question that remains unanswered by the data. Is there a point at
which teachers would see the problems as being solely within the
child and not the remit of a mainstream teacher? There are hints of
this when one of the NQTs says that they have not been trained to
teach slow learners mixed with other normal pupils. But saying
one is not trained is potentially more positive than saying that
disabled children should be sent somewhere else to someone else.
Some of the particular strategies used by these NQTs might be
useful in other schools in Tanzania or further aeld; the striking
 J. Westbrook, A. Croft / Teaching and Teacher Education 51 (2015) 38e46
similarity of some strategies to those used by teachers in Malawi
supports their potential relevance for teachers in resource-
constrained education contexts in other low-income countries
(Croft, 2006). In addition, this research has implications for the
process of teacher learning. Initial teacher education has apparently
had some inuence on the NQT's pedagogical discourse and prac-
tice, but the teachers also learnt from other more experienced
teachers and from reection on their own practice. This combina-
tion is probably typical of many NQTs around the world, but as
noted above, Tanzania has a great shortage of qualied teachers
available to mentor NQTs. Further, given the large proportion of the
teaching force needing initial training, as in some other countries
with rapidly-expanding education systems, it is particularly
important that ITE operates as efciently and effectively as possible.
One possible improvement highlighted in this study is the need
for ITE to connect more with the reality of primary classrooms and
to prepare teachers more specically for challenging teaching
conditions. Korthagen (2010) has argued cogently for greater links
between classroom and college and provided examples of ways this
can be achieved through situated learning. Zeichner and
Dahlstrom's (1999) edited collection describe how teacher educa-
tion can achieve this in an African context via a form of action
research. Incorporating action research into ITE also formally pre-
pares student teachers to learn via reection on their own teaching
experience, something that goes beyond strategies for the here and
now and ideally prepares students to be responsive teachers
throughout their careers. In Zeichner and Dahlstro m's Namibian
example the aim was to create a socially-just inclusive pedagogy to
counter the exclusion of Apartheid; there are clear parallels for the
creation of pedagogy inclusive of other often excluded groups, such
as disabled children. Finally, once NQTs are in post, reective
practice and learning from other teachers could be formally
encouraged, perhaps by a form of East Asian lesson study (Ono,
2010) or other forms of teacher collaboration and peer support
(Westbrook et al., 2013). As one of the NQTs said, talking about a
lesson afterwards in this research was like taking a course. An
important point from our data is that where teachers had a clear
aim of teaching all students, and sufcient technique to achieve
some success with this, they were motivated and able to continue
learning how to do this better.
6. Conclusions
Overall, despite the constraints of class size and curriculum, the
ndings of our study show that these Tanzanian NQTs are willing
and able to learn how to teach inclusively. There may be a need
within teacher education, curriculum development, and policy-
making to depersonalise the debate from the perception that the
problem is either in the children (the medical model of disability)
or with the teachers (decit model of teachers) or that the problem
lies in a lack of resources (true but unlikely to change substantially
in the next ten years), to a more interactionist perspective whereby
the problem is understood as being located between teachers,
learners and the curriculum and resources provided by higher
levels of the education system. This is not new but warrants
restating at the present time (Tomlinson, 1982). The teachers in this
study understood this interactionist perspective as their explana-
tions of the source of children's learning difculties and their sense
of responsibility for helping children learn demonstrate. In other
words, it may be more constructive to focus on inclusive pedagogy
as a developing interactive process rather than something special
that teachers either do or do not practice. In this case the questions
are differently framed: what can we do to improve teaching? What
can we do to improve learning? Specic resources or additional
teaching may well be the right answer for some disabled learners at
45
some times but these can be compatible with an inclusive rather
than exclusive approach in which all teachers are responsible for
and capable of teaching all the children in their class (see
Westbrook et al., 2013 for a fuller discussion). The NQTs' de-
scriptions of how they learnt to teach offer guidance for the
improvement of teacher education and development, particularly
in contexts such as Tanzania where there are large numbers of
teachers needing training. Although the practices of the NQTs in
this study may not appear inclusive to some audiences, their overall
positive attitudes, sharp understanding and awareness of their
learners lend support to an inclusive pedagogy, thereby normal-
izing practices that help all learners to learn. In this respect they are
already enacting UNESCO's recommendations to strengthen
teacher attitudes and provide appropriate teaching for those having
difculty learning (UNESCO, 2011). They are doing much of what is
possible within their local schools and, in the larger context of the
global learning crisis, they offer reasons to hope rather than to
despair. The challenge of inclusion is not to be underestimated, but
the numbers of children with relatively moderate impairments
point to the need to address this challenge primarily with main-
stream teachers in mainstream classes. Although these NQTs are
just beginning to teach inclusively, consider what they might do if
such attitudes and methods were integrated into their initial
teacher education courses right from the beginning as the key lens
through which they viewed teaching and learning, and their stu-
dents. This glimpse of what could be, as presented in this paper,
would be simply what all teachers do but better and more
consistently.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation for their funding for the larger Teacher Preparation in
Africa project.
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