Informal,moralistic health education in Kenyan teacher education and how it influences the professional identity of student-teachers

Abstract

This study explores informal health education with a moralistic content in three Kenyan teacher training colleges and what it means for the development of a professional identity in health education student-teachers on a continent affected by far the largest number of health problems. Informal health education with a moralistic content is a kind of non-curricular health education which exists parallel to formal health education lessons, but which influences student-teachers’ professional identity formation in complex ways by provoking resistance but also strengthening the community of student-teachers. The study used ethnographic methods and drew on a body of interrelated works in the field of sociocultural and critical educational theory and theory about professionalism to understand informal health education learning and processes of acquisition of professional identity. The findings document that in spite of institutional discipline and student-teachers’ resistance to informal moralistic health education, informal health education also initiates peer learning and identity work as student-teachers negotiate what they consider an appropriate teacher identity in the complex structures of teacher training colleges. The study concludes that these processes strengthen student-teachers’ sense of belonging to the teaching profession and thereby positively influence their professional identity.

Introduction

Primary school teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa are one of a few groups of health professionals with a formal education in health in rural Africa. They therefore play a crucial role in promoting health in rural areas on a continent that suffers from most of the serious health problems in the world (WHO, 2012). Classroom teaching in Sub-Saharan countries including Kenya is often described as being highly teacher-centred, competitive and science-dominated (Hardman et al., 2009; Pontefract and Hardman, 2005), confining pupils to a passive role and fostering lower-order skills (Dembélé and Lefoka, 2007: 536) and a low quality of learning (Cunningham, 2012). Classroom teaching is arguably the strongest school level determinant in Sub-Saharan countries (Dembélé and Lefoka, 2007: 535). Improving the quality of the teaching force is therefore essential. The literature has emphasised increasing concerns about the teaching profession (e.g. Beijaard et al., 2004; Cochran-Smith, 2004) also in low-income countries (Dembélé and Lefoka, 2007; Mugimu and Nabadda, 2009; Welmond, 2002) where there is a need for more and better training of teachers on, for instance, health education (HE) topics (Mugimu and Nabadda, 2009).

The formal HE curriculum at Kenyan teacher training colleges (TTCs) stresses that students must learn about biomedical topics such as hygiene, nutrition, diseases and disease prevention with a view to developing commitment and competence during HE training (MOEST, 2004). However, students also learn about health through a less detectable HE curriculum at Kenyan TTCs – informal HE with a moralistic content, as suggested by Dahl (2014). According to Dahl (2014), moralistic HE is a kind of informal HE which exists parallel to the formal HE curriculum at Kenyan TTCs, but which differentiates between students by providing different health resources and services for them. Informal, moralistic HE is here explored in further detail regarding the way in which it influences HE student-teachers’ acquisition of professional identities.

As debated in previous research, the teaching profession is not a ‘value-free’ entity but arises within schools and teacher education institutions, which can be conceptualised as ‘cultures’ with local systems of values, beliefs, attitudes, identities and meanings that shift over time and where existing power and knowledge hierarchies are sometimes challenged and/or reinforced (Cochran-Smith and Boston College Evidence Team, 2009; Ladson-Billing, 2006). Research has indicated that teachers’ professional identity is not a stable entity but changes over time (Beijaard et al., 2004; Chong and Low, 2009). It may be influenced during health intervention programmes in teacher training (Lei et al., 2012). It is multifaceted and may consist of many conflicting sub-identities (Beijaard et al., 2004). This article raises two significant questions about HE and professional identity in TTCs: What do informal, institutional norms and practices look like in Kenyan TTCs regarding professional, academic standards and behaviour in HE? How do these norms and practices influence the development of professional HE teacher identities in students?

As illustrated by research, many of the learning events occurring in workplace contexts are not formally taught, but are embedded in normal working practices (Eraut, 2000, 2004, 2012). Informal learning is difficult to study, as it encompasses a wide range of more or less structured environments and practices with learning in mind. Consequently, ethnographic methods such as participant observation and informal conversation that are sensitive to practice and tacit knowledge in less explicit teaching, as well as a theoretical framework encompassing socio-culturally sensitive concepts, are used to comprehend tacit everyday learning which cannot be understood within more conventional (i.e. generally accepted) understandings of learning. To match the complexity of the social processes in the multifaceted institution of TTC, the study uses an eclectic approach drawing on sociocultural learning theory and critical educational theory to understand aspects of institutional HE, everyday life and professional identity formation. This will make it possible to explore how norms and values from the level of the institution and everyday life influence the personal level of identity. The problem of students’ identity formation is approached by looking at the interplay and differences between informal HE, bureaucratic structures, peer learning and identity work.

