12 - Concluding Reflections

Summary

This concluding chapter recaps briefly on the key arguments presented in the book. It notes that Southern expert teachers are able to effectively facilitate learning regardless of the challenges of context that they face precisely because their expertise evolved in equilibrium with these challenges. Such challenges should, nonetheless, not be seen as acceptable in any context. The chapter argues that expert teacher studies deserve a more prominent place in international discussion on ‘what works’ in education in developing countries; their high ecological validity and potential for contingent generalisation mean that they can be of enormous use in developing models of appropriate pedagogy for both individual contexts and wider generalisation across the global South. The need for further expertise studies in Southern contexts is also underlined to help ‘flesh out’ the differentiated expert teacher framework proposed in Chapter 10, and it is argued that until we understand the practices of expert teachers in diverse contexts we cannot claim to truly understand teacher expertise itself.