Examining Discourses of Writing and Writing Instruction in Ugandan Primary Education Curriculum

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Teaching amidst a changing landscape of literacy ideologies, expectations, curricula, and pedagogies

Proposal

From 2012 through 2019, the East African nation of Uganda implemented an English and Mother Tongue (MT) literacy program sponsored by USAID called the Uganda School Health and Reading Program (SHRP). This program was completed with the technical assistance of RTI International, a US-based independent non-profit research institute, in collaboration with the Ugandan Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES). The program sought to “improve reading achievement in 12 local languages and English in Grades 1 to 4 in 4,097 government primary schools” (USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program, 2019). To support the success of this program, curricular materials were developed that included Teacher’s Guides and Pupil Books for teaching English and 12 selected indigenous Ugandan languages to learners in lower primary. Within the overall narrative supporting the importance of early grade literacy, much attention is devoted to the importance of reading, as measured by numerous early grade reading metrics. Yet these alone are insufficient to determine success in school (Bartlett, Dowd, & Jonason, 2015). Furthermore, research indicates that reading and writing are mutually supportive of one another and should be integrated across learning environments (Graham, 2019; Graham & Hebert, 2011). In this paper, I undertake a content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002) of a subset of SHRP materials, focusing specifically on how writing and writing instruction are positioned in these materials designed for teacher and pupil everyday instructional use. Drawing upon current research in the field of writing instruction, I develop deductive codes based on Troia’s (2014) review of evidence-based practices (EBPs) for writing instruction and Ivanic’s (2004; 2017) discourses of writing and learning to write in my analysis. I specifically ask: RQ 1) What evidence-based practices (EBPs) for writing instruction are prominent in the Ugandan Teacher’s Guide (MoES, 2018) and Pupil Book (MoES, 2015)? RQ 2) What discourses of writing and learning to write are prominent in these same materials? RQ 3) How do the results of RQ2 and RQ3 compare with an analysis of the Ugandan Ministry of Education Primary Syllabus (2010)? In seeking to answer these questions, I uncover evidence of what Graham and colleagues refer to as “the homogenization of writing instruction” (2021, p. 920), in which writing instructional practices with specific evidence derived from one learning context are presumed to be relevant and applied in another very different learning context. My research also highlights the potential emergence of new discourses surrounding writing and the purposes of writing in the lower primary curriculum. By exploring this, the introduction of new discourses surrounding writing and writing instruction can be mapped through these curricular materials that were meant to enhance rather than replace previously existing resources. By tracing the introduction of specific writing and writing instructional practices in an educational context through curricular interventions like SHRP, I lay a foundation for further investigation into the ways that these curricular materials, EBPs, and discourses of writing and learning to write are enacted in specific classroom contexts and in specific classroom literacy events.

Author

• Lindsey A. Hall, Michigan State University