Enhancing pre-service teacher education in Uganda to sustain early grade reading initiatives

• In Event: Examining a Sustainability Framework for Early Grade Reading

Proposal

As governments and development agencies strive to achieve the SDG2 goal of improving the quality of education in schools, one of the main focuses in many developing countries has been on improving literacy instruction in the early grades. This can be seen in the increasing number of large scale early grade reading projects being implemented in countries throughout the South. A common practice of these large scale projects is to work with ministries of education to develop new literacy curriculum materials and conduct in-service teacher trainings on the new instructional methodologies for teachers throughout the country. While in-service training is an essential component of early grade reading (EGR) projects, it only addresses the current force of teachers and is usually a one-time, resource intensive undertaking. In these efforts, pre-service teacher education is often not addressed overlooking the next generation of teachers who will also need to know how to teach the new reading curriculum.
This paper will discuss how the Uganda Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) has worked with two USAID-funded EGR projects (School Health and Reading Program [SHRP] and Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity [LARA]), a government-run EGR project funded by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), Kyambogo University, and other local partners to develop an addendum to the Primary Teacher Education Curriculum to ensure the early grade reading initiatives introduced by the projects are incorporated into the pre-service teacher training program. It will briefly discuss the EGR interventions that are being conducted in Uganda and explain how the MoES along with its partners were able to identify the problems associated with incorporating the interventions into the pre-service teacher education program. The paper will then demonstrate how the EGR and related methodologies and content were incorporated into the existing pre-service curriculum through developing an addendum and training key stakeholders at the primary teaching colleges on how to incorporate it into the pre-service courses.
The Uganda MoES has been working since 2012 with donor-funded projects to improve early literacy in schools by revising and developing a new EGR curriculum in twelve local languages plus English through the SHRP, LARA, and GPE projects which cover more than 70% of the country. As the first few years of the interventions focused mainly on curriculum development, materials provision to schools, and in-service teacher training, the MoES and its partners recognized that the pre-service training provided at Primary Teacher Colleges (PTCs) did not include the new methodologies and content introduced by the projects and being implemented at schools throughout the country. Therefore, they held discussions and explored how the new EGR materials and methodologies could be included in the Primary Teacher Education Curriculum. But the MoES faced two major challenges to update or revise the pre-service curriculum in that 1) a revision was not scheduled or budgeted by the government for another few years and 2) it was not included in any of the projects’ scope or budget to revise the pre-service curriculum.
Therefore, after much deliberation the MoES and its partners decided to develop an addendum to the current Primary Teacher Education Curriculum that would provide guidance to teacher educators at PTCs on how to incorporate the new content and methodologies of the EGR curriculum into their current pre-service courses without having to revise the curriculum as a whole. The addendum development effort was a collaborative effort between the MoES, the three EGR projects, and other local education partners working to improve instruction in primary schools. Through a number of consultative workshops and under the direction of Kyambogo University, the institution responsible for pre-service teacher curriculum in Uganda, the addendum was developed and approved by MoES.
A dissemination workshop was held at venues across the country for key personnel (principals, deputy principals, and tutors) from all government PTC to be oriented on the addendum to the curriculum and trained on the new content and methodologies introduced through the EGR interventions. The PTCs are expected to incorporate the new information into their existing pre-service courses to ensure that the next generation of teachers also receives training on the new EGR curriculum.
This paper hopes to demonstrate the importance of incorporating EGR interventions in the pre-service teacher education program along with implementation in schools with existing teachers.

Author

• Scholastica Tiguryera, RTI International