Freirean dialogic action in Brazilian public schools: a Lesson Study contribution to teacher development

ABSTRACT

Recalling Freire's lessons on education and teacher development, this study embraces the transformative power of dialogue. In the context of Brazilian public schools, where education faces challenges such as rigid curriculum prescriptions, the researchers implemented a Lesson Study cycle as a dialogic teacher development intervention. Despite constraints, it fostered a collaborative and dialogic space, enabling English teachers to share and reflect in formative interactions. This approach allowed for critical discussions, empowered teacher agency, and enhanced the quality of English teaching. Inspired by Freire's vision, dialogic Lesson Study proved to be a liberating experience for teachers, promoting active and meaningful practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Lesson study
• English teaching
• Freirean dialogical practices
• teacher development

Introduction

The importance of teaching practice is indisputable for the development of a quality education in which not only students learn but teachers also continue to progress in building knowledge on their subject area and in its corresponding pedagogical knowledge (Park and Oliver 2008; Schulman 1986). To this end, impactful teacher’s professional development processes and programs are crucial for effectively tackling the massive challenges of Brazilian education today. At the intersection between education and teacher development, it is essential to evoke the thought of the educator Paulo Freire who, in his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1979), entrusts us with the transformative potential of dialogue, articulating the power of the word within its two constitutive dimensions: action and reflection. He affirms that one does not preclude the other and nor do they overlap, otherwise action will not transform reality and reflection will only be translated as an empty, meaningless discourse. Freire expands by arguing that in the presence of an action that transforms, and a reflection that re-signifies, it emerges a liberating vision of each and everyone involved in the process of teaching and learning, amplifying room for the open expression of ideas.

Inspired by the social and philosophical concepts of Paulo Freire who insists education is a process of human relations where we learn by sharing in permanent dialogue, this paper describes and analyses the implementation of a Lesson Study cycle (Dudley 2013; 2019) which can be understood as a dialogic teacher development intervention with teachers of English from two public schools in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, between October and December 2021.

Brazilian Education and Teacher Development: socio-historical context

In order to know the context in which the pilot project was developed, and to understand its relations with Freire’s proposals, it is essential to identify the characteristics of the teacher development processes in Brazil, recovering the cultural frameworks that boosted the development of education and the formation of the curriculum over the last decades. Many of the legacies of these social phenomena remain in the workings of Brazilian schools, despite the time that has elapsed between the emergence of such frameworks and the successive changes in public policies, including those related to teacher education until today.

The genesis of Brazilian education is initially based on the Christian and Catholic framework, understood as a synthesis of two ancestral and fundamental cultural frameworks: the Indo-European, which brought up the culture of the gaze from the Greeks, and the Semitic, of Hebrew-Jewish nature, with an emphasis on the culture of the word (Casali 2018). The Jesuits were in charge of acculturating the first peoples and maintaining central power, enforcing the teaching of Portuguese to the indigenous peoples, and in doing so disseminating the language of the colonisers throughout the Brazilian territory thus establishing a linguistic hegemony favourable to colonisation. At the same time, the first peoples were taught biblical stories and Catholic rites. In this way, a colonising process was set in motion, integrating communication and faith.

There were two curricula, one for the Portuguese elite living in Brazil, and another for the first peoples. The latter was subjected to strict controls and based on the precepts of Ratio Studiorum, the manual of the Jesuit order that only admitted teachers from the age of 30, with consolidated teaching experience, and a profile adhering to Jesuit values (Paim 1967). Enlightenment books were forbidden to teachers, perpetuating, in turn, distancing them from the divergent and contradictory discourses and, for that very reason, discourses that could have been liberating. This had the effect of blocking access to those scientific thoughts that were spreading throughout Europe, including in Portugal.

The Jesuits remained in Brazil for two hundred years, and despite different actions installed in the period, there are legacies that are still visible in different school organisations in the current Brazilian landscape. We are often confronted with teachers without autonomy and authorship, following prescriptive curricula and being educated through prearranged manuals that only serve institutional interests (Paim 1967). The administration of standardised assessment, as the sole criteria for decision-making for public policies, is the common practice. These same hegemonic public policies generally do not dialogue with the wider plural society and their regional and sociocultural needs. The Jesuit action, whose traces can still be found today, in fact, represents the Portuguese interests in the colonisation of Brazil and a vehicle for the submission to authority that is characteristic of teachers’ positions in this country.

