Abstract
The Republic of Guinea in West Africa has a centralized educational system that controls teachers right down to daily sign-off on lesson plans by school directors. Yet, ironically, during our research on reading instruction in Guinea, we noted that the Ministry of Education was promoting massive reforms that seemed to encourage teacher autonomy. One was a project to improve teacher skills and support student-centered instruction in every elementary classroom in the country, a project supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).1 Another was the Small Grants School Improvement Project, supported by a World Bank loan, which encouraged local teachers across the country to propose school-level reforms and then compete for funding to carry them out (Diallo et al. 2001). An ambitious program of teacher recruitment and training, which had strong Canadian participation, was also framed within “a strategy of professionalizing teaching” since teachers “have to continually make professional decisions” (Diané and Grandbois 2000:8). Finally and of particular interest in this chapter, the nationwide distribution of a new set of textbooks, which was supported by a loan from the African Development Bank, had inspired Ministry of Education staff to argue that teaching methods should be “in the teacher, not in the book.”
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© 2003 Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt
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Anderson-Levitt, K.M., Diallo, B.B. (2003). Teaching by the Book in Guinea. In: Anderson-Levitt, K.M. (eds) Local Meanings, Global Schooling. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980359_4
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