Teaching marginalized children at primary schools: teachers professional development through collaborative action research

This paper discusses an attempt on teachers’ professional development through collaborative action research to enhance marginalized children’s learning. Despite all efforts to overcome the difficulties of learning encountered by marginalized children, their performance both in the external as well as in the school-based assessments show poor performance especially in subjects like Science and Mathematics. This situation prevails and has resulted in dropout of the students at the primary level before they pursue for secondary education. Based on a series of observations, focus group discussions (FGD) with teachers and consecutive school visits, it was identified that the teachers face some difficulties in teaching Science, Mathematics and language. Teachers tend to use similar teaching approaches as those were being used in the urban schools, which are more teacher-directed in nature. Further, many teachers do not possess sound pedagogical skills to teach Science and Mathematics and to employ alternative approaches suitable for marginalized children in their context. To overcome this situation, teaching modules are developed by the teachers and researchers to provide alternative ways of teaching science. Additionally, teachers become known to the concept of action research. Two professional development workshops have been conducted to introduce some alternative approaches to teach primary science. Preliminary findings show that teachers perceive the modules very useful and beneficial to them. Moreover, the students demonstrate better motivation to learn as well as active involvement in the learning activities.