With the expulsion of the Jesuits from the country in 1759, a second political moment began with the arrival of the Marquis of Pombal to Brazil, promoting transformations, including closing Jesuit schools and establishing a secular educational structure. Despite similarities in some aspects of the Jesuit and Pombaline phases, it is possible to highlight some changes in the Pombal government, such as teachers being paid for specific classes and in the replacement of humanities subjects for a more pragmatic curriculum geared to the commercial development of the country. However, despite the attempt to overcome obscurantism with the introduction of lay teachers and the intention to implement a national system, Pombal was not successful. The introduction of simultaneous changes in a stratified scenario by Jesuit management provoked the disruption of teaching (Paim 1967). Education in colonial Brazil moved from political-religious directness to a more pragmatic-focused curriculum, which required different profiles of teachers that were not developed and thus available at the time.

In 1807, Dom João VI fled Portugal to Brazil and bought with him collaborators, many in a position to take on teaching. The monarch created an educational structure divided into three levels of education: primary – a school to learn to read and write; secondary – a level focused on languages with addition of new subjects; and a third level designed for higher education. Brazilian education, again, was under the teaching of external specialists belonging to the culture of the coloniser, without significant links with the local context (Boaventura 2009).

In the second half of the twentieth century, pedagogy underwent a major transformation, becoming an Educational Science. The new sociocultural expectations demanded different educational goals to ensure both social and professional insertion in the labour market, determining different ways of organising teaching with the support of educational technologies. From this perspective, between 1969 and 1980, during the military dictatorship, Brazilian education was shaped by traditional-liberal and liberal-technicist pedagogies. In the traditional-liberal framework, the teacher became the centre of the process, the holder of knowledge, ‘able’ to lead the student to the mastery of standardized content. They were exempt from responsibility for social and political content, or rather, banned from entering this terrain, which was restricted to central administrative bodies such as the Ministry of Education, state and municipal secretaries of education, aligned to the authoritarian model established, which issued educational documents. (Libâneo 1994)

In the liberal-technicist trend, drawing on the positivist orientation proposed by Auguste Comte, and the behaviourist one conceived by Skinner, the overall purpose was to improve the competences of individuals to meet the demands of the productive sector, especially in the labour market. (Libâneo 1996). The 1964 military government, in order to create a ‘harmonious social system’ and promote greater economic development, imposed a framework which organised the curriculum based on prescribed scripts of educational materials produced by large groups of private editorials, in turn stifling the action of the teacher who was a mere transmitter of the content. Students were recipients of lessons designed by external specialists to be taught within strict schedules.

In both the traditional-liberal and technicist-liberal approaches, the role of the teacher was primarily one of a mere executor of scripts, focused on mostly technical teaching, with no room for dialogical articulation between teaching and learning ensuring compliance with a standard curriculum governed by encyclopaedism (Libâneo 1994). These approaches strongly shaped the nature of public education, whilst by contrast, private schools managed to maintain some different curricular pathways more focused on Science, Language and Arts. As a consequence, private education in Brazil was consolidated in a rather different way, weakening the public education sector that was doomed to an instrumental and low-demand curriculum (Kuenzer 2004). From that period on, the gradual devaluation of the teacher as an intellectual can be observed, including the neglect for teaching career plans in the public sphere, and the gap between the salaries of public and private network teachers, with advantages for the latter.

With the enactment of the law n° 5.692/71 regulating the Brazilian educational system, the discourse of quality in the private schools was based on a new type of educational material called Sistema de Ensino Modular (Modular Teaching System). This resource was based on a single pedagogical model for conducting classes that was identical in all grades, with variation only in content. This was coupled with a unified calendar of tests and the assignment of homework, without taking into account the different learning paces and particularities of the teacher’s action. These ready-made materials, with immediate and replicable solutions regardless of the characteristics of the context, were adapted to primary schools on behalf of teaching efficiency and effectiveness, in turn ‘saving’ the teacher’s planning time. It also served the purposes of a homogenised vertical curriculum aimed at preparing for higher education standardised admissions test.

