providing support to teachers to enable them to develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to encourage learning in all their pupils. The scale of the challenge around quality teaching in Sub-Saharan Africa is vast; approximately a third of primary teachers are either unqualified or underqualified, and to achieve universal primary education, an estimated 1.1 million additional teachers are required (UNESCO, 2011). Existing teacher education institutions do not have the capacity to train greater numbers of new teachers or to offer extensive professional development to serving teachers. These facts necessitate innovative and cost-effective solutions, workable across vast geographical areas where infrastructure is weak and availability of learning resources is inadequate or non-existent. In 2005, TESSA brought together experts from a range of African and international institutions to address these challenges; our solution centred on the creation of a rich set of open resources which could be adapted for multiple contexts and cultures to support classroom-focussed teacher development. Many teacher education institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa are not in a position to commission or produce high-quality learning materials themselves; capacity is stretched, facilities such as libraries are limited and there is a deficit of skills to write or adapt materials and to use ICT effectively (O’Sullivan, 2006). Teachers, both those registered on formal programmes and those engaged in more informal learning, frequently have few materials to support them in addressing complexities in the particular setting of their own classroom. The TESSA OER address these needs, working within current policy agendas and institutional frameworks but drawing on the most up-to-date international thinking around learning and the ideas of the “open” movements, such as open licensing. The TESSA OER offer a model of teacher development grounded in an understanding of learning as a social and collective phenomenon in which the notion of participation is key (Lave, 1996). Learners, both teachers and their pupils, are seen as agentive, proactive, creative and curious; learning belongs not to individual learners but to the conversations in which they take part (Bruner, 1996). In this model, new teacher learning and professional knowledge is supported by gradual and highly structured participation in the practice of teaching, rather than by internalisation of discrete, prescribed teaching skills and competencies (Leach & Moon, 2008). Participation is not limited to discrete teaching activities but also encompasses broader engagement in different arenas of practice — in the classroom, school, local community and college or university. At the heart of the TESSA OER are highly structured sequences of classroom activities, related to the primary pupil curriculum, for teachers to integrate into their teaching. These encourage teachers to engage in ongoing conversations with their practice, moving towards the possibility of solving problems within their classrooms through analysis of their experiences and development of a more critical understanding of their practice (Freire, 1970). This is in contrast to the approach of many existing college or university methodology courses, in which lecturers often use an acquisitional frame of learning (knowledge transmission) with student teachers to “teach about” different classroom strategies, in preparation for testing through decontextualised examination questions (Glennie & Mays, 2008).
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