Experience-Based Reflections on the Potential for Critical Practitioner Inquiry to Transform Teacher Education in Africa

In Africa, administrators have inadequate scholarly debates on the type of teacher education required to bring about educational and social transformation. Most of the methodologies we use to train our teachers come from abroad and are ill suited to address the continent's problems. This reflective article describes the experiences of the author and other teacher educators with Critical Practitioner Inquiry (CPI), a teacher education program born in the south of Africa to liberate teachers and teacher educators from authoritarian views of knowledge construction. CPI makes possible what Mezirow calls perspective transformation. Experience shows that CPI promotes education as a practice of freedom. This article argues that CPI encourages practitioners to sense and transform factors that perpetuate injustice and inequality in schools, classrooms, and wider society.