Related research

Informal health education

The link has been established between the success of African schools’ HE, for instance HIV education, and the relevance and quality of the teacher training programmes that are offered (Mugimu and Nabadda, 2009). Pedagogical renewal and professional teacher development are also linked (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Dembélé and Lefoka, 2007). Research has demonstrated that teacher education also covers unofficial curricula, negotiated by prospective teachers vis-a-vis the formal curriculum (Cornbleth, 2010; Dahl, 2014). Multiple sociocultural contexts, including everyday life and life at schools, impact teachers’ teaching (Dahl, 2012b, 2015; Monzó and Rueda, 2003). Scholars have argued that most human learning does not occur in formal contexts (Eraut, 2000: 114), but takes place in the spaces surrounding activities and events with a more overt formal purpose in a much wider variety of settings than formal education or training. These findings recognise the social significance of learning from other people (Eraut, 2004: 247) and the social world (Nasir and Cooks, 2009).

Within HE, the literature on teacher education in general fails to debate other sources of HE than the formal HE curriculum. Though contextual and sociocultural factors that influence health are valued by students as important for their HE training, these factors are often ignored in research focusing on HE in education institutions (Jourdan et al., 2011; Wood, 1996). Only a few studies focus on tacit HE (Hawks et al., 2008), though anthropological studies of schools have demonstrated how informal learning, such as college students’ everyday romances with other students at college, is central to and affects students’ lives in higher education institutions (Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Horowitz, 1987). Students shape and are shaped by others as they interact with the different people and group identities around them in their everyday interactions in schools (Pollock, 2008: 374). However, there is little knowledge about what happens to students in non-Western contexts who are confronted with Western schooling (Levinson and Holland, 1996: 17), for instance in Kenyan TTCs. HE as an academic and school subject, and teacher training in it, is an under-researched field with few examples of research among student-teachers (e.g. Paakkari et al., 2010). With only a few exceptions (e.g. Dahl, 2014), the literature is sparse about informal HE that is communicated parallel to formal HE lessons in a non-Western teacher education context and the way in which it shapes the individual in this setting.

Teachers’ professional identity

Currently in the academic world, there is no common understanding of what teachers’ professional identity actually is (Beijaard et al., 2004: 108; Lei et al., 2012: 1299). Research within the field is vast and covers almost all areas of individual and collective components and aspects. However, the importance of teachers’ professional identity for meaning-making and decision-making in teaching has been emphasised in the literature (Bullough, 1997; Korthagen, 2004). Bullough (1997: 21) defines student-teachers’ identity as ‘what beginning teachers believe about teaching and learning and self-as-a-teacher’. Others define teacher identity more broadly as the answer to the recurrent questions: ‘Who am I as a teacher?’ (Korthagen, 2004: 82) and ‘Who am I at the moment?’ (Beijaard et al., 2004: 108). Korthagen’s (2004) differentiation between the levels of change occurring in individuals can be useful to emphasise the importance of professional identity for how competencies and beliefs are converted into behaviour in specific educational environments, and how this influences the way in which teachers understand their mission. Korthagen (2004) differentiates between six levels of change occurring in student-teachers during initial teacher education: Peripheral levels, such as environment and behaviour; deeper levels, such as competencies and beliefs; and in-depth levels, such as professional identity and mission. The in-depth levels of change, which includes the professional identity of students learning to become teachers, constitute the core of one’s personality. In line with these findings, Hammerness et al. (2005) found that the way in which teachers begin to understand who they are as they become teachers has an impact on their teaching skills: thinking about teaching in ways that are not based on their own experience as students; developing metacognitive skills; thinking systematically about teaching; and putting knowledge into practice. Sugrue (1997: 217) found that ‘having a teaching personality is privileged over cognitive skills or pedagogical and subject-matter knowledge; having attitudes, dispositions, personal qualities augmented by particular talents are the essentials of being a teacher’. Other studies found that professional teacher identity formation is a unique and complex process (Antonek et al., 1997; Beijaard et al., 2004) involving personal and social processes (Chong, 2011), referring to both personal experiences and roles of teachers in a given society (Welmond, 2002) and a changing world context (Samuel and Stephens, 2000). One study found that teachers’ professional identity is formed by a combination of many knowledge sources; for instance, historical and cultural conditions of teachers’ classroom experiences (Antonek et al., 1997). Welmond (2002: 42) and a review on teachers’ professional identity formation (Beijaard et al., 2004) suggested that teachers’ professional identity is construed in different ways according to the contexts where they operate. Specifically, professional identity formation depends on teachers’ notions of professional community (Goodson and Cole, 1994). For instance, engaging in cultural activities in learning settings offers individuals particular identities, which in turn influence their identity formation (Nasir and Cooks, 2009). Other studies have found that student-teachers’ professional identity is tacit (Dillabough, 1999; Sugrue, 1997) and the formation of it varies in form from theories of teaching (Sugrue, 1997). Lei et al. (2012) found that self-consciousness about the teacher role and a sense of belonging to the teaching profession are some of the dimensions of professional identity which are positively correlated with an individual’s decisions, exploration and success in a teaching career. Research has indicated that one of the things that formal training might improve is the professional identity of teachers regarding senses of belonging (Lei et al., 2012) and commitment (Day et al., 2006) to the teaching profession. Sugrue (1997: 216) found that identification with teaching as a profession is an important first step for student-teachers, for instance in developing a socially constructed identity and personality which is ideally suited to teaching (Sugrue, 1997: 217). The link between unofficial HE curricula in Kenyan TTCs and student-teachers’ development of competencies (Dahl, 2014) has also been established. But issues related to professional teacher identity regarding HE in this context are yet to be discovered.

