This hermeneutic phenomenological research examines the institutional obstacles to Continuous Professional Development (CPD) among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The study sought to chart the interrelationship of the issues and present a re-conceptualized model of growth. Data were gathered using in-depth interviews with sixteen EFL teachers, two focus group discussion and hermeneutic analysis of eight official CPD portfolios. The triangulated results indicate a vicious cycle of professional stagnation, which is caused by underlying socio-economic precarity, extreme resource loss, in-service training irrelevance, demoralizing classroom conditions, and resultant loss of teacher motivation re-coded as critical consciousness. Importantly, the analysis of the documents revealed the presence of the so-called Performative CPD, where poorly-rated portfolios (average: 2.60/5.00) are artefacts of a system based on compliance, which structurally silences the experience of the teachers. The research concludes that training interventions, which are isolated, do not work. It advocates an ecological approach to professional development, suggesting gradual, system-wide changes, which simultaneously focus on economic welfare, convert bureaucratic tools to dialogic ones, supply the necessary resources, and redesign support as job-inquired inquiry.
Sahle et al. (Thu,) studied this question.