Collaborative Action Research in a Community of Practice to Nurture Sociocultural Teaching Innovations Among Teacher Educators in Ghana

Abstract

This thesis describes three (3) action research (AR) cycles I conducted in collaboration with my co-participants in Ghana's colleges of education. The focus of our collaboration was to nurture creative and innovative teaching strategies for education on HIV/AIDS and other emerging health issues. It has become necessary to engineer this bottom-up approach to learning and research because we see the current way of teaching and learning in Ghanaian schools as mere regurgitating of information and reproducing same in examination without meaningful change in behavior. This assertion was reiterated by Ghana's minister of education, Dr. Yao Osei Adutwum when he addressed delegates at the just ended United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 2022. He says, "[y]ou can't memorize your way out of poverty but you can critically think and innovate out of poverty." My co-participants and I are of the view that many people will continue to die from HIV/AIDS if teachers continue to teach by encouraging students to memorize factsheets to reproduce in examinations. The action research described in this thesis seeks to empower teacher-educators in Ghanaian colleges of education with useful pedagogical and research tools. The long-term goal - beyond the timeframe of this thesis - is for them to train new teachers to be confident, bold and assertive to push cultural and systemic boundaries, to nurture equally assertive students to deal with health challenges (pandemics) which they may be confronted with. Methods used to gather data included focus group interviews, observations of lesson presentations and reflective notes (journals). The design of this research was, partially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings, however, still proved to be interesting. Among those findings were strong teacher educator participation and a significant improvement in teacher educators' understanding and employment of SCT teaching strategies suited to their HIV/AIDS and Other Tropical Diseases in Africa classes.