Theoretical framework

The concept of informal learning

Eraut (2000) argues that ‘non-formal learning’ is a more precise term than the term ‘informal learning’. According to Eraut (2000: 114), informal learning is often treated as a residual category to describe any kind of learning which does not take place within, or follow from, a formally organised learning programme or event. The term ‘informal’ is associated with many other features of a situation that ‘its colloquial application as a descriptor of learning contexts may have little to do with learning per se’ (Eraut, 2000: 114). However, Cook (2009) argues that non-formal learning involves learning the principles, approaches and practical skills of teaching, and therefore should be on the agenda of all policy and practice, for instance in institutional development. To avoid confusion with non-formal learning, which occurs in connection with practical learning, this article uses the term ‘informal learning’ as a contrast to formal learning. According to Eraut (2000: 114), ‘formal learning’ is a prescribed learning framework, an organised learning event or package, the presence of a designated teacher or trainer, the award of a qualification or credit and/or the external specification of outcomes. The term ‘the hidden curriculum’ (Bauer and Borg, 1976; Print, 1993) takes informal learning one step further since it includes everything that is conveyed by the curriculum, including ideological messages. It is a kind of ‘logic of practice’ (Bourdieu, 1990), where agents such as students, tutors and staff act based on a specific logic in practice following their different forms of capital, relation and position within the specific field, for instance in the TTC. Moralistic HE, specifically, is a concept which has been used to describe the value-laden and totalitarian approach of HE in health communication, which does not give space to students’ own thinking and decisions about concepts of health and what a healthy life might mean for them (Jensen, 1997: 420). These concepts – informal learning and moralistic HE – can inform the study regarding the tacit, value-laden and formative aspects of HE in Kenyan teacher training.

Everyday life learning and identity

Lave and Wenger’s concept of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) helps us see students’ learning and becoming as being embedded in everyday life and as a movement from peripheral to full participation in the specific context of teacher training. It helps us see how students develop from novices to competent participants by acquiring identities and competencies through the ways in which others – other students and staff – recognise their participation in the field. According to Lave (1993: 8), learning is ‘an integral aspect of activity in and with the world at all times’. So the institution of TTC is a ‘socially constituted world’ (cf. Lave, 1993: 4). Social participation is learning and identity work (Lave, 1993; Nasir and Cooks, 2009; Wenger, 2007), and students are active participants in the practices of social communities, in relation to which they construct identity and other values and virtues (Wenger, 2007: 4). In this way, identity as an analytical theme is an inspiration in seeing how learning and being also constitute identity work. In this article ‘teacher identity’ is a ‘negotiated experience of self’ (Wenger, 2007: 150) and a way of being in the world. This connects Wenger to more classical theory about identity (Erikson, 1968), where identity is viewed as an on-going process between self, others and context. Post-structural theories such as those of Foucault (1979) are an inspiration in seeing how the fluidity of emerging teacher identities in pre-service teacher education stems from participation in the powerful, discursive field of teacher training, which also influences behaviour and learning at a more fundamental level. This view recognises identity as multiple, conflicting and contradictory, not permanent or fixed (cf. Philips and Carr, 2009). As ‘negotiated experiences of self’, the concept of identity therefore allows us to make informed interpretations about how students act and think in the context of teacher training, for instance how institutional pressure influences and frames students’ becoming. Bourdieu’s theory of practice-logic (1977) can shed light on how TTCs are social fields and institutions of meaning-making in which individuals transform and produce habitus and practices as they negotiate between objective structures and practices (cf. Reay, 2004), thereby acknowledging that learning and identity-making are also embedded in institutional structures and processes.

Methodology

Setting

In Kenya, teachers are trained on a two-year programme at TTCs where they also live. In 2011 there were 18 public TTCs in Kenya with a capacity of 600 student-teachers in each, and more than 100 private TTCs (data from the fieldwork). All student-teachers receive formal HE lessons during their first year of training. Students specialising in science receive HE training during their second year too. All primary school teachers are expected to have the skills to teach HE topics once they are posted in primary schools. The first teacher training in Kenya was initiated by British missionaries in the early 1920s (Sifuna and Otiende, 2006). The moral values of teachers were a major concern for the missionaries and the British colonial administration, who stated in the 1950s that there was ‘lack of dignity in the teaching profession’ (Sifuna and Otiende, 2006: 225). Today, many public TTCs still receive sponsorship from Christian Anglican churches, which are often represented on the board of governors of many TTCs. Religious and moral concerns occupy a central role in the daily running of many TTCs, although these concerns are not explicitly included in the formal TTC curriculum.

