Harriet Mutonyi

ICT on the Margins: Lessons for Ugandan Education.

In this end piece, we argue that while this special issue shifts debates on the digital divide to address students capacity to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for productive social purposes, access to ICT remains a major challenge in countries like Uganda, in which less than 1% of the population has access to the Internet. However, since the case studies address marginalised communities in Australia, Brazil, Greece and South Africa, the findings have relevance to Uganda and other developing countries. Five lessons, in particular, are important for curriculum planning and policy development in Uganda: the need to collect empirical data on ICT access and use; the importance of recognising local differences across rural and urban communities, male and female students; the need to promote professional development of teachers so that they can make effective use of ICT in classrooms; the importance of integrating in and out-of-school digital literacy practices; and the need to consider how global software can best be adapted for local use. We conclude that if ICT is to play its part in achieving Education for All by 2015, there is an urgent need for collaborative partnerships between a wide range of stakeholders at both the local and global level.

'Talk what others think you can't talk': HIV/AIDS clubs as peer education in Ugandan schools

The clubs will do peer education; the clubs will be a forum for affected students to share their experiences. (HIV/AIDS Technical Advisor, Ministry of Education, 4 October 2004) The clubs extend what we do in the communities. We train the leaders so that they can do peer education. (AIDS health official, 2 October 2004) In this article, we make the case that HIV/AIDS clubs in Ugandan schools provide valuable information to students who may not have easy access to health services. As one club motto suggests, the clubs ‘talk what others think you cant talk’. The innovative peer education methods, which include drama, popular culture and community outreach all have great appeal to youth, and provide unique opportunities for female students to raise gender issues and develop leadership skills. We conclude that innovative adaptation of the Ugandan model may complement other HIV/AIDS educational programmes in Africa and beyond.

Cartoon drawing as a means of accessing what students know about HIV/AIDS: an alternative method

Combating the spread of HIV/AIDS in Uganda has involved massive public education campaigns. One of the challenges of these campaigns has always involved the need to simultaneously respect and transcend cultural taboos around direct discussions about sexuality and sexual issues, particularly among youth. Research consistently shows that drawing, as a means of investigating what students know, has the potential to reveal students’ perceptions of given concepts and provides an alternative to predominantly language-based methods. Visual methods, however, have rarely been taken up in research on students’ sexual health and HIV/AIDS knowledge. This interpretive case study examines the use of cartoon drawing as a unique tool for understanding Ugandan secondary students’ conceptions of HIV/ AIDS, particularly concepts that are not directly discussed culturally.

Building Scientific Literacy in HIV/AIDS Education: A case study of Uganda

The term scientific literacy is defined differently in different contexts. The term literacy simply refers to the ability for one to read and write, but recent studies in language literacy have extended this definition. New literacy research seeks a redefinition in terms of how skills are used rather than how they are learned. Contemporary perspectives on literacy as a transfer of learned skills into daily life practises capture the understanding of what it means to be scientifically literate. Scientific literacy requires students to be able to use their scientific knowledge independently in the everyday world. Some models for teaching towards scientific literacy have been suggested including inquiry‐based learning embedded in constructivist epistemologies. The inquiry‐based model is posited to be effective at bringing about in‐depth understanding of scientific concepts through engaging students’ preconceptions. In order to establish whether directly engaging students’ preconceptions can lead to in‐depth understanding of the science of HIV/AIDS, a case study was designed to elucidate students’ prior knowledge. From questionnaires and classroom observations, Ugandan Grade 11 students’ persistent preconceptions were explored in follow‐up focus group discussions. The inquiry process was used to engage students with their own perceptions of HIV/AIDS during the focus group discussions. Findings suggest that students need to dialogue with each other as they reflect on their beliefs about HIV/AIDS. Dialogue enabled students to challenge their beliefs while making connections between ‘school’ and ‘home’ knowledge.

Meeting the Challenge of Health Literacy in Rural Uganda: The Critical Role of Women and Local Modes of Communication

This article seeks to better understand the relation between local and traditional modes of communication and health literacy within the context of a rural West Nile community in Northern Uganda. Drawing on social semiotics (multimodality) and Bakhtins notion of the carnival, the focus is on a group of women participating in a grassroots literacy program and their use of local modes of communication to address the endemic problem of malaria in the West Nile region of Uganda. The argument is that women and local modes of communication can serve a critical role in disseminating primary health care information in particular and in community health care development in general. This article also makes a case for adopting a more holistic approach to health literacy promotion; one that brings together local and new modes of communication and knowledge with desperately needed health care services and trained personnel.