Feed A Hungry Mind

Education East Africa Quarterly Report

25^th November 2015

The general election of all general elections took place on 25^th October in Tanzania. Two candidates vied for the presidency. This was the first time that presidential candidates were nominated and elected without any legacy from the nation’s founding father, Julius Nyerere. The campaign was all that was talked about for weeks and weeks. The result of the election was not announced until 30^th October, and a new cabinet has not yet been announced. All this has meant that very little has been functioning in Tanzania for many, many weeks.

In this time of not-much-happening Katy Allen took off to Kigali, Rwanda armed with her tome on how to learn Kinyarwanda. It’s a fiendish language to learn, and even worse to pronounce – did you know that ‘bw’ is pronounced ‘bg’, and ‘by’ is pronounced ‘bj’? A new project is set to start in Rwanda in January. This will replicate our projects in Tanzania and will start with work on teaching and learning English as a foreign language. Rwanda was a French speaking country, but changed some years ago to having English as it second language. The teachers are struggling, and a new curriculum is coming into effect in 2016 before accompanying text books are ready! All the officials from the Minister for Education, the Director General of the Rwanda Education Board to the Head of Teacher Development and the Head of Higher Education (responsible for teaching-training colleges) are enthusiastic about our entrance to their education sector and are giving great support.

Back to Tanzania, the primary schools close for 2015 on Friday 4^th December. They will open for the new school year in mid-January 2016.

The last quarter has been exceptionally quiet for our projects as, noted above, the campaign for the general election consumed the nation, grinding everything to a halt.

First there were the national end-of-primary school examinations on 9^th and 10^th September, followed by a one-week half-term holiday. There were then a few weeks until the general election on 25^th October. It was extremely difficult to get to see any government official, and after the busy lead up to the Standard VII leaving examinations the teachers requested a bit of a break from our in-service visits. This is always the case at this time of year and we view the months after the national examinations as an opportunity for necessary research and planning.

Barbara had two meetings with the district academic officers to discuss her data analysis. For the first time the national body which oversees the marking of the examination papers is going to retain the Standard IV national examination papers. We rely on those papers for our detailed analysis. The Standard VII national examination papers have always been retained and so we can only analyse from the results and not from the answers to each question. The Standard IV national examination papers have, therefore, been crucial for our detailed analysis question by question for each pupil. The academic officers are to find out if they can request the examination scripts.

Katy and Barbara enjoyed meetings with our Dutch colleagues at F T Kilimanjaro with whom we work in Lower Moshi. The Dutch organisation introduced us to their Lower Moshi projects of infrastructure improvement, school feeding programmes and others, and we complement their work with our in-school projects. We were able to exchange ideas for improvement in our projects for 2016.

Not a hugely busy end to the year, but the elections are only once every five years. We now wait to see the new Minister for Education as soon as we can, and to forge ahead with our plans for 2016.

Our donors are vital for our projects to continue. Work in Africa is not always straightforward and an understanding of the ups and downs and the patience needed to navigate the system is essential. We thank all our donors for your support, enthusiasm for our projects, interest in our work and all it takes to achieve it.

Thank you, and early good wishes for a happy Festive Season,

Katy Allen

Director

www.EducationEastAfrica.org    

The national Standard VII, end of primary school, examinations take place on 9^th and 10^th September. That is then followed by a week’s half-term holiday.

Our work started again in the schools in the third week of July, following the long mid-year break in June and part of July.

However, at the beginning of July Katy Allen, the director, attended the LANES international conference held at the University of Dar es Salaam. The conference was on promoting innovative approaches to the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy in the primary schools. Katy presented a paper on the ‘Jiandae’ language awareness course books which this project prepared and printed and which is being used on our pilot projects. This highlighted the emphasis in the course on Swahili reading and writing and the importance of ‘chunking’ or learning letter-clusters, from which each Swahili word is formed. It also emphasised the importance of the development of different kinds of thinking skills, as this is something that is not brought out from the current syllabuses.

Barbara Kerr worked hard to produce data analysis of the Regional Mock examinations for Standard VII which took place in May before the schools closed. Each examination is a multiple-choice paper. Each school on the project was provided with data which show the weak areas which need to be addressed before the national examinations. Katy Allen wrote a paper on the English mock examination as it was full of grammatical errors and sentences which had little meaning; for some questions there was no correct answer and for others three of the four options would have given grammatically correct answers. The paper will be given to the Academic Officers in the district.

In the schools Barbara Kerr has continued to assist teachers with the teaching of mathematics, but concentrating on Standard VII teaching before the pupils sit the national examination.

One session exposed the teachers’ lack of understanding of ‘perimeter’. This is because they use a formula without understanding the basic concept.

‘Mobile tea’ sessions have been held for teachers of English. This is a workshop session when we collect the teachers from their schools and bring them to Langasani primary school, set out our thermoses of tea and milk and our plate full of ‘maandazi’ (doughnuts), and work with refreshments. Each session takes a grammar structure for the teachers to learn and practise. The teachers are now confident in the use of the past simple tense. Work continued on the past continuous tense with success, and teachers can confidently make their own sentences. More work was on ‘why?’ and ‘because’ and this was quickly picked up as it is so similar to the use of Swahili. In these sessions Katy is able to help the teachers by speaking Swahili and showing them the similar structures of Swahili and English.

Katy and Barbara have been invited by the Tanzania Institute of Education to attend their curriculum development sessions in August. This will be for two weeks to assist on the mathematics and English curriculum and is a great honour. Also in August Barbara has been invited to give a full-day session as part of the Mathematics Association of Tanzania (MAT)’s annual conference.

Thank you to all our donors for helping us to undertake this work, and so give such valuable assistance to the primary school teachers and their pupils.

Very best wishes

Katy

Katy Allen
Director

28^th August 2015