Study design and methods

This study was part of a larger study about HE curricula and practices in Kenyan TTCs conducted over a 16-month period in during 2009–2011. Data from the present study was collected over 10 months in 2010–2011 in two public TTCs and one private TTC in Central and Eastern Kenya. Two of the colleges were situated in rural areas, and one in an urban area. The reason for including both public and private TTCs that were situated in different contexts was to make the selection reflect the ethnic, social and physical composition of Kenya by including diverse student populations and local areas. The colleges had populations of between 622 and 1050 students and 25 to 86 tutors (data from the fieldwork). All data was generated by the author and two field assistants. The three colleges were visited on a weekly basis during the first three months, and twice a month for the following nine months. The main methods of data collection were participant observation, informal conversations, interviews, focused group discussions (FGDs) and document analysis of local and national policy documents about teacher training. Participant observation and informal conversations took place in classrooms, dining halls, dormitories, staff-rooms and outdoor corridors with students and tutors during day and evening hours, and focused on health communication between students and staff, discipline and authority exercised by staff in health matters, students’ responses to TTC health services, communication and structures. Four initial FGDs with groups of 8–10 students were conducted prior to the interviews and FGDs to adjust the interview questions and locate students with diverse backgrounds. A total of 27 in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 students – seven males and seven females (2–3 interviews with each) – were completed in the form of open-ended, semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Then 13 interviews with principals, HE tutors, administrative staff and health personnel,– three males and seven females (one-two interviews with each) – and 12 FGDs with groups of 8–10 students selected according to gender, age and year group, were also carried out. During interviews and FGDs, students and staff were asked about their understandings of the content of health messages communicated in TTCs, aspects of health in their everyday lives at TTCs, students’ aspirations and visions for the teacher profession, and practices and structures of HE and how this influenced their formation of professional identities and sense of belonging to the teaching profession. All interviews and FGDs lasted between 27 and 137 minutes and all but two were tape-recorded. Many additional shorter and informal interviews and conversations with students and tutors were included in the data material.

Data analysis

Interviews and FGDs were transcribed by two field assistants and coded for content by the primary researcher using the principles of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Data from the various sources of inquiry (FGDs, interviews and observations) was analysed separately and four broad categories of results were developed: sources and content of informal HE; moralistic aspects in informal HE; institutional discipline and authority; and opinions and understandings about what a professional teacher identity is. Observations from informal HE practices were transcribed and thematised based on field notes taken on location. Policy documents were thematised for indications of informal HE. The analysis of FGDs, interviews, observations and other data sources was checked by external researchers in three peer debriefing sessions (e.g. Spall, 1998) held at universities in Kenya and abroad. Member checking was also done during three feed-back sessions at TTCs in Kenya. Feed-back from participants was included in the final results.

Ethical considerations

This study was approved by the ethical committee of the National Council for Science and Technology in Kenya in 2010. Informed consent was obtained and participants were assured of full anonymity (cf. American Anthropological Association, 2009). Since the study covered sensitive topics, methodological issues concerning students’ participation were carefully assessed prior to and during the study. Interviews and FGDs were conducted in isolated rooms during weekends and evenings, when few staff were around campus. The issue of anonymity was also raised in sessions with a number of students to promote unrestricted discussions. Students and staff were informed about their right to withdraw at any time from the study.

Findings and discussion

The following discussion presents what were regarded as some of the most substantive themes that developed during the analysis: informal HE with moralistic content; health practices in everyday life; discipline in the health bureaucracy; identity as resistance; and sense of belonging in students’ communities and to the teaching profession. Several other themes emerged during the analysis, but space limitations preclude their inclusion in this article. These conceptually related foci were inspired by the body of sociocultural and critical educational theory, and made it possible to study HE as a process of professional development that took place as a negotiation between institutional structures and students’ intimate lives in relation to health.

Informal health education with moralistic content

Moralistic HE was continuously represented as informal learning in the structures of TTC in the form of an informal code of conduct, which demanded that students should behave in a disciplined manner, for instance abstaining from intimate relations with the opposite sex, dressing conservatively and speaking politely:

The female students are gathered for the obligatory guidance and counselling session. The Dean of Students talks: ‘I do not like the types of relationships you have. The male students tell me that you disturb them by telling them to buy for you mandazi [oil-cooked sugared bread]. You sell yourselves for five shilling mandazi and he comes and sleeps on you on this field! Your dressing also matters a lot. There is an issue [female student] in class 20B, who wear a blue mini jeans skirt with a slid in front. I will punish you and send you home for good.’ (Observation)

As the above observation illustrates, the communication between students and staff was characterised by threats of punishment and moral appeals. Serpell notes with an example in Zambia how some educational cultures in Africa are characterised by ‘puerility exaggeration’ (Serpell, 1993: 91), suggesting that students in the context of TTC were perceived as being under-age and immature: they were expected to keep any contact with the opposite sex to a minimum, to practise sexual abstinence, and in general to obey college rules as part of being students at TTC. The moral aspects of teacher training can be identified in the traditional Kenyan literature about the teaching profession in the way it has been associated with many different roles and the moral aspects of these roles in particular: ‘The teacher is a disciplinarian, a parent substitute, a judge, a confidant’, writes Bogonko (1992: 171). Bogonko’s statement is indicative of the numerous roles – some with a moral and evaluative content – with which the teaching profession in Kenya is associated. Other sources in the literature describe moral education in teacher training as a vestige of the colonial education, which focused on producing a submissive labour force for the colonial administration by disciplining the body and mind through schooling (Sifuna and Otiende, 2006).

