This chapter offers a detailed ethnographic description of one of the participant teachers in the study as a concrete example of how teacher expertise may manifest itself in one of the many challenging contexts frequently found in the global South. It begins by summarising key features of her contexts and the challenges she faced in her work, also offering an overview of her personal background and her beliefs about teaching and learning. The chapter then discusses her interpersonal practices (relationships with learners) and her languaging practices – the complex ways in which she and her learners made use of resources from varied languages in the classroom. After this, I discuss how she managed curriculum content, developed resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed account of her classroom practices – how she structured lessons, balanced between whole class and learner-independent activities and offered individual support to learners in large classes. It also offers an account of her knowledge, reflection and professionalism, and closes with brief comparison of her expertise with the findings of prior expertise research, identifying both important similarities and insightful differences. Numerous lesson and interview extracts are provided to support the discussion and claims made.

This chapter begins by describing the circumstances and challenges faced by teachers working in the global South, including challenges the learner faces, challenges the teacher faces, challenges within the school environment and challenges of the wider education system, to provide a rounded account of the characteristics that often typify educational systems in low-income countries. It also defines ‘effective teaching’ for this book. The chapter then provides a second detailed literature review, in this case documenting the findings of prior research into effective teaching in low-income contexts worldwide in an attempt to make sense of what research to date seems to tell us about appropriate good teaching practices in the South. It offers observations on aspects of teacher knowledge and beliefs, teacher professionalism and a number of areas of pedagogic practice reported from this body of literature. This review is then briefly compared with the expertise review in Chapter 3. The chapter closes with a critical conclusion, observing that the majority of research into teacher effectiveness in low-income countries either reports on the introduction of exogenous innovations and reforms or focuses on problems and inefficacies in existing provision, rather than attempting to seek out endogenous effective practice.