Either/or literacies: teachers’ views on the implementation of the Thematic Curriculum in Uganda

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to understand the challenges of literacy acquisition under the Thematic Curriculum reform in Uganda, which introduced Mother Tongue instruction in lower primary. We compare teachers’ perspectives from two central districts using Luganda and two peripheral districts using Ateso, drawing on a multi-layered approach to understand the interplay between policy, pedagogical, and conceptual-level factors that shape the way Mother Tongue instruction is implemented. We show how teachers cope with the challenges of parallel literacy instruction in two languages against the dilemma of which language to prioritise. By focusing on teachers’ agency, we suggest that teachers’ language choices demonstrate the bilingual realities of Ugandan schools and societies, which undermine either/or narratives that pit English and local languages against each other. Our main contribution is in exposing teachers’ unofficial classroom practices and relating these to an interplay between micro- and macrolevel factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• mother tongue education
• Thematic Curriculum
• language planning and policy (LPP)
• early literacy
• Uganda

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the African Humanities Programme (AHP) of the American Council of Learned Societies and The Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The authors would like to thank Gibson Ncube for his generous feedback on early drafts of this manuscript, and Irene Akurut for her invaluable work as research assistant. We also acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for the very useful comments that helped to shape this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. NAPE is the Uganda National Examinations’ arm for progressive national assessments, particularly at primary school level.

2. The piloting districts for the TC reform were selected based on the nine regional languages which the MoES approved as LoLTs by 2006 – Lusoga, Luganda, Ateso, Runyankore-Rukiga, Runyoro-Rutooro, Dhopadhola, Lugbra, Acholi and Ng’akaramojongo (Namyalo and Nakayiza, 2015: 420).

3. For instance, subjects such as Social Studies (SST) and Sciences are now studied across Literacy 1 and Literacy 2 lessons, divided into themes such as ‘our school’ or ‘accidents and safety’ (National Curriculum Development Centre 2016, 10, 28).

4. The one-teacher-one-class system meant that rather than teaching by subjects and moving between classes, each teacher now had to teach all subjects, even ones they were not trained to teach. Since the pupil-teacher ratios are high, and school days are invariably long – often eight to ten hours – handling all the thematic areas by one teacher was a daunting challenge (cf. Ssentanda, et al. 2019).

5. In Teso we worked with a local research assistant who was a native speaker of Ateso. Though the first author speaks basic Ateso and could follow the research assistants’ translations, we felt that the quality, depth, and openness of the interviews would benefit immensely from being conducted by a native Ateso speaker. There was also an external consultant – an elder native speaker of Ateso – for questions that came up during the translations from Ateso. The second author is a native Luganda speaker and conducted the interviews and translations himself.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University and The African Humanities Programme (AHP) of the American Council of Learned Societies.