Keyword: ecological systems theory

ABSTRACT: The mushrooming of non-formal home-based schools (NFHBSs), which people call extra lessons, operates as an unregulated yet significant educational system in Zimbabwean urban areas. Informal learning environments exist to help students who need extra academic support because people face economic difficulties and want better education results, and formal educational systems have their own limitations. While these services fulfil community educational needs, their informal nature and decentralised structure, together with a lack of government supervision, create a vacuum with significant safeguarding vulnerabilities for children. This study uses a qualitative grounded theory design to examine how NFHBSs operate in Masvingo, Rusape, and Plumtree. Results show that while Zimbabwe has robust non-formal education and safeguarding policies, these policies may fail to regulate NFHBSs, resulting in exposure of students to several vulnerabilities. To remedy this situation, the study proposes a tiered safeguarding framework.

ABSTRACT: Teachers are ubiquitously theorized as agents of change capable of both facilitating learning and serving as educational teacher-researchers. The negotiation of teacher-researcher identity has garnered substantial scholarly attention in international discourse. In Vietnam, the majority of existing inquiries have primarily concentrated on tertiary-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lecturers, leaving an empirical gap concerning how contextual variables affect this identity reconstruction among other teacher populations. This retrospective narrative inquiry, endeavoring to bridge this gap, explored contextual influences on a Vietnamese high school EFL female teacher’s identity negotiation through her Master’s thesis-conducting experiences. The study adapted Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems Theory of Human Development as its theoretical framework. Data source included a two-round semi-structured narrative-framed interview with the primary participant, triangulated by an outsider-nominated interview. The data analysis followed Clandinin and Connelly’s (1990, 2022) three-phase narrative analysis of broadening, burrowing, and storying/restorying. Findings unveiled how a four-layered ecological system, including individual, academic, institutional, and socio-cultural factors, aligning with micro-, meso-, exo-, and marco-sytem, respectively, affected such negotiation. The findings further showcased how thesis conducting acted as a catalyst for nurturing epistemological belief transformation, occupational enhancements, and multifaceted identity development as a language teacher. Implications and methodological recommendations were proposed to advise stakeholders to pedagogize their practices and inform future inquiries to expand this study’s findings.