Situating Pedagogical Documentation Practices in Teaching and Learning at Zimbabwean Primary Schools

A Phenomenological View

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to assess pedagogical documentation practices that help inform teaching and learning at Zimbabwean primary schools. In this paper we argue that one of the pervasive paradoxes in primary school teaching and learning is the qualitative discrepancy between what is contained in teacher prepared documents and what happens in practice presenting a rhetoric-reality dichotomy. We used a reflective paradigm, and the qualitative interpretive phenomenological design with a convenience sample of ten primary school teachers drawn from Masvingo urban, Zimbabwe. Document analysis was the main data collection instrument triangulated with data from open-ended interviews. The study found that there was a decline in the quality of preparation and use of pedagogical documents by primary school teachers in Zimbabwe. Pedagogical documents were viewed as tools in teaching and learning and part of the teacher professional identity and responsibility, yet the study found no empirical evidence to suggest a coherent picture of the relationship between documents and the teaching-learning processes. We recommend the need for a national consultative workshop to review the pedagogical documents in which there is greater primary school teachers’ participation with the view to rethink the whole documentation practices in the Zimbabwean primary school classrooms.