Abstract:
The practice of chewing chat limits teacher’s professional roles in teaching and learning
process. Absenteeism from their work places reduces teachers work effort, by affecting teachers’
legitimacy and interaction in the society, creating teachers who remain carelessness for their
profession and the roles expected from them. Furthermore, it influences their performance and
physical health disrupting their eating, sleeping, mental and other habits. It also affects financial
capacity of chat chewers since they spend much on buying it to fulfill their common need, which
could affect directly the life of their family and social responsibilities. Moreover, the purpose of
this study was to investigate the negative effects of chewing chat on professional role of teachers
in Waliso administrative town. In this study descriptive research design and mixed research
approaches were employed. The researcher took three high schools through purposive sampling
technique. Accordingly, 145 samples were taken using non-probability sampling in which
accidental sampling for questionnaire, availability sampling for an interview and snowballing
sampling method for the FGD. Additionally the target population of the study was high school
teachers, student’s parliament of the town, school supervisors, chat sellers, Woliso
administrative town education bureau officers and teachers association. The instruments of data
collection were questionnaire, semi structured interview and FGD. And the data was analyzed
through mixed research approaches; the data obtained through FGD and an interview was
analyzed qualitatively, whereas the data obtained through questionnaire analyzed by SPSS. The
findings of the study shows that chewing chat negatively affects the students learning out comes,
economy of the chat chewer, social relationship of the users, psychology of the users and
physical health of the users. As a result, chewing chat exposes productive society to become idle.
Chat addicted teachers usually become very unstable, talkative, emotional, and aggressive. Chat
chewing also associates with other unhealthy living habits like drinking alcohol and smoking
cigarette. It also paves ways for illegal activities such as sexual harassment, corruption and
thefts. Accordingly, Schools and their stakeholders should create a favorable condition for their
teachers that encourage their stay at the working places. The school principals should
encourage the social bonding between chat chewer teachers and non-chat chewers. The Schools
stakeholders should give constructive advice that could improve the life and duties of chat
addicted teachers. School principals should focus on ensuring local communities educational
needs implementing the best approaches to treat addicted teachers. It is highly recommended to
come up with new interpretation and analysis since gaps are inevitable in research writing
