The Response to an Educational Mess, Influencing Teacher Professionalism in Liberia: Practical Arguments in Political Discourse

Abstract

Understanding ‘the teacher’ as a discursive construct, this study sets out to investigate on what grounds and how 21st century primary teachers in Liberia are being constructed, through influences well beyond its national borders. Emphasizing the importance of culture and context, it examines what influences the country’s sociohistorical past might have on this construct. Utilizing Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) Political Discourse Analysis as both theory and method, the study identifies and analyses the practical arguments of a 2018, press conference held by the Ministry of Education in Liberia, made accessible to discourse analysis through a process of transcribing. The aim of the study is to identify the current response to what has been termed an educational mess in Liberia, in an attempt to explore how this response might influence conceptions of teacher professionalism in the country. The study argues that the current response to the educational mess in Liberia is shaped by an underlying, neoliberal ideology, resulting in an economization and standardization of the country’s education sector, feeding into conceptions of teacher professionalism, in essence rendering teachers as controlled and compliant. Finally, acknowledging its limitations it proposes further research into the topic of education and teacher professionalism in Liberia.