Schools justified the adoption of these resources because of their economic benefits. The ‘Sistemas’ practically extinguished the need for teacher development programmes given the curriculum was highly prescribed in its details; they also abolished planning meetings, such that it erased investment in continued education for teachers, opening possibilities for hiring professionals with less seniority and lower salaries. Ultimately, teachers became just executors of a recipe, disconnected with the reality of the school context, without the opportunity for autonomy or the means of engaging in professional struggles. Their practice was contingent on the models given by the ‘Sistemas’, and they were evaluated based on how accurately they delivered the homogenising curriculum. ‘Sistemas de Ensino’, therefore, inherited from the dictatorship period, implemented an instrumental curriculum, on the one hand, and an assessment system focused only on results, on the other. The outcome was that it gained considerable traction and was introduced into the public schools.

As a reaction to this period of authoritarianism, a critical framework emerged in Brazil; this was a product of critical pedagogy whose greatest representative was Paulo Freire (Casali 2018). He announced freedom of thought, awareness of citizenship rights in search of a more just and egalitarian society, and dialogue in all instances of human interactions, including education. This theoretical construction has been championed all over the world by influential intellectuals, such as Gramsci and Dewey, and in more recent years Giroux, Torres (this issue) and Mayo (this issue), amongst others, who have studied the relationships between power, domination, social justice, freedom, democracy, identity, knowledge and culture, as well as the place of education and its agents in this complex scenario.

In this sense, Giroux states that,

Critical educators provide theoretical arguments and enormous volumes of empirical evidence to suggest that schools are, in fact, agencies of social, economic, and cultural reproduction. At best, public school teaching offers limited individual mobility to members of the working class and other oppressed groups, but ultimately, public schools are powerful instruments for the reproduction of capitalist relations of production and legitimizing ideologies of everyday life. (1997, 148)

Freire pointed to problematisation and dialogue as essential components of the educational process, in which the dialectical movement must ensure the flow of ideas without imprisonment, and without exclusivity in a single direction. In Freire’s view, relations between teachers and students must be respectful, and the idea of teaching authority must distance itself from authoritarianism. Contrary to what the popular imagination believes and often describes, as the lack of systematisation and consistency, especially in the realm of literacy, critical pedagogy cannot be identified with laissez-fairism and teacher complacency because it advocates a teacher responsible for the process; in short, a curriculum leader and the author of the lesson who is a professional committed to student learning.

It is in this sense, among others, that radical pedagogy can never make any concessions to the tricks of neoliberal ‘pragmatism’ that reduces educational practice to the technical-scientific training of students. To training and not to formation. The necessary technical-scientific training of students […] has nothing to do with the technical and scientific narrowness that characterizes mere training. (Freire 2000, 22)

In this way, as Freire affirms, the teacher cannot be trained either, as this risks reproducing this model in the students’ educational practice.

Currently, in Brazil, Freire’s ideas are not accepted nor disseminated in the education system due to political-ideological polarisation (Moratelli 2022). Despite the democratic discourse adopted by the institutions and educational objectives focused on student-centredness, there is no effective recognition of Freire’s contribution except in academic circles and in the intellectuals identified with the ideology that underlies his liberation rhetoric. There is a contrast in thinking between critical intellectuals and traditional theorists. Critical theory is at odds with the trend towards homogenising, authoritarian policies in educational terms currently in force in Brazil.

To conclude this section which has sought to contextualise teacher education in Brazil, it is crucial to bring to light trends in professional development which were adopted in the pandemic where ‘unprotected’ by the collapse of school walls, teachers found themselves in the perspective of ‘no place’ and the ‘no time’ created by technologies not always known in the world of teaching until then (Auge 2012). Teachers were compelled to leave their comfort zone, whose frameworks had been shaped by ‘ … western rationalist and positivist philosophy (obsessed with disciplines and controls) that structured teaching, learning and schools in Brazil, throughout its history’ (Casali 2020, 10). In the same way, educational materials and Sistemas de Ensino (Teaching Systems), at the centre of the teachers’ professional development process for decades, technology and its resources became the main object of teacher development, whilst teaching and learning, again, were replaced with a second plan.

