Working conditions as policy mediators: Exploring teachers’ enactment of early grade reading reforms in Uganda

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

Proposal

For the past ten years a series of donor-funded programs and government policy reforms have shifted the way reading is taught in Ugandan primary schools, with the goal of increasing literacy outcomes in the early grades. In this paper I ask: how have teachers experienced these program and policy shifts? And, how do the social and material conditions of teaching influence how early primary teachers perceive and enact new expectations and approaches for teaching reading and writing in their classrooms? Drawing on classroom observations, a teacher survey and teacher interviews in government primary schools across three districts, this research shows how working conditions mediate teachers’ policy enactment in myriad ways. A shortage of textbooks forces teachers to spend time and resources drawing diagrams and copying reading passages; a shortage of staff requires teachers to take on multiple roles in the school and saps their ability to plan lessons or give students feedback on their work; low salaries push teachers to take on additional jobs outside of school and prevent them from undertaking professional development trainings in new pedagogies; frequency teacher transfers across schools and grade levels limited their ability to implement trainings they received; Long commutes to and from school gave teachers little time or energy to prepare themselves for new lesson plans or provide formative feedback to students, as new reading curricula asked them to do. These findings contribute to the limited literature on teachers’ working conditions, and the even smaller research base that directly links working conditions to teacher implementation of new policy reforms. As Nina Bascia and Cindy Rottmann observe: “In the large and varied body of research on teaching, there is remarkably little attention to teaching conditions” (2011, p. 789).

Author

• Jonathan Marino, UW-Madison