Rethinking Scale for Deep and Lasting Change in Teacher Education: Lessons from Uganda

• In Event: Scaling Educational Programs: Case Studies from Uganda, Honduras, and Colombia

Proposal

In 2007, Kimanya-Ngeyo Foundation, based in eastern Uganda, was accompanied by the Foundation and Application for the Teaching of the Sciences (FUNDAEC) to “import” and implement a non-formal educational program from Colombia known as Preparation for Social Action (PSA). Through a process of “decentralized recontextualization” and learning (Author, 2018), Kimanya-Ngeyo was accompanied by Colombian trainers to understand the conceptual framework made explicit in PSA texts, and then to adapt FUNDAEC’s educational ideas and practices to a diversity of local contexts. Among the outcomes of this effort was what Morel et. al., 2019, would describe as a local “reinvention” for use of the PSA materials, leading to the establishment of a teacher training program.

By 2015, Kimanya-Ngeyo Foundation, based in eastern Uganda, began delivery of a year-long, in-service teacher professional development program using PSA materials. Starting with a pilot of 30 teachers in 2015, the project has gone on to train more than 1000 teachers within two districts in the past eight years. The aim of the trainings is to provide teachers with rich, practical experience in new pedagogies that are progressively adopted over a year-long process of planning, experimentation, and reflection. Teachers analyze the program’s training materials and explicit conceptual framework, applying what they learn to their lesson plans and to community outreach activities.

As Kimanya-Ngeyo prepares for its first step in scaling the PSA teacher training program to new districts, and to working with government Teacher Training Institutions for the first time, the organization has drawn lessons from the process of adapting the PSA program from Colombia to Uganda. At the heart of the recontextualization process is assistance of participants to take ownership over how PSA materials are used in their communities. This is achieved by helping participants to engage in generation, application, and dissemination of relevant knowledge as guided by PSA materials. Today, teachers and administrators in the PSA training program have continued this legacy by taking ownership over the adaptation process in their schools today. Coburn, 2003, refers to this process as a shift in ownership over a reform, and suggests that “…to be considered “at scale,” ownership over the reform must shift so that it is no longer an ‘external’ reform, controlled by a reformer, but rather becomes an ‘internal’ reform with authority for the reform held by districts, schools, and teachers who have the capacity to sustain, spread, and deepen reform principles themselves.”

Drawing upon interviews and observations conducted with Kimanya-Ngeyo staff and teachers in the training program, this presentation provides support to the observation by Coburn, 2003, that “…the more challenging a reform is to teachers’ existing beliefs and practices, or the more aspects of classroom practice or levels of the system it engages, the more it may need well-elaborated materials and sustained, ongoing professional development to achieve depth. Similarly, reforms of this nature may require more effort on the part of reformers to work with multiple levels of the system to encourage normative coherence and sustainability.”

Author

• Joseph Lample, Kimanya Ngeyo Foundation for Science and Education