Though informal HE with a moralistic content was not prescribed, formally organised or specified for external outcome, nor did it provide a conventional qualification (cf. Eraut, 2000), it was deliberate since tutors and other staff were more or less involved in orally communicating non-curricular moral aspects of everyday life. Sometimes the moralistic HE content explicitly occurred in the Students’ Guide Book, which was a formal policy document for students’ behaviour at TTCs. The management of all TTCs were required to distribute this document to all the students:

Grooming and decent dress is an important aspect of the teaching career. Please note that trousers and other indecent clothes such as ‘see throughs’ are not allowed to be worn by lady students. Such attire will be confiscated and the victim punished. (Excerpt, Students’ Guide Book)

Moral discipline and the surveillance of students’ bodies were apparently regarded as an important part of becoming a teacher. From the point of view of the TTCs, the teaching profession seemed to be associated with acquiring certain moral qualifications, closely related to the understanding of teachers as role models for others. The local managements of some TTCs were aware of the difficulties which informal moralistic HE posed for students, but could do little to change the status-quo:

Students are mature adults. It is not fair that they cannot live their adult life. There is discrimination between teacher students and other students for instance at university, yet they are the same-same persons. We have no housing for pregnant student, so we are forced to encourage them to abstain. Unfortunately we have to use any mean. (Interview, TTC principal)

In spite of this managerial awareness, the college staff referred to most of the students as ‘immoral’ and ‘naughty’. Within TTCs, the behaviour of these students represented ‘méconnaissance’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 127) – the systematically repressed and underrated practice (cf. Dahl, 2014) which impacted the way students practised and learned about health in their everyday lives, as discussed below.

Health practices in everyday life at TTC

Many students lived a double life at college. During school hours – when tutors and administrative staff were present – they engaged in academic work during class lessons, in social relationships with students of the same gender and other everyday college activities. However, simultaneously they lived a secret life in which they engaged in romantic and intimate relationships with the other gender. The differences between the different kinds of lives students would engage in and the risks their behaviour posed to their health can be illustrated through three different episodes, recounted from the field notes:

In the middle of the dining hall a male and a female student sit at a table next to each other. Food is arranged on a plate in front of them, from which they both eat. On top of the table there is a mobile phone, playing love songs with English lyrics and a blues rhythm very loud. The table is situated so that the majority of students have to pass it in order to get to their seats, and as they pass many of them turn their heads in the direction of the two students and whisper: ‘Wanasikia vizuri’ [Kiswahili, meaning, ‘they are feeling good’]. (Observation)

A male and a female student sit on a lawn. The physical education tutor arrives and starts jogging around. From time to time he glances at the two students. As the bell goes, the two students get up and move towards the classroom building. The tutor follows them at a distance of a few metres. The female student later comments on the incident: ‘Did you see that tutor? He pretended to exercise, yet he was only supervising! Surely he will come up with that you are messing up and not behaving like a teacher! And now the Dean of Students will have the eyes on you. In our age we are supposed to socialise and talk with our boyfriends. But teachers go around and watch those who are standing two and two’. (Observation and informal conversation with female student)

The principal’s office receives a report that a female student has passed away. An enquiry reveals that the student was seven months pregnant. Since abortion in Kenya at the time of the fieldwork was illegal, the student had visited a backstreet abortionist, where the child as well as the mother died. The other students reported that the female student wanted to avoid the forced maternity leave. (Informal conversation, female students)

The three episodes are different but closely connected in the way in which students experienced how informal moralistic HE impacted their everyday lives. Students engaged in romantic relationships (episode one), lived secret lives due to institutional discipline (episode two) and engaged in risky health practices (episode three). In the first episode the public display of emotions between the female and male student at the lunch table demonstrates that intimate relationships are an important part of students’ lives. In the second episode the students are aware of being watched and hence try to hide their romance from a tutor. The third episode illustrates how secret lives might convert into risky health practices. The college staff complained about students who engaged in romantic relationships. Students, on the other hand, complained that college staff monitored and punished them. They therefore felt forced to adopt hidden, risky health practices:

The college is not giving us freedom. At times it becomes so bad on us. When you are given freedom, we know how to work with that freedom. Yet when they become so strict on you, you’ll find that within a short time then you’ll mess on you. (FGD, second-year female student)

At TTC learning for students was multiple and took place in the form of simultaneous participation in many different environments, including informal processes of participation as suggested by Lave and Wenger (1991). According to Lave (1993: 5), everyday practice ‘cannot be analysed in isolation from the socially material world of that activity’. It is therefore necessary to include more of the context, such as the institutional and peer-learning context, to illustrate the way in which students learned and how this influenced their professional teacher identity.