Currently, in Brazil, Freire’s pedagogy challenges the status quo because it proposes a liberating education based on the critical and political formation of the student. It is thus a political pedagogy in the deepest sense of the term, for it advances a rather different understanding of society and nature that stands in opposition to neoliberal ideology, which undergirded the extreme right that had come to dominate the Brazilian government until December, 2022 (Brasil 2018). Celebrated in the world, Freire was considered persona non grata in Brazil, by Abraham Weintraub, who headed the Ministry of Education in 2019, under the tenure of President Bolsonaro. He credited the poor results of Brazil in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) to Freirean inspired approaches, stating that Freire ‘represented this total and absolute failure’. Indeed, now former, President Bolsonaro repeatedly criticised Paulo Freire, blaming him for the low quality of the Brazilian education system.

If the aim of Freirean pedagogy is to enable each and every one to express themselves in the world with autonomy and freedom, it is essential that teacher education is provided in such a way that it brings a critical, dialogical teacher to the fore. In this regard, Lesson Study (LS) can be a means for teachers to develop competences through a liberating dialogue, valuing the students’ critical thinking and freedom of choice and expression. Lesson Study places the teacher at the centre, as agent, author, intellectual and promoter of their own development and, consequently, that of the student.

It is in this complex multidimensional universe and political heritage that this LS pilot project was developed, introducing practices that had not been tried before in public schools in Salvador and that adhere to Freire’s pedagogy, especially with regard to the concept of dialogue.

Contribution of LS in the training of English teachers

The initiative to carry out a pilot project of teacher development in Salvador, Bahia, was born out of academic interest¹ and professional experience as a teachers’ trainer in Brazilian bilingual schools² by one of the authors. The double interest delimited not only the research field, but also the participants’ selection from two municipal public schools. It is to be noted that the public education sector in the city of Salvador serves 277,124 elementary school students, with 13,908 teachers (Portal da Educação 2023). Initially, we conducted procedures such as the interpretation of the historical frameworks that built, over time, the characteristics of the school leadership and professional development processes and, the identification of training needs of English teachers, taking into account the state’s cultural and sociodemographic contexts. We officially received authorisation from the Secretary of Education for Salvador to conduct the study in public schools of the region and the consent from each participant. The selected schools are in line with Brazilian educational legislation (Brazil. Ministério da Educação 2018), therefore, linked to the contemporary conception of education, which comprises the provision of teacher professional development programmes.

The choice to implement a Lesson Study cycle, as an approach to professionally develop teachers, was based on the vast international literature in the area that highlights Lesson Study as an efficient and effective methodology for the professional development of teachers, and for improving students’ learning in different countries, evidently, in different historical and cultural contexts. (Dudley et al. 2019; Willems and Van den Bossche 2019).

For this pilot project we elected to use a specific model of Lesson Study, the Research Lesson Study (RLS), developed and introduced by Pete Dudley to the UK in 2001. This model incorporates dialogic learning features throughout its phases which are essential to mobilise the principles and concept of Freirean dialogue into practice. RLS is now used in over 12,000 schools across the UK, in many European countries, the Middle East, Southeast and Central Asia. RLS is used as the official teacher development programme for all 7000 state schools in Kazakhstan (Dudley 2019).

It is noteworthy to mention that Lesson Study is a bottom-up approach to educational innovation, which originated in Japan over a hundred years ago, and since then, it has been their central method for teacher development and systematic curriculum reform. Over the years, variations of the approach were created as in China and other Asian countries, reaching the West in the 1990s (Dudley 2019) The American researchers Stigler and Hiebert (1999) on their seminal work The Teaching Gap (1999) imputed the consistent high standards of the educational attainment from Japanese students to long-held Lesson Study practices on their educational system In the early 2000s. Lesson Study was then developed in Sweden and in the UK, and by 2020 it had spread to over 80 countries. In Brazil, however, Lesson Study remains a relatively unknown approach, and at present the few initiatives that have been developed have focused mainly on Mathematics (Souza, Wrobel, and Baldin 2018; Utimura, Borelli and Curi 2020).

