Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter brings together key areas discussed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 to focus on what they can tell us about female teacher agency. This discussion contributes to outlining recommendations to support effective reflective practice among teachers in India. Teacher values outlined in previous chapters act as the foundation for understanding female teacher agency and how reflective practice can be developed within teacher education. Specifically, Chapter 5 outlines the classroom as a space for female teacher empowerment and how reworking teacher effectiveness in India can support reflective practice.
Education in India concentrates on exam performance and consequently the teacher in India often acts as a disseminator of textbook material, as well as maintaining class discipline and respect. This book explores low-income female teachers’ speech and syntax as a crucial resource in which agency, freedom and empowerment is enacted within a strong oral tradition in India.
The book demonstrates how this socially and economically marginalised group overcome prejudices to develop relational agency and embed their authority. It shows how they establish their values and why their beliefs shape attitudes to aspiration, achievement and freedom of choice. It concludes with recommendations for policy and improvements to reflective practice in teaching.
This chapter sets out ways in which female teachers are marginalised and continually displaced. Social, economic and education contexts of female teacher displacement examine restrictions placed on women’s work and income levels, educational opportunities for girls and their role within the household, as well as the impact of educational culture and policy on the teacher’s role. Chapter 1 concludes with an argument for the lived experiences of low-income female teachers to be taken into account to respond to a lack of representation within policy and education development within India.
This chapter centres upon teachers’ understanding of Habermas’s notion of authentic knowledge and what teachers believe is transformation for their students and themselves. The chapter draws upon teacher responses to examine their social praxis, as defined by a form of distributed personhood, to pass on knowledge to their students.
This chapter outlines teacher’s perceptions of their roles. This includes their social relationships with students and colleagues, expectations of behaviour from students, dynamics of the classroom and motivations to become a teacher. Family expectations and roles are also examined, as this provides a crucial foundation for understanding why women from low-income backgrounds choose to teach and how this contributes to their need to stay within the profession.
This chapter examines the way teachers defined their social spaces in terms of who was part of their community and who was outside this. The definition of community itself is explored in this chapter in relation to teacher relationships that maintain social cohesion by avoiding internal conflict and protecting each other from external intrusion. This chapter also builds on teachers’ understanding of core neoliberal ideologies that have defined education policy in India, by commenting on what a meaningful life is for themselves.
This chapter argues that the design and delivery of social assistance does not take adequate account of the nuanced role of work in children’s lives and that current interventions are therefore ill-equipped to tackle children’s harmful work. This argument is developed against a background of increasing evidence that social assistance has the potential to reduce children’s engagement with work but limited understanding of its impact on children’s engagement with harmful work. The chapter reviews a set of evaluations of social assistance schemes, and shows that few studies look beyond prevalence or intensity of work. This results in a substantial knowledge gap about the extent to which, and how, social assistance may reduce harm through work. An alternative way of understanding benefits and harms of children’s work is proposed.
This chapter focuses on the largely unexplored case of the Lake Volta fishery. Children’s work in the area has a long history, takes various forms and provokes significant controversy. Drawing on historical and descriptive evidence, the chapter questions the overly simplistic trafficking narratives around children’s economic activity in the fishery. It argues that this discourse obscures other dimensions of children’s work, including motivations and trade-offs, and the exposure of migrant and home-working children to hazards and harm. Lack of evidence means that sensationalist stories around trafficking drive perceptions of children’s relationship to the fishery. The chapter calls for more nuanced research into the nature of children’s work in and along the fishery value chain so that policies are appropriate and supportive of the wellbeing of children and their families.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY licence.
Millions of children throughout Africa undertake many forms of farm and domestic work. Some of this work is for wages, some is on their family’s own small plots and some is forced and/or harmful.
This book examines children’s involvement in such work. It argues that framing all children’s engagement in economic activity as ‘child labour’, with all the associated negative connotations, is problematic. This is particularly the case in Africa where many rural children must work to survive and where, the contributors argue, much of the work undertaken is not harmful.
The conceptual and case-based chapters reframe the debate about children’s work and harm in rural Africa with the aim of shifting research, public discourse and policy so that they better serve the interest of rural children and their families.
This chapter introduces the book by highlighting the tension between the celebration of family farming on the one hand and the desire to eliminate child labour from agricultural value chains on the other. It argues that at all levels of social policy, and in high-level public discourse, children’s engagement in economic activity is frequently conflated with ‘child labour’; and that this is particularly problematic for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. To set the stage for the chapters that follow this introduction explores change and continuity in African family farming, and evolving perspectives on children, childhood and children’s work. Finally, the individual chapters are briefly introduced.