Discipline in the health bureaucracy

In this section the institutional set-up as a motive for categorising and disciplining students according to their everyday health practices is investigated. The way in which students were handled during their years of study at TTC depended in many ways on how they responded to the morality and bureaucratic layout of the institution. Students complained about their lack of opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the administration, and that they were punished with dismissal or expulsion from college if they raised their voices against what they perceived as a repressive system and unhealthy living conditions:

The administration here is not friendly. If a window is broken or you find insects in the food and you report that to the administration, the next time you will be send home, maybe even going for good. The administration is rigid because you can’t complain or think of something, even if it is bad for you. So you just be quiet and go back with what is there which is somehow not good. (Interview, first-year male student)

According to Weber (1978), a bureaucracy is an institution that gains its authenticity and legitimacy by modifying social actions and incidents into rationally organised actions according to the hierarchies of authority between the people in it. Kenyan TTCs are bureaucracies whose units and hierarchies are defined in relation to a biomedical discourse involving specific categories of actors – students, tutors and other staff – that set the stage for interaction (Andersen, 2004; Dahl, 2014; Turner, 1987). Hence the bureaucratic structures produce different spaces for the production and legitimisation of the meaning of health (cf. Dahl, 2014): learning, life and professional formation depend on contextual disparities. If TTCs are regarded as bureaucracies, it becomes possible to explain why the everyday lives of students differed from the ideas propounded by the college. Tutors and other staff at TTC constantly categorised and evaluated students’ moral behaviour using these distinctions and assessments actively in their conduct with students:

You know, in here, we have the spoilers and the naughty ones. The first time when they arrive, they are very good ladies and gents. But after one month or two, you find they change the character because of the friends. They find freedom of doing a-b-c-d. So you start looking at the company and the group, whoever she or he is walking with, then you know who is the spoiler of this one. So that is when I start ruling out, this one she has changed the behaviour because of the [TTC student] community. I come to a conclusion, ‘This person when she was at home, she was within these rules and since she is now far from the parents, she now feels free’. So I shuffle and counsel them, and some say, ‘Oh yeah, OK, I’m getting on a wrong track’, so they leave and come back to how they were before [TTC]. Others never listen. (Interview, TTC nurse)

Bureaucratic structures at TTC can explain why students were categorised according to what TTC staff considered to be ‘appropriate moralistic behaviour’. The bureaucratic layout of the institution enforced the moral categorisation of students and thereby led to uneven communication and distribution of resources. For instance, tutors sometimes showed the answers to questions posed in upcoming exams to students who displayed what was considered ‘morally appropriate behaviour’, and were therefore considered worthy of passing exams. Students who did not concur with moralistic HE had to apply different forms of practice, for instance hiding their intimate everyday lives from the institution in order to meet institutional norms. These findings are in accordance with previous research, which has demonstrated how higher education institutions prepare students and attempt to impose specific values and attitudes on their candidates which are not solely academic (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Willis, 1977). The processes and activities that led to informal learning were strongly influenced by the interpretations of tutors and staff regarding appropriate student practices, similar to findings in other research where informal learning in workplaces was influenced by managers’ opinions (Eraut, 2012). On a wider scale, these findings connect to critical educational studies about implicit learning processes and hidden curricula, some with a focus on the ideological and repressive aspects of schooling (Freire, 1973; Illich, 1971; Serpell, 1993).

Identity as resistance

This section explores students’ reactions to the bureaucratic discipline and what this meant for the way in which their professional identity was shaped. Many students perceived the institutional discipline, in particular moralistic HE, as something they could not identify with and which they actively resisted:

In here, we are being treated as children. Students are adults but here they are given pressure. They are being forced to just stay in the compound and they are being forced to study 24/7, ’cause that person is being forced to be in a cage somewhere. It’s like a little prison. (FGD, second-year male student)

It’s annoying. We are humans and grown ups but we’re being watched like children, though some of us are married and have children. They treat us like minors like if we don’t know what we are doing, like if we can’t take care of ourselves. We are being monitored so bad. (FGD, second-year female student)

Students experienced that their lives at TTC were strongly influenced by informal HE, yet at the same time they learned to adjust to the system by not openly raising their voice and complaining, though they clearly felt resistance to the institutional discipline:

The rules are there and fixed. You have to apply the method that ‘I don’t have a right’. Try to be somebody that don’t have a right. Because if you have a right, automatically you’ll go home. They [tutors and administration] will look for something that is your right and then they never understand. So be somebody who doesn’t have a right in school and then you just try to continue with your own life without telling them. (FGD, second-year male student)

Learning and identity formation took place as a collective, dynamic and informal process (cf. Lave, 1993). At one level, the involvement of the students with everyday romances was a reaction against what they perceived as suppressing structures; at another level it constituted a way of finding an appropriate teacher identity. Students regarded romances with other young people of the opposite gender as an appropriate way of engaging in college life and a valuable, important and enjoyable experience on the way to constructing what they regarded as an appropriate teacher identity. However, data from the observations, interviews and FGDs revealed that many students responded to institutional discipline with resistance and a claim for more modernity and autonomy. When young people enrolled in TTC, they entered a world of intimate relationships – represented by low-cut blue jeans, T-shirts, pop music from mobile phones and sometimes unrestrained behaviour which iconised Western youth culture:

I have two girlfriends here. They are meant to enjoy life, because I have another girlfriend at home. How can you be in college without a girlfriend? Even the married students here have their boyfriends and girlfriends. By the way, you should stay here up till very late to see what people do in Mapenzi Street [local name for outside corridor at the TTC]. That is a hanging place for couples. They hold each other and do all kinds of things. (Interview, second-year male student)

At Saturdays, I like to dress in my short skirt and T-shirt. Then there are no tutors to distress me and I can see my boyfriend as I really am. I love my boyfriend and as soon as I am through here we’ll move together. (Informal conversation, second-year female student)

Students’ culture of romances highlighted virtues and values associated with modern life such as individual autonomy and nuclear family life based on intimacy and romance and less on more traditional understandings of relationships (cf. Dahl, 2014). At one level, institutional discipline and moralistic HE impacted students’ bodily experiences of everyday health negatively; yet, at another level students developed a counterculture to the institutional discipline through which they became critical and conscious of institutional moralisation. A ‘counterculture’ can be defined as a social group’s active resistance to what is perceived as an authoritative system, for instance TTCs, and the internal development of one’s own concepts and codes: a ‘culture’ that opposes the established system (Willis, 1977). In Willis’s study, a group of young schoolboys in England, ‘lads’, developed a counterculture on the basis of their parents’ culture, which critically questioned the school and teachers as authorities. The lads developed their own rules, based on ‘working class rules’, just as TTC students actively rejected moralistic HE and integration into the institutional system at TTCs and instead developed secret and romantic lives. The identities which students developed from living romantic lives represented a way of gaining autonomy, exercising control over their own lives and resisting control by the institution, which often marked them as promiscuous and guilty of violating college rules. However, this sense of guilt also put students at increased risk of contracting, for instance, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) as they engaged in what college explanatory models – such as HE with a moralistic content – referred to as ‘risky health practices’ (cf. Simmons, 2011: 482). However, students’ increased risk of contracting diseases did not in practice give them control over their own bodies. Rather, they gained control over how they presented themselves through, for instance, clothing and behaviour, which again gave them a profound sense of deciding about and controlling their own lives and bodies. In other words, student-teachers became professionals as they developed resistance to what they experienced as a suppressing and old-fashioned system. They did this in another way than that proposed in both the formal HE and informal, moralistic HE. As Lave (1993: 8) suggests, learning always undergoes construction and transformation in use. Moralistic HE provoked a form of ‘student life’ in which students’ moral qualities in relation to health, identity and their lives with their fellow students became important.

Sense of belonging in students’ communities and to the teaching profession

When students came to college they were exposed to other students. During their two years of teacher training they changed from being peripheral, legitimate participants (Lave and Wenger, 1991) to being full members of the TTC student community. This initiated a learning process which was perceived by the students as beneficial for their personal development:

Now in college we socialize, we interact even during sports. This has built some personalities where I can talk to all kinds of people also madam teachers [female students]. In fact, when I was in high school I could not even stand and talk in their presence, but at least now we go to class together and we talk, we can share together and learn from them. (FGD, second-year male student)

Some students felt that the disciplinary environment at TTC had created a student community which had influenced their sense of belonging to this community and the teaching profession positively:

This college provided a very hazardous sort of environment but all the same that one has given me a lot of strength. Maybe we are subjected to a hostile sort of environment, but this one has helped us maybe to be able to adjust to life in whichever way it comes that we may be able to cope when we are subjected to other climates and environments, now good ones. TTC has contributed a lot to me, especially on the side of social affairs. I have now got so many friends and they help me here. I used not to talk to people but here I have emerged to be one of the most talkative. I am part and parcel here. (FGD, second-year male student)

Lave and Wenger (1991) is a help in seeing how the students became full participants in the student community during the time they spent at TTC. Through their participation in this student community, their everyday experiences strengthened their participation in and sense of belonging to the community of students, especially through living romantic everyday lives and taking health risks with their fellow students:

When I came here I never wanted to have a girlfriend. But in this place, you find people pair, they are enjoying their youth. You also want to feel at home. I should also have a girlfriend. (FGD, second-year male student)

I hide in the bushes at night with my boyfriend, so we can have private time together. (FGD, second-year female student)

I wanted a girlfriend when I came to college, because everybody in here has one. They [the administration] must not know. The ladies in here are stress absorbers. (FGD, first-year male student)

As indicated in the students’ statements, the student community contained other values and virtues than those prescribed by the informal HE. The sense of belonging to the place and the other students, which students developed, was based on their relationships with fellow students:

I can’t explain it but how they [older students] talk to you, how they ask you questions, I just feel friendly and open. So the attachment is there not in one specific person but generally in all of them. You just feel as if you are kind of attached to them [other students]. That is now, I find it very easier and enjoy the profession. (FGD, first-year female student)

Personally TTC has contributed a lot to my development. Since I was born I have never been in mixed school of ladies and gents. So it has contributed to my social life so much because I have just been interacting with the boys at high school level so when I came here I was asking myself, would I be able to make good relationship with the female? So TTC has helped me socially and helped me to become a good social person. (FGD, first-year male student)