Structure of the pilot project

The procedures, phases and overall design of the pilot study have been created to develop the capacity of school leaders and teachers to replicate and lead the implementation of this school improvement methodology across their own schools, and perhaps in other schools and beyond. A suite of evaluation procedures was deployed bringing together the perspectives of the school leaders, the LS groups, individual participants, as well as the informed perceptions of the researcher which could be used to enhance the schools’ future teacher development policies with strong potential to be used at scale by the public educational system.

The pilot study consisted of one LS Overview meeting with the Secretary of Education for the city of Salvador, Bahia, four workshops with school directors, LS leaders and teachers, two feed-in sessions with teachers and researchers, and finally, the Lesson Study sessions conducted by the teachers, over five months during the second semester of 2021. The study followed the three iterative cycles depicted in the diagram below (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Research Lesson Study cycle (Dudley 2013; 2019).

Methodology

We employed design-based research (DBR) to implement Lesson Study given it is a systematic but flexible methodology aimed at improving educational practices through iterative analysis, design development, and implementation based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories (Wang and Hannafin 2005, 6).

We collected data through video recordings of the three collaborative planning and three post-discussion sessions, conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers, designed and applied surveys to better understand the context and obtain deeper perceptions of teachers and school leaders about teacher development programmes and the Lesson Study process itself. Documents, as the teachers´ LS workbooks were also analysed.

Discourse analysis was used to examine the transcripts of the recorded LS planning and discussion sessions using N-vivo software (Braun and Clarke 2013; Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2017). The data collected from interviews, surveys and documents were coded and analysed using a thematic approach to identify themes and patterns of meaning across the data set (Brinkmann 2018; Creswell 2014).

Description of the selected schools

At Escola Nova Sussuarana, where the pilot study was conducted, resources are precarious and the population served is characterised as low-income, with children from low SES workers. We carried out a survey to identify the training needs of the English teachers, and also conducted interviews with the school directors, pedagogical coordinators (middle leaders) and English teachers. The pilot project, which initially counted with three English teachers from three different public schools, observing the recommended number of three teachers for the implementation of the RLS (Dudley 2019), followed on with two teachers only from Escola Cidade de Jequié and Escola Nova Sussuarana. The role of LS leader was taken by an officer from the Secretary of Education of Salvador, notably, not part of the direct leadership of the participating public-school teachers. It is important to emphasise that each municipal school in Salvador has only one English teacher for all years/grades, hence the need to bring together teachers from different schools. The intervention took place with students from year 6 at Escola Nova Sussuarana.

Analysis and discussion

Dialogic relationship and the search for autonomy from the Freirean perspective

The interviews with the English teachers revealed their desire to establish an open dialogue with their peers to discuss the improvement of their teaching processes. Interviews also showed a genuine interest in theorising educational practice as a way to understand and develop the quality of the lesson, as their main goal for a teacher development programme, and not simply participate in an academic erudite study.

Although, there were a number of drawbacks in implementing the project, which required the renegotiation of actions to achieve the objectives that, initially, seemed compromised by the inactivity of the work group, the full RLS cycle was completed. The meetings with the participants, which at times occurred solely with the group leader due to teachers’ occasional absence, aimed to clarify protocols and procedures regarding the methodology.³

It is noteworthy that the lack of technological infrastructure conditions significantly hindered the quality of the work and the achievement of pre-established deadlines. According to Yoshida (2012) the development of the LS process can be potentially frustrated by structural and cultural obstacles, the main ones being the lack of support and resources to conduct the intervention and the lack of institutional vision for planning improvements, in addition to the time available among the numerous tasks of teachers for their development. Similar circumstances were experienced in the course of this pilot study. These barriers, in fact, confirm the legacies of the instrumental approach to teachers’ training (not really development) present today; barriers that are not unintentionally around but exist and demonstrate that the liberal project in which teachers and their growth must be silenced is still vividly ongoing.

Despite the conditions not always being favourable, the participation of teachers in this pilot project did not prevent the collaboration of the participants in building a meaningful design for this methodology in the face of the local school context. It was possible to overcome the prescriptive paths expected from training programmes in schools with centralising leadership, in which the discourse of participation inherently composes the proposed ideals, but does not always correspond to the school's reality. The practice of this LS cycle cognitively and socially demanded from teachers, even if initially, a collaborative reflection, a crucial principle for Freire’s dialogicity.

