| The economic hardships that plagued Zimbabwe since the 1990s damaged the education system. Schools lacked funding to maintain infrastructure and struggled to replace and upgrade teaching technologies needed to achieve desired goals. The deterioration of secondary school conditions necessitated a study to understand how teachers made sense of existing problems to perform assigned duties under given circumstances and identify strategies teachers used to cope with day-to-day challenges. The conceptual framework driven by social constructivism helped design the study and captured concepts that constituted the construction of meaning of practice and strategies teachers used to cope with existing school problems. Sources of data collection included observations of school and classroom conditions, interviews of five teachers per case from multiple sites, and document analysis to provide background information about school conditions and to verify details from participants. NVivo software helped analyze and visualize the data. The results indicated that all schools experienced dire shortage of teaching materials and equipment but the condition of infrastructure, school grounds, sports fields, and utilities varied among cases. The results of the study should encourage educational leaders to appraise school environments and make targeted investments in school infrastructure to maintain conditions supportive to teaching. |
