Teacher Education In Sub Saharan Africa

In the drive to achieve universal primary education as one of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing recognition of the urgency of focusing on teacher education to both meet the demand for more than one million qualified teachers required to achieve this goal within sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to combat the sometimes poor quality educational experience reported in the school. Currently, approximately only one third of teachers are qualified to teach. This dearth in qualified teachers also means that secondary and tertiary education need to be improved upon to provide an educated cohort of graduates. This in turn will ensure that the quality of teacher trained and retained within the profession is of a sufficiently high standard to ensure sustainable progress. This volume focuses on the various aspects of teacher education which need to be addressed in order for the wider Millennium Goals to be achieved, but more importantly, so that each African child living within sub-Saharan Africa will have the right to a quality education: ensuring they too experience their right and entitlement as children to reach their full potential - often taken for granted in Western countries – giving African children the necessary tools to build a better future for themselves. Of particular interest to the education researcher and policy maker, this volume’s contributors look at the various issues and challenges around the teacher profession, particularly in relation to resources and practices within sub-Saharan Africa. The contributors examine the issue of building research capacity for educational research within teacher education Colleges and explore the concept of education for sustainable development with the view to improving the development of quality teacher education within the global South. In this volume, research reports are presented highlighting the various challenges within the structure and provision of teacher education within certain national contexts, including assessment and curricula issues, which need to be addressed. This volume goes from the global to the local and examines teacher educator teaching, learning and reflective practice issues within different contexts, as well as exploring alternative pre-service experiences for western teachers who wish to work within the sub-Saharan context as well as some teacher educator exchange programmes between the South and North. Case countries explored include Lesotho, South Africa, Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Madagascar, to mention but a few. Of particular value to the education researcher and policy maker, this book provides a timely resource focusing on an area of neglect, highlighting the central role of the teacher and teacher education towards sustainable development within the sub-Saharan African context.

Continuing Professional Teacher Development in Sub-Saharan Africa explores the prospects that the on-going continuous professional development (CPD) of teachers working in schools offers for meaningful change, particularly towards improving the quality of educational provision for the majority of the continent's children. By reflecting on teacher professional development efforts and their place in broader education reforms, the book highlights the challenges of teacher CPD in these education contexts - contexts strongly shaped by endemic poverty, under-development and social upheaval. The collection draws together examples of innovation and resilience, and the valuing of teachers as critical role players, enabled and empowered through their on-going development as education professionals. Drawing together a wealth of experience, the volume identifies the policy and research implications for the future of CPD across the continent, providing important lessons that can be integrated into a post-2015 development agenda for Africa.

This working paper is based on country case studies of Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Tanzania, and Uganda, and an extensive literature review. In many parts of Africa, the demand for secondary teachers substantially exceeds the supply, due to factors such as secondary teacher attrition, bottlenecks in the teacher preparation system, and perceived unattractive conditions of service. Few countries have strong policies, strategies, and programs for recruiting able secondary school graduates to secondary teaching. The paper suggests several critical and promising areas for improvement in th.

This book explores the plethora of social-justice issues facing teacher education and development in Africa. Using both theoretical and empirical perspectives, it considers the need for teacher education to be transformational and address conventional pedagogy as well as the rights and duties of all citizens. The edited volume focuses on a wide range of relevant aspects, such as decolonisation, economic models, environmental concerns, as well as multilingual and multicultural aspects of education. Evidence-based chapters cover strategies used to support preservice and in-service teachers on how best to tackle issues of social justice through induction activities, pedagogy and discipline content, involving local communities, and the role of technology, including the use of open educational resources. The principles underlying these strategies are being used in the COVID-19 pandemic and will be equally relevant in the post-COVID-19 world. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of teacher education, African education, educational policy, international education and comparative education.

Quality is at the heart of all education systems as good quality teaching and learning environments ensure effective learning outcomes. Quality influences what students learn, how well they learn and what benefits they draw from their education. The quest to ensure that students achieve decent learning outcomes and acquire values and skills that help them play a positive role in their societies is an issue on the policy agenda of nearly every country. As many world governments struggle to expand particularly basic education, they also face the challenge of ensuring that students stay in school long enough to acquire the knowledge they need to cope in a rapidly changing world. The purpose of this book is therefore to profile some aspects of education quality in the African education systems and highlight key policies for improving the teaching and learning outcomes. The book is also intended to provide basic information to scholars who are interested in studying education in the Sub-Saharan African region. To enable users understand and appreciate developments, trends and changes that have taken place in the education systems, for most chapters, the book deliberately adopts a historical approach which leads to some focus on developments which date back to the colonial period in Africa.

In Africa, with the expansion of coverage of primary education in recent decades, many of the remaining out-of-school children are in hard to reach areas, with low population density and poor transport. Providing access to education is challenging in such contexts, as the population in any village is often too small to support a conventional primary school. One of the answers is the use of multigrade teaching, where one teacher works with students of two or more grades. This paper examines the practice of multigrade teaching in three African countries, Uganda, Senegal, and The Gambia. Although these three cases had very different approaches to multigrade, their experiences suggest that multigrade teaching is a promising and cost-effective option, but that successful implementation requires sustained support from policymakers, adequate training of teachers, and careful explanation of the approach to parents and the communities.