This Lesson Study experience has demonstrated that teachers can exercise agency even in the face of adverse factors. It emphasises that teachers, as intellectuals, can steer their own professional development given clear objectives, commitment to their growth, and adherence to the Freirean postulate. According to Freire, education doesn't occur in isolation; rather, it's a communal process involving a continuous, dialogic exchange of knowledge among individuals.

Dialogue is thus an existential necessity. And since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person ‘depositing’ ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’ by the discussants. (Freire 1987, 89)

This experience also showed teachers that taking a critical perspective in relation to their current practices, related to both teacher development programmes and prescribed lesson models, can lead to the understanding and adoption of new formats and strategies, substantially co-constructed by collaborative action among peers. This reflection considers the participation of the community that desires self-government and makes its own decisions, ensuring respect for the space of each and everyone, adopting Lesson Study as a methodology that is based on the complementarity of knowledge of the participants engaged in the process. The more teachers reflect on their reality ‘about their concrete situation, the more they emerge, fully aware, committed, ready to intervene in reality to change it’. (Freire 1979, 19)

Conclusions

In Brazil, at this moment, Lesson Study (LS) is still emerging. Given its approach that facilitates and engages teachers in dialogue, prompting a reflection on their own practices, LS may represent an opportunity for schools to reclaim what teacher professional development has identified as an essential condition for conscientious teaching and a focus on the whole education of students. In other words, it involves teachers engaging in conversations, in dialogues regarding their challenges and achievements. Teachers who explore head-on viable alternatives for teaching and learning, addressing their own difficulties, find solutions collectively.

This mode of thinking, acting, and constructing knowledge will be extended into the classroom, contributing to the development of students with an inquiry attitude, seeking for answers to their curiosities and questionings. As Paulo Freire would assert, the school should not stifle ‘inquiring’ (perguntação)but rather, it should stimulate curiosity, doubt, hypothesis, and, above all, collaborative efforts in finding answers to such numerous questions. Hence, teachers who ask questions, engage in discussions and talk about their own challenges and successes are capable of nurturing curious and inquisitive students.

Lesson Study provides resources for this investigative practice by teachers, which should be mirrored in the dialogical dynamics within the classroom, permeating the relationships between teachers and students, as well as amongst the students themselves. In essence, it constitutes a formative process wherein individuals take responsibility and construct their own knowledge through the shared dialogue of their perceptions, experiences, and expectations. This approach combines reflection, investigation, and conclusion processes that, despite being provisional, stimulate the pursuit of answers to the ever-existing questions.

Teachers’ development through Lesson Study, embedded in the love and generosity that Freire’s discourse conveys, adds a transforming attribute to teachers’ professional development, making them overcome the role of vessels of prescriptive practices to become multiplier agents of initiatives that lead to improvement and/or or transformation of the pedagogical practice itself. Ultimately, when Lesson Study practice embodies Freirean dialogicity, it can empower teachers to become active participants in their own professional development and genuinely believe in the possibility of changes and transformations.

If someone reading this text were to ask me, with an ironic smile, whether I believe that in order to change Brazil it is enough to surrender to the fatigue of constantly stating that change is possible and that human beings are not mere spectators, but also actors in history, I would say no. But I would also say that changing implies knowing that it is possible to do it. (Freire 2000, 31)

This statement served as a guiding principle throughout this project. We contend that this perspective can prompt teachers to embrace their evolving responsibilities in enhancing students’ learning outcomes, effectively shaping the school curriculum, and fostering a proactive approach to ongoing professional development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The pilot project was identified as the introductory phase of the doctoral research project in education at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Participants underwent initial training on the Lesson Study methodology, a particular model of collaborative action research in the classroom, and executed a full cycle of SL within their respective school environments.

2 Since 2008, Paula Castro has held the role of Teaching and Learning Director at Bilingual Schools in Brazil. Alongside this position, she works as an international educational consultant and teacher developer, assisting both public and private educational institutions in Brazil and across Latin America.

3 The research work, encompassing all stages within a complete LS cycle, was concluded in December. However, the teachers' records were submitted to the researcher in December 2021 and February 2022, respectively, owing to the recess period and school holidays at the local public schools.