"Teachers are situated at a busy intersection, where numerous policies, programs, and priorities meet. In this study of primary school teachers in Malawi, I adopt the notion of "everyday creativity" (de Certeau, 1984) to examine how teachers creatively navigate the multiple and shifting demands of their work. Everyday creativity directs attention to how, in mundane and ordinary moments, individuals exercise "artisan-like inventiveness" as they use available materials, resources, and cultural forms in creative ways (de Certeau, 1984, p. xiii). This study involved nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, predominantly at one school in southern Malawi where I investigated the meanings teachers, and other stakeholders, made of teaching. I pursued two research questions: how do teachers make meaning of their work? and, how is teachers' work framed within and influenced by policies and international development projects? How teachers made meaning of events, activities, and opportunities involved everyday creativity, and to explore this I drew from interpretive approaches (e.g., Erickson, 1986; Geertz, 1973). My second research question examined the intricacies of teacher engagements with policy---teachers are both used by policy and international development projects, and, at the same time, they put these elements to use in creative ways. Conceptualizing policy as practice (e.g., Levinson et al., 2009) enabled me to explore these multidirectional processes. I adopted a vertical case study design (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2006) to structure this study, which was grounded in one school site and also included interviews and document analysis at district, national, and international levels. Fieldwork at one school site included participant observation, multiple interviews with 19 teachers, and shadowing two focal teachers. Beyond fieldwork at one school, I interviewed district and national policy officials and conducted document analysis in order to gain context about the policies intersecting with teachers' work and to compare how teaching was being understood across levels of practice. This dissertation is organized into two parts. Part I: Framing the study describes the context of education in Malawi, presents the study design, and introduces the main case study school and focal teachers. Part II: Reimagining teachers' work explores both how the terrains of teachers' work are changing at policy levels and how teachers are creatively reimagining their work. Overall, I find that teacher responsibilities are intensifying through and because of policy and that teachers exercise considerable agency in incorporating these responsibilities into their work. This agency is constrained and directed by relationships, policy landscapes, and financial realities. In a historical moment during which teachers features prominently on the global stage and powerful actors are reimagining what it means to be a teacher (Akiba, 2013; Robertson, 2012), this study provides a window into how teachers themselves are reimagining their work. Through this window, we can also see how competing imperatives for schools have added to teacher responsibility and complicated teachers' work. Yet, teachers engage with these imperatives with everyday creativity. The examples of everyday creativity presented in this dissertation illustrate how, though conditions of teaching in Malawi seem to impede teacher wellbeing, individual teachers creatively engage tools available to them to preserve and even improve it."--Pages ii-iii.
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