A BIT ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN ETHIOPIA
on My VSO Ethiopian Adventures (Ethiopia), 27/Oct/2010 11:46, 34 days ago
My first job, with the help of a colleague, Wondifraw, has been to develop and run a 2 week induction programme for new staff.Some background to the university system in this country– as I understand it after 4 weeks is needed to set the scene.Ethiopia has a handful of established, traditional universities first established by Haile Selaisse in the 1950’s. Addis Ababa was the first and another is the one close to us, about an hour away, Haramaya, where there are VSO colleagues along with quite a few expatriate teaching staff.Akin to the UK’s experience, there has been a recent Government drive to develop higher education provision in the form of universities across the country. The Government sees education as the way out of poverty for its population and 24% of Government expenditure is on education. Twenty two additional universities are now in the process of development and operation, and it is one of these at which I am placed. Dire Dawa is enrolling 7000 students this academic year, starting at exactly the same time as the new UK academic year, (although interestingly the Freshers start a whole month later). They are building for a capacity of 10,000. All these new institutions need new staff resources and this year DDU is employing 80 new staff.I gather that the education system is very centralised here and students are more or less assigned a university by the Ministry of Education; hence no UCAS system, no confirmation and clearing processes along with the annual nail biting challenges of meeting targets to avoid the penalties of over/under recruitment. However, this means there is also little or no choice for students, who presumably must go to where they are sent, and I believe in a lot of cases to study the subject they are assigned!This also apparently applies to staff. There must be masses of job opportunities in the university teaching sector now and positions are offered to fresh graduates. Clearly, although these young people are qualified by subject, they have no experience of the outside world, and placements/work experience does not exist here, and also they have no pedagogical knowledge and skills.The placement that I have here is as a Higher Diploma Programme Leader. The Higher Diploma has been designed and developed by VSO to meet the needs of teacher educators in Ethiopia, teaching at all school levels as well as at university level, to develop their teaching or pedagogical skills in order to improve the quality of teaching across the country, through developing the capacity of the teaching population.Thus when the programme starts here this year, staff will be individually selected by their Deans to participate in this academic year long programme. They are likely to be staff that have been here for two years at least.However, in the mean time there are 80 new staff arriving with no teaching experience. It makes sense to develop an induction programme for them to introduce them to basic teaching and learning concepts and techniques as well as inducting them in the policies, procedures, systems and expectations of the university.So organising this as soon as I arrived has been a challenging undertaking, while at the same time trying to get used to living in very new and equally challenging conditions.Wondifraw, my colleague has been fantastic and obviously he has had the main job of sorting out administrative requirements as well as contributing to the teaching input. He has a Masters in Pedagogical Studies from Addis Ababa University. Together we have muddled through to get this programme into shape.The induction programme has now finished, so a few observations can be made.Not only are nearly all of the staff straight out of university but they are almost exclusively male. This is interesting as there is no shortage of female students walking around the campus, indeed in some classes it appears that women are in the majority. They seem as at home on a university campus as do our UK female students and many of them dress in modern western dress as if they were in at a British university. Many of these are clearly Muslim students– which is pleasing to see and with their long black, often close fitting, gowns, slim bodies and perfect deportment, and frequently bright contrasting long head coverings, they look absolutely stunning.The interesting contrast is that out of 80 joining staff, 6 are women! I haven’t got to the bottom of this, and there will be more on gender no doubt in a later epistle.As the new staff come from all different parts of the country and climatic conditions vary enormously in Ethiopia, many if them are suffering as much as me, or more so, with the heat and dust. They clearly dislike the campus conditions and as Ethiopians are very conscious of cleanliness, they are very concerned about keeping fresh and will not sit on a chair or lean on a table until they have rubbed it assiduously to remove the inevitable layers of dust.Despite the conditions and the long hours (all day, every day for 2 weeks), they worked incredibly hard. We were told to keep close records of attendance as the President believes, no attendance, no final certificate, so this may be a carrot to boost attendance!The intensity challenged their ability to stick with English the whole time and as the teaching and learning sessions are all about active participation they are active learners in all the sessions– which is clearly new and quite uncomfortable to many.I am starting to learn a bit about how this university works and the approaches and attitudes of its management, a little on the background politics and a lot already about how the culture impacts on the teaching and in the classroom, as well as the challenges it gives to me as a native English speaker as many staff are nervous and lack confidence to speak up in class in front of an English person. Difficult to deal with in active learning! Clearly many lack academic confidence also and given the impoverished resources here, I’m not surprised. Its is sad to think that many of these staff are without doubt incredibly bright and capable but may never be able to realise their full potential. We make the same observation about potential football stars here. All the kids, well the boys, play football around here (most withbare feet, otherwise flip-flops!) and clearly there is talent around, which is unlikely to ever be realised. Our staff coffee room sports a picture of Manchester United team 2009 on the wall, but Ethiopia is not noted for its football team talent – again probably just resources to make it happen.Thank goodness they have excelled in the sport of running at least – less resource intensive?I will carry this learning forward into the preparation for starting the HDP in 2 weeks time.As I gradually gain a better understanding of how things work here, I will be able to write more on this subject.I think some of this learning is the same for new staff to this university in the desert! I think the Nike logo may serve me well– Just Do It!