Frances Vavrus is Assistant Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction with a minor in African studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the recipient of a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for Swahili, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Anthropological Demography. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of international development, gender studies, and demographic change in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Lesley Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Comparative and International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
"This volume, written by a multi-national team of scholar-practitioners, makes an important contribution to our understanding of learner-centered teaching and collaborative educational research. Based on an intensive investigation in Tanzania of a professional development program and teachers' efforts to conceptualize and implement a globally-promoted pedagogical approach, the authors illustrate--and critically analyze--how these practices are enabled and constrained by cultural lenses, power relations, and material conditions. Importantly, they also examine refl exively how cultural, power, and resource issues shaped their struggle to engage in a collective praxis of qualitative inquiry. The tensions referenced in the title sparked valuable insights, which will be useful to educators, researchers, and policy makers."--Mark Ginsburg, FHI 360 and Teachers College, Columbia University