This four-year long action research project was conducted at one village school in rural Etiopia. The main goal of the action research was to create new, culturally suitable teaching methods based on student-centred learning instead of traditional lecturing and rote-learning. These methods have long roots in the history of Ethiopian education, but during the recent years the Ministry of Education has demanded teachers to use student-centred teaching methods in primary and secondary schools. Teachers consider this very challenging and they chose this situation to be improved by action reserach.

In this symposia I will clarify

1) what kind of changes took place in participants’ teaching methods and their professional development during the research

and 2) what are the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements at the school and how they enable or constrain the using of student-centred teaching methods.

The theoretical framework of this research consist of theories about professional development, action research and practice architectures.

Abebe, W. & Woldehanna, T. 2013. Teacher Training and Development in Ethiopia. Improving Education Quality by Developing Teacher Skills, Attitudes and Working Conditions. Young Lives. Oxford. Kemmis, S. 2008. Critical Theory and Participatory Action Research. In The Sage Handbook of Action Research. Participatory Inquiry and Practice. Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R. & Nixon, R. 2014. The Action Research Planner. Doing Critical Participatory Action Research. Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P. & Bristol, L. 2014. Changing Practices, Changing Education. Springer.