LEARNING HOW TO TEACH - The upgrading of unqualified primary teachers in sub-Saharan Africa
The renewed introduction of Universal Primary Education in 2002 and the failure of the previous upgrading programme was the immediate reason for the MUKA programme, the “Upgrading Programme for Grade B and C Teachers to Grade A” (Mafunzu ya Ualimu Kazini Kufikia Daraja ‘A’). In Tanzania, our study focused on the MUKA programme, which has targeted more than half of the primary teaching force.
The MUKA programme – a description MUKA is a distance education programme parallel to the regular Grade A teaching certificate programme provided by the teacher training colleges. It consists of three important elements: face-to-face sessions, course materials in modules for self-study, and support from tutors in the classroom. The aim of the MUKA programme is to improve the quality of teaching in primary schools. The three-year MUKA course was compulsory for all Grades B and C teachers, even for those that started in the teaching profession during the 1970s and were approaching retirement. When the programme started in 2003, teachers with Grades B and C constituted about half the teaching force, so there were more than 50,000 teachers eligible for the programme. In the first year, the course started with 5,000 students; in the second year it enrolled 10,000 students. The third and last batch sat for examinations in May 2009, by which time all primary teachers are supposed to be at the Grade A level. (1, Principal Education Officer, MEVT) The MUKA course starts with a one-week face-to-face session, for instance at a teacher training college or teacher resource centre. The week starts with the tutors explaining the importance of MUKA, emphasising that the government wants all teachers to be upgraded to Grade A. Next, teachers meet their facilitators and receive a guide on how to study independently, which also asks about time available for studying, about timetables, and about aspirations for starting these studies. Then, the teachers are split into groups of about 40 to study the content of the course materials. Twice a year, during the June and December holidays, there is a one-week faceto-face contact with the tutors in the teacher training colleges. (The original idea was to organise sessions of two weeks face-to-face, but funding was unavailable.) During this residential part of the training, the teachers can raise questions about areas that created difficulties in their work. The course material consists of 25 modules, developed for MUKA by the Tanzanian Institute of Education, to be studied at home over a period of three years. These modules introduce the content that is necessary as academic background to teach in primary schools, then they combine this content with appropriate participatory methodologies. The instruction language is Kiswahili, the Tanzanian lingua franca.
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