“Give us the one for the teachers”: Exploring the relationship between working conditions and pedagogy reform in Uganda

• In Event: Engaging with the foundations: How the global learning crisis reshapes policy and pedagogy in the Global South

Proposal

For over a decade, Uganda has been the site of large scale shifts in reading curricula, pedagogy and assessments in the early primary grades. Since 2011, an estimated 80% of Ugandan government primary schools have adopted new curricula that emphasize explicit phonics instruction, and over 30,000 in-service teachers, and all pre-service primary teachers, have received professional development in phonics, learner-centered pedagogies, and the use of assessments focused on reading speed and fluency.

These reforms bear similarity to those playing out in many low-income countries across the Global South in recent years. Sensing that their push to expand universal access to primary education has not yielded desired results, international donors and policymakers coalesced around the need to target learning, and particularly early grade reading, seen as the gateway skill for future schooling success.

In this paper I draw on interviews with donors, NGO workers, Ugandan policymakers and teachers conducted between 2022-2024, and observations of classroom reading instruction in four Ugandan primary schools over nine months, and leverage Sunder Rajan’s notion of conjuncture, or the study of the “particular conditions upon which events unfold”, to explore how growing political agitation amongst Ugandan teachers shapes how they perceive and implement early grade reading reforms (Rajan 2021).

After Uganda eliminated school fees in the 1990s, teachers saw their class sizes balloon; Uganda’s student-teacher ratio (STR) increased by over 60% after eliminating fees, more than any other country (Evans & Yuan 2018). More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic took a particular toll on Ugandan teachers as they endured the longest pandemic-related school closures in the world, spanning nearly two full years. In July 2022 teachers launched a national strike in protest of a government proposal to raise secondary level science teacher salaries by 300% while holding all other teachers’ salaries constant. The strike ended with no change in government policy and unresolved frustrations amongst teachers. A recent national survey found that 47 percent of government primary teachers were dissatisfied with their job, 59 percent were interested in leaving teaching, and about 78 percent believe that their colleagues are dissatisfied with their job (TISSA 2014).

In this context, new reading curricula, pedagogies and assessments has been perceived by some primary teachers as an addition to already overburdened workloads in the absence of meaningful corollary efforts to address poor working conditions. As one teacher in my sample put it: “The numbers are overwhelming. The workload is overwhelming…So many teachers look at the new literacy and just want to leave it because it is all so heavy.”

Attending to the intersections between the politics of teacher labor and reading pedagogy reforms shows how improving reading instruction for young children is not just a matter of getting the right books and proper pedagogies into classrooms. Based on these findings, I argue for greater attention to teaching conditions as a development and policy priority.

Author

• Jonathan Marino, UW-Madison