Eight expert Indian teachers of English: A participatory comparative case study of teacher expertise in the Global South

This PhD project involves a comparative case study of eight Indian teachers of English, all identified as experts of their respective contexts based on multiple criteria. The original, participatory design involves a planning workshop prior to data collection to enable participants to contribute to the study's research questions and plan outputs of practical use to them and their colleagues.


Over 100 empirical studies of teachers identified as experts have been conducted in high and upper-middle income countries. However, almost no comparable studies have been conducted in the more challenging contexts typically found across the Global South, likely due to the erroneous assumption that teacher expertise does not exist in such contexts because of a lack of support and resources for it to develop.


This study challenges this assumption, offering an equitable, replicable design and detailed descriptions of the practices and cognition of expert teachers working in a southern context (Indian government-sponsored secondary education). By doing so, it helps to lay the foundation for a knowledge base on indigenous good pedagogic practice in India. Such a study is of potential benefit to teacher education, curriculum and policy; it enables authorities to base future models on the practices of expert teachers working in local conditions. As such, they are likely to be more culturally appropriate, more feasible and more sustainable than pedagogic models based on exogenous practices imported from higher-income contexts.


The study has identified many shared features among these expert teachers, most of which were less frequently observed among their colleagues. These include well developed pedagogical content knowledge and English language proficiency as well as beliefs in building learner self-confidence, engaging learners and ensuring understanding of lesson content. Participants were found to build warm, supportive relationships with learners and show inclusivity towards all languages in the classroom. Their frequent use of interactive whole-class teaching was balanced with regular, learner-independent activities that included both collaborative learning and active monitoring of seatwork to enable them to provide differentiated individual support, even in large classes. Their professionalism was underpinned by lifelong learning, extensive reflection and care for their learners, whose opinions they valued most. However, variation was also observed in a number of areas, including clinal differences relating to their conception of subject (what English is) and their degree of control over classroom processes.


Strong agreement with the findings of prior studies of teacher expertise (mainly conducted in higher-income contexts) was also noted, although important differences include participant teachers' prioritisation of inclusion and confidence-building over the setting of high standards, their focus on learner understanding over higher-order thinking skills and their varied strategies for helping learners assimilate content from highly ambitious curricula.


The study offers a contingent expert teacher prototype for low-income contexts, as well as an equitable, replicable model for identifying and studying teacher expertise in the Global South. It offers further support for certain frequently documented features of expert teachers (particularly their caring, dedicated and reflective personalities) that have implications for teacher recruitment, development and evaluation. It also offers observations of potential importance for Indian secondary English pedagogy, such as the practice of scaffolded text interpretation as a means to enable learners to understand and access curriculum texts well beyond their level of independent reading competence, and participants' complex translanguaging practices that replicate those found in wider Indian society.