An exploration of drop-in among students who are at risk of dropping out of lower secondary school in Eritrea Khabusi Emmanuel Kamuli University College London Institute of Education Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Education (Ed. D) 1 Declaration I, Khabusi Emmanuel Kamuli, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract There is consensus about the potential of education to influence the lives of individuals and society. Governments and the international community try to harness the positive potential by promoting universal access to quality basic education through periodic global goals, constitutional guarantees, deliberate national policies and increased investments in education. However, despite the multiple imperatives, evidence from national education systems and the Global Education Monitoring Reports indicates that the number of school-aged out-of-school children (OOSC) continues to grow exponentially, especially in low-income fragile contexts. The most affected are children in their second decade of life. In this thesis I problematised the contradiction between imperatives to increase access to education and the rapid growth in OOSC numbers, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. I analysed existing data from the Eritrea Education Management Information System and then applied conceptual frameworks drawn from literature on OOSC (UNICEF & UNESCO, 2015); on risk (Hammond et.al. 2007; Rumberger & Lim 2008), motivation (Deci & Ryan 2004) and resilience (Masten & Powell, 2013; Schoon, 2006; Wright et.al., 2013) to explore the phenomenon of drop-in among lower secondary school students who were considered by their schools to be at risk of dropping out of school. My position as an insider/outsider facilitated me to conduct complementary analysis of existing official documents from the Ministry of Education and UNICEF. The key findings were that whereas the traditional EMIS provided information on basic education in general, it was not adept at accounting for all children of school age, particularly ‘invisible’ children (Carr-Hill, 2012; UNICEF, 2005) such as those in institutions including those offering non- 3 formal education, children living on streets, working children, or those kept out of sight due to disabilities. The Eritrea EMIS had a blind spot for qualitative data, and consequently, it did not sufficiently document the risks faced by students nor the strategies by individual children and institutions to overcome those risks. In this thesis I argue that information, which is readily available at school and community level, can be collated and analysed to advance understandings on student flows and children’s ability to enjoy their right to education. I also note that whereas existing frameworks for assessing risk, motivation and resilience are helpful, they only provide a partial understanding of the way those concepts operate within the fragile communities in sub-Saharan contexts, particularly in the way individual resilience underpins students’ volition to drop into school. For example, external resilience frameworks tend to base on a single system of learning whereas the students in fragile contexts function in multiple concurrent learning systems. The thesis recommends ways in which EMIS can be strengthened to benefit from complementarities of qualitative and quantitative data to provide a more composite view of children’s participation in schooling. It also makes suggestions on how drop-in can be nurtured into more sustainable participation in schooling for at-risk students in low-income contexts like Eritrea. 4 Reflective Statement Introduction I start with a brief self-introduction and how I came to this point in this study. I was born and spent my formative years in a rural Ugandan village on the slopes of Mount Elgon, where I enjoyed the rustic pleasures of a free-range life, tending animals, tilling the land, and participating in the routines of indigenous and formal educations where open air classes, play with banana-fibre balls, traditional arts and the rituals of maturation were the most memorable hallmarks of the learning experience. In my community, then as now, it was common for children to be out of school. What was different then was that elders in the community showed active concern about children who showed signs of truancy; they chased them back into school and followed up with their families and teachers. Education was neither free nor compulsory. The teaching methods and discipline regimes were rigid, yet schooling was interesting and many of us from poor rural schools transitioned to high school and tertiary education. I recall stories about champions of education in other parts of Africa, the most memorable and closest to me being the story of Chief Odera Akang’o, of Gem in Siaya County, across the border in Kenya. Chief Akang’o, was said to have championed formal education in early 19th century, long before Kenya attained independence. He had a reputation for brooking no excuses from parents. It is reported that Akang’o’s efforts resulted in that community producing the highest ever number of University professors in any community in Kenya (Odhiambo 2015). Chief Akang’o was such an influence in my village that the community elders who forced us to persist in education were nicknamed “Kango”. In the context of this study, Kangos 5 were part of the protective and promotive assets that underpinned resilience in schooling. Career path My initial training was in secondary teacher education. After teaching in secondary schools in Uganda and Kenya, I enrolled for the M.Ed. course at Makerere University to enhance my professional profile (Ludmerer 1999,) in preparation for a possible role in education administration, assessment or quality assurance. I joined Institute of Teacher Education Kyambogo (ITEK) in 1997 as a teacher educator and because my students were experienced teachers seeking to upgrade from diploma to graduate status my approach to teaching necessarily upgraded to facilitator. After 10 years at ITEK as teacher educator, I moved to UNICEF as education specialist to lead the education-in-emergencies (EiE) effort to restore basic education services in the war-ravaged districts of Lango sub-region, Northern Uganda. Working with UNICEF exposed me to different work culture and experiences. For example, I appreciated the dilemma of different professions working within the same organisation on parallel programmes for the same recipients. The programme structure encouraged sections to work in performative silos unlike the practice in formal educational setting where teachers generally worked as a team (Ball, 2008). Undertaking the Ed.D course The incentive to pursue doctoral studies arose during my tenure as a lecturer at ITEK where it was a requirement for academic staff to attain a doctorate (Nansozi-Muwanga, 2004; Sebuwufu, 2017). This was crystallized during my years with UNICEF where I was exposed to diverse experiences and possibilities within the field of education. For instance, 6 whereas my initial training prepared me to teach Literature and English language to secondary school students, I discovered that working with UNICEF demanded a polyvalent disposition with ethical literacy, sensitivity and the ability to read dynamic situations, adapt and exercise sound judgement (Lunt, 2008). One of such instances was where I was immersed within humanitarian work with deprived children in unpredictable and low- income contexts. Those experiences brought home to me the characterization of professional identity as “a process of continuous evolution, … because of the need to adapt to the new requests and activities of contemporary society” (Voinea and Pălăşan, 2014:362) Impact of the Ed.D. course on my work Much as I functioned effectively in my professional work prior to joining the Ed.D programme, the course has systematized the way I conduct my professional business and enabled me to influence others with whom I interface. For the key milestones of the course I grasped opportunities to select settings for various components of the research (Dowling and Brown, 2012) and sought to apply the knowledge accordingly. My first formal opportunity to apply the Ed.D to my workspace was during the Foundations of Professionalism module. I explored the concept of professionalism and how UNICEF staff in Uganda perceived themselves as individuals and members of teams within the silos I referenced earlier. There had been efforts to reconfigure the office team into a collaborative team of professionals, using a process like Engestrom’s (2004, 2007) co- configuration and expansive learning. My survey found that UNICEF staff in Uganda identified with their ‘mother’ professions although they knew that they were expected to identify as UN professionals. It was not clear to them what it meant to be a UN professional other than acting with integrity. My 7 research provided the opportunity for UNICEF staff in Uganda to reflect on their professional identity. The finding was consistent with Avis’ (2005) argument that such reworkings of teams to rein in the workforce spawn the blame culture typical of performativity. Buoyed by the possibilities of using my workspace as a base for my studies, I applied all subsequent aspects of Ed.D to the work environment wherever I happened to be. For the first Methods of Enquiry module I based on the context of Eritrea where I had been temporarily assigned by UNICEF in early 2013 to support the Ministry of Education to develop a proposal for a project to promote access, enhance quality and strengthen the capacity of the education system in Eritrea. However, as we developed the sector plan and funding proposal, it became evident that there were multiple conceptions of quality, with the predominant view being the state of infrastructure, not the curriculum or learning outcomes. Given my involvement with the Ed.D. course I was able to recommend the mixed methods of inquiry approach to the drafting committee to explore how different stakeholders defined “quality”.