Uganda has a population of 29.9 million people (World Bank 2006), with literacy levels of 62% and a ratio of Gross National Product per person of just $320 (World Bank 2002).
In 1998, 55% of primary school teachers had attained the required qualification level (UNESCO EFA year 2000 assessment). Just 2% of the populated are educated to tertiary level (http://www.iucea.org/?jc=papers-01).
The introduction of Universal Primary Education in Uganda in 1997 had the effect of almost trebling student numbers; annual spending on education increased by only 9%. The introduction of Millennium Development Goals for 2015 has pushed many African countries including Uganda into introducing Universal Secondary Education too, again with a massive impact on conditions in the education sector. Class sizes of 70 are common and many schools face huge shortages of furniture, basic equipment and books (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/katineblog/2008/may/23/ugandawillachieveitsmillen).
Distance learning in Uganda
Uganda has a long history of distance education, which was first used in the colonial period as a way of training civil servants for administrative duties (Binns 2006). From Independence onwards, a key use for distance learning has been for the training of teachers. Since the 1980s there have been a number of programmes that have used distance education as a way of providing in-service training for primary school teachers. The main mode of distance education has been the use of printed texts, with radio and cassettes used to a lesser extent due to scarcity of required resources. Television and video are rarely used (fewer than 5% of households have a television according to http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ug-uganda/med-media).
Pedagogy
Distance learning requires access to resources such as a reliable distribution network (which could be postal, based on internet technology, based on mobile phone network etc) and to resources to be distributed to students. It can be argued that it also requires an educational system in which it is generally agreed that learning can take place without a teacher at the centre of a classroom (Rennie 2007). For example, in Nepal a style of distance learning that appears more acceptable than the distribution of printed resources is the use of video conferencing, which can replicate the dominant model of the expert teacher giving an oral presentation (Rennie 2007)
There is clearly a relationship between the dominant pedagogy used in an education system and the access to resources in that system. If 70 children are being taught by a single teacher with few books or other materials, then inevitably the pedagogic method will rely on the teacher's presence and his or her ability to impart information to pupils.
Reports show that even where Sub-Saharan African school curricula encourages investigational or activity methods, the majority of lessons rely on traditional rote-learning (Mereku, 2003; Mirembe, 2002).However, even if the teacher is the major "resource" available to pupils, that does not necessarily imply that the pedagogic approach has to be teacher-centred and that all learning has to be rote learning. O'Sullivan (2006) surveyed a number of classrooms in which teachers were teaching large groups of students. Successful strategies were identified by analysis of video recordings and interviews with students. The author's findings were that successful teachers:
Building an effective ‘Open Education Resource’ (OER) Environment for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: The TESSA Experience (http://www.wikieducator.org/images/6/6a/PID_402.pdf)
- praised children
- looked around the classroom frequently to keep scanning all children, and used a lot of eye contact with students
- used some repetition but did not resort to long periods of it
- provided group tasks for students to work on and had established with students how group work was to be carried out so that it was efficient and effective
- did not rely solely on rote learning and copying from the blackboard
Binns (2006) describes efforts to ensure that distance learning for teaching training was student-centred. The Northern Integrated Teacher Education Project (NITEP) trained 3000 student teachers using distance learning. They evolved methods they described as a 'culture of care' which aimed to support students with their learning in very practical ways. This places students at the centre of their learning through their needs and difficulties being taken extremely seriously.
References
Binns, B. and Otto A. (2006). Quality assurance in Open Distance Education - towards a culture of quality: a case study from the Kyambogo University, Uganda. In Perspectives on Distance Education: Towards a Culture of Quality. (eds) Badri N. Koul and Asha Kanwar, Commonwealth of Learning 2006. Accessed as
http://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/PS-QA_chapter2.pdf
Rennie, F. and Mason, R. (2007). The Development of Distributed Learning Techniques in Bhutan and Nepal. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Volume 8, Number 1, 2007.
O'Sullivan, M. (2006). Teaching Large Classes: The International Evidence and a Discussion of Some Good Practice in Ugandan Primary Schools. International Journal of Educational Development, no 26, pp 24-37, 2006.
0 comments:
Post a Comment