With the best of intentions

Teacher training institutions are not just places with buildings, classrooms, tutors, textbooks, lesson plans, and exams. They are also spaces for growing up to become somebody and someone - a space where future teachers are shaped in complex local moral worlds.

In her book, Kari Dahl provides a unique and rare look into an unknown and often overlooked world as she takes us on a compelling journey inside the reality of teacher education and schooling in Kenya today. Relying on the author s extensive immersion into the world of teacher training institutions, readers will become familiar with the complex array of concerns that condition the spaces for teachers in training, and thus shape what professional identity means in a stratified and  diverse culture.

Drawing on a rich conceptual and theoretical vocabulary, we begin to understand how students in these teacher training colleges constantly negotiate and confront the complex constructions of ethnicity, gender, and class, as well as moral, religious, academic, and resource deprivation issues which they meet in the different institutional cultures. 

We hear the voices of five young men and women on their way through college. Their stories reveal personal hopes and ambitions in their processes of becoming teachers as they struggle through college. We get a glimpse inside the authoritarian and bureaucratic Lexington teacher training college, the poor but accountable Wummit teacher training college, and the run-down private teacher college called Global where students are kings and customers in poor surroundings.

This story of the process of growing up and becoming an education professional in an African setting will appeal to readers interested in education, schooling, and international development. It will interest researchers, educational planners, teachers, and students in the fields of teacher education, professional studies and international educational studies within social psychology, social anthropology, ethnography, and microsociology.

Richly illustrated with photos.