Participation and Entitlement in Educational Development: Accounts of Participatory Practitioner Research in Botswana

This title was first published in 2003. The Botswana Inservice and Preservice Project (BIPP), funded by the UK's Department for International Development and launched in 1996, was designed to enhance the quality of education in Botswana. It was a multi-faceted project encompassing initial teacher training, differentiated and mixed ability teaching and the development of a national learning resource centre. Key features included teamwork, local ownership and the fostering of a spirit of collaboration. During the project several themes kept recurring: entitlement, inclusion, partnership, ownership, participation and empowerment. This volume presents the outcomes of a variety of practitioner research projects illustrating the importance of these themes. These studies show genuine, professional engagement with real change in response to identified development needs in schools, regional clusters and colleges of education. They also communicate that to be effective, planned educational change must take account of the uniqueness of each context in terms of its people culture, economic and political policy.