Effectively educating teachers is crucial in protecting youth from HIV pandemic

Preparing teachers to give high quality HIV and AIDS education in the classroom is a crucial way of protecting young people throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s worst affected region.

In Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, content in syllabuses as well as materials and practices used to train future teachers are inadequate at having a significant impact on their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours towards the pandemic.

In order to overcome these shortfalls, HIV and AIDS education should be a separate examinable subject; a variety of learning material should be available to support the training of future teachers; and those training the potential teachers also need adequate preparation and support.

These and other recommendations which address successful teaching of HIV and AIDS – an increasingly major threat in many countries to educational gains made in recent decades - are made in a new Commonwealth publication.

‘Where are the Gaps? HIV and Gender Pre-service Teacher Training Curriculum and Practices in East Africa’ was written by Iffat Farah, Caroline Kavuma, Mweru Mwingi and Orwe Onyango. They are affiliated with the Aga Khan University, Institute for Educational Development, East Africa.

The publication comes after a regional workshop back in 2006 organised by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, which concluded that there needs to be greater understanding of the current teacher education curriculum and practices in addressing the HIV virus.

This prompted a review of teacher education curricula and practices in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, where the rate of HIV and AIDS is high and where girls continue to face disparity in various ways.

“The review sought to consider not only the policies and curriculum, but also the ways in which these are translated into practices,” explains Dr Jyotsna Jha, Education Adviser at the Commonwealth Secretariat.

“Drawing on a comprehensive desk review of relevant materials, and in-depth interviews of tutors and trainee teachers, the report concludes that although the three countries have a strong and encouraging policy context mandating the inclusion of HIV and AIDS education in the teacher education curriculum documents, the gap between policy and implementation is wide.”

Another recommendation which emerged from this review was that tutors need a clear understanding of the purpose of participatory methods and a better ability to use them effectively.

The authors also write that gender education for teachers must emphasise examination of their own concepts and beliefs about gender and further understanding of a teacher’s responsibility to practise being gender aware in the classroom. Their final recommendation is that curricula should also highlight the links between gender and HIV and AIDS.

This publication is being launched and discussed at two events in New York on 3 and 4 March 2009 held on occasion of the fifty-third session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

The first event is a panel discussion on ‘Ending AIDS Stigma: Women and Men working together' organised by the Commonwealth Foundation in the UN Headquarters on the morning of 3 March. Caroline Pontefract, Director of Social Transformation Programmes at the Commonwealth Secretariat, will release the book.

The following day the book will be launched in the afternoon at UNICEF House after a screening of ‘Where the Water Meets the Sky’, a film narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman, which tells the inspiring story of 23 women from a remote region of northern Zambia who are trained in film-making. This is an UNGEI (United National Girls Education Initiative) event.

Both these events are organised on the occasion of the 53rd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women scheduled for 2 to 13 March in New York.

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