TTC has changed my personality. It has bring a positive attitude towards me and other students. It has helped me not to stereotype things. When I came here I thought that people from so and so are like this but in meeting you realize that it is not what is in the ground. It is something that we have only built in our mental capacities but it is not happening here. I’ve come out a flexible person who knows how to relate with everybody. (FGD, second-year male student)

Being in a community of other students and sharing life with them on an everyday basis was an on-going learning process in which the identity of the students as teachers was negotiated – in particular in terms of feeling connected to others, helping others, being a role model, etc.:

To me the teaching profession is a way of nurturing a kid or a youth to be somebody by being a responsible person and a role model to them. So that’s why I like teaching because always I’m involved with the youths and I like something that can make them change for the positive. (FGD, second-year male student)

Teaching as a profession acts like a pillar of everything. Like in the youths it really plays a very wide role since the talents and opinions of the young people are nurtured. So it’s from teaching that someone realizes himself or herself. (FGD, second-year female student)

Teaching is a very good profession. It brings somebody to be morally upright. You can be a very good example to the whole people, a role model to the society, and bring some positive change to the society where there are wrong things. You can make them make a change so that people do the right things. (FGD, second-year male student)

The students’ visions about initiating development and change processes in their future teaching indicated how they had developed commitment to, motivation for and a sense of belonging to the teaching profession. This ‘evidence of becoming’ (Phillips and Carr, 2009: 210) as teachers was illustrated by the way in which students gradually attached themselves to other students during their years at TTC, thereby attaching themselves to the teaching profession with more positive attitudes than the attitudes with which they initially entered TTC.

In the community of student-teachers, intimate relationships, risky health practices, critical awareness of one’s role at TTC and a consciousness about what kind of a teacher the student-teachers wanted to be were themes that were negotiated constantly in the student community. The discussions of the dominant concepts of and experiences with health, the institution, other students and themselves became a way for student-teachers to be in the world (cf. Wenger, 2007), constituting an on-going process and negotiation between self, others and context (cf. Erikson, 1968).

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to explore the informal and less visible HE curriculum in Kenyan TTCs and how it shapes student-teachers’ professional identities. The study indicates that HE in Kenyan teacher education cannot be viewed as an effort that takes place only in classrooms. Instead, it is embedded within the institutional structure as a force that influences the way in which student-teachers become professionals. This study documents that aspects of student-teachers’ professional identity other than those suggested by formal procedures are influenced during teacher training; for instance, sharing, caring, a sense of feeling connected to and being a role model for others and commitment. Informal, moralistic HE thus offers a potential for renewing stifling and stilted HE school practices in primary schools, where authoritarian and hierarchical pupil-teacher relations often mean that professional aspects of personal commitment, caring and sharing might be less visible. It is important to note, however, that not all student-teachers felt resistance to the institutional discipline and informal, moralistic HE, and not all student-teachers became part of a modern youth culture. Doubtless, other student sub-cultures and formal and informal forces in the context of TTC also influenced students’ professional identities. The lack of a control group and the number of cases – TTCs and student-teachers – included in the study are other limitations of the current research. The study concludes that informal, moralistic HE certainly constitutes an unsafe arena for student-teachers. But although this may be unintentional, it also constitutes a resource since students strengthen their sense of belonging to the teaching profession through the communities in these arenas. Being subjected to informal HE is thus a way for students to develop more inclusive teacher identities than those which seem to be planned in the formal HE curriculum at TTC, which largely focuses on delivering health messages with a biomedical content. There is evidence in the literature that teaching demands significant personal investment (Day et al., 2006). The findings regarding how student-teachers develop a sense of belonging to the teaching profession through the resistance developed in their student community might be one way of recognising how informal, moralistic HE also contributes positively to the teaching profession. In addition, informal HE and students’ everyday health experiences help to develop a broader image of health for student-teachers than formal HE lessons, as documented in previous research (Dahl, 2014). Students learned to navigate between different health messages in a complex institution, and expanded their views on health beyond the biomedical HE curricula to include sociocultural topics, which they learned during everyday interactions with peers. These findings are in accordance with previous findings in similar contexts (Dahl, 2014) where health is understood as also being culturally defined and ingrained in social relations as social, cultural and bodily experiences of what is considered ‘a good life’ (Meinert, 2004), as well as being defined as being political and critical (Dahl, 2012a). In this way Kenyan teacher education can help to shape committed primary school teachers who can work to improve health standards in their future positions as HE professionals for the difficult task in primary schools.

Two aspects of this study regarding student-teachers’ professional development appeared vital and may impact the future planning of teacher training in this specific cultural context:

It is necessary to recognise student-teachers’ informal learning contexts as indispensable dimensions of how they construct their professional teaching identities. Informal HE learning with a moralistic content is a significant aspect of Kenyan teacher education and therefore needs to be situated and discussed more decisively within the institutional agenda.

Students’ communities, regarding health and everyday life practices, are a resource for students which helps them to develop professional identities that entail aspects of commitment and sense of belonging to the teaching profession. These communities must actively be included in the HE activities at TTC for students to benefit from the informal everyday HE learning and learning for professional identity that takes place in these communities.