Walking with “barefoot” teachers: an ethnographically fashioned casebook

This article presents an ethnographic inquiry into the professional development of seven unlicensed or non-qualified teachers in a community teacher education project. They were teaching in two informal settlement community schools in shack-towns (informal settlements) near Johannesburg, South Africa at the time of the inquiry. The article commences by sketching the context of the field study, introducing the schools, the communities that they serve, as well as the teacher education program in which the teachers have been involved. The procedures of data collection and processing in the inquiry are then described briefly. The findings of the investigation are subsequently forwarded as interpretive outcomes of a study in the culture of education, presented in the format of a combinative ethnography, or ethnographic casebook.