Mentoring is crucial for teachers' professional development but challenges of access, resources and capacity make it difficult for regular in-person mentorship in low-infrastructure contexts. Mobile technologies such as social media have the potential to scale teacher professional development and communities. This paper explores the culture of teacher mentorship in rural Cote d'Ivoire and the motivations and challenges mentors face in using mobile technology in their work through semi-structured interviews with 33 teacher mentors. We found that mentors valued social connections and knowledge sharing in using mobile technology. However, power dynamics between teachers and mentors affected how they could collaborate. Mentors also expressed frustrations with the lack of moderation within social media groups. Lack of infrastructure and connectivity also raise potential issues of inclusion and access to rural areas and schools. We conclude with design recommendations for technologies that scale culturally-relevant teaching mentorship in low-infrastructure contexts.

As governments in developing countries race to solve the global learning crisis, a key focus is on novel teaching approaches as taught in pedagogical programs. To scale, these pedagogical programs rely on government teacher training infrastructure. However, these programs face challenges in rural parts of Africa where there is a lack of advisor support, teachers are isolated and technology infrastructure is still emerging. Conversational agents have addressed some of these challenges by scaling expert knowledge and providing personalized interactions, but it is unclear how this work can translate to rural African contexts. To explore the use of such technology in this design space, we conducted two related studies. The first was a qualitative study with 20 teachers and ministry officials in rural Côte d’Ivoire to understand opportunities and challenges in technology use for these stakeholders. Second, we shared a conversational agent probe over WhatsApp to 38 teachers for 14-weeks to better understand what we learned in the survey and to uncover realistic use cases from these stakeholders. Our findings were examined through a theoretical lens of aspirations to discover sustainable design directions for conversational agents to support teachers in low infrastructure settings.

Access to literacy is critical to children's futures, but formal education may be insufficient for fostering early literacy, especially in low-resource contexts. Educational technologies used at home may be able to help, but it is unclear whether or how children (and families) will use such technologies at home in rural communities, particularly in low-literate families. In this paper, we investigate these questions with a voice-based literacy technology deployed with families in 8 rural communities in Côte d'Ivoire for 4 months. We use interviews and observations with 37 families to investigate motivations, methods, and barriers for rural families' engagement with a literacy technology accessible via feature phones. We contribute insights into how families view digital literacy as a learning goal, leverage networks of supporters, and over time, transition from explicit to implicit support for children's learning.

Teaching is challenging in rural areas in developing countries because of large classroom sizes, limited basic infrastructure, and lack of teacher training. Teachers' impact on educational outcomes can be improved by teacher training programs but these programs are limited by poor infrastructure in rural areas. Although infrastructural challenges can be overcome by information technology today, it is unclear how such technology can support teacher training. Therefore to explore opportunities for teacher training in rural developing contexts with technology, we conducted interviews and observations with 22 primary school teachers in two regions of rural Côte d'Ivoire. We followed an aspirations-based approach that focuses on the user's aspirations (long term desires) to help understand teachers' intrinsic desire to grow in their professional life. We found that teacher aspirations conflict with their current role but their solidarity helps them find education role models who balance this conflict. We found that teachers face challenges in teacher training but they handle issues through their solidarity and by creating solutions. We then discuss ways to measure impact on aspirations, designing for conflicting aspirations and to leverage aspirations to create a social change in teacher training using technology.

Significant research has demonstrated the crucial role that parents play in supporting the development of children's literacy, but in contexts where adults may lack sufficient literacy in the target language, it is not clear how to most effectively scaffold parental support for children's literacy. Prior work has designed technologies to teach children literacy directly, but this work has not focused on designing for low-literate parents, particularly for multilingual and developing contexts. In this paper, we describe findings from a qualitative study conducted in several regions of rural Côte d'Ivoire to understand Ivorian parents' beliefs, desires, and preferences for French literacy. We discuss themes that emerged from these interviews, surrounding ideas of trust, collaboration, and culturally-responsive design, and we highlight implications for the design of technology to scaffold low-literate parental support for children's literacy.

Low levels of childhood literacy in global contexts may be mitigated by educational technologies, however, these technologies often rely on parents of sufficient literacy to effectively support their children. Given low levels of adult literacy in many low-resource contexts, we investigate the nature of low-literate adult support for children's use of a literacy technology designed to foster early literacy precursors. We deployed an interactive voice response (IVR) system with 38 families in a rural village in Côte d'Ivoire using the IVR for 5 weeks in their homes. Using call log data and grounded theory analyses of IVR observations and interviews, we find evidence that families leverage complex support networks where family members support children's use of the IVR in different ways, via a collective network of intermediaries. These results suggest opportunities to scaffold low-literate family supporters for educational technologies.