Richard Tabulawa

University of Botswana | UB · Department of Language and Social Science Education

The University of Botswana (UB) was established by government in 1982 as a national university. Its historically dominant role within the country’s tertiary education sector and its significance in national life make it Botswana’s flaship university. While its historical evolution is fairly well documented, the same cannot be said about its contrib...

This paper explicates the growing interest in interdisciplinarity as a form of knowledge organisation at the University of Botswana (UB). It accomplishes this by locating this development in a global context of a growing instrumentalisation of knowledge, partially occasioned by the advent of the knowledge society. Generally, the paper argues that i...

The phenomenon of child soldiers provides a metaphor for the role of pupils in ‘developing’ country classrooms who are cast in the frontline of the culture wars implicit in progressive educational reforms that project a worldview which often runs counter to local educational cultures. This commentary uses this perspective to explore some traps thro...

Market forces are being introduced in public spheres such as higher education and public health, which hitherto were closed to such forces. Ironically, it is the state that is responsible for this process of marketisation. Some see this state action as leading to a growing influence of the state in public policy while others see an attenuation of i...

Since the 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa has experienced unprecedented attempts at reforming teacher and student classroom practices, with a learner-centred pedagogy regarded as an effective antidote to the prevalence of teacher-centred didactic classroom practices. Attempts at reform have been going on all over the continent. In fact, learner-centred p...

Literature on globalisation claims that changed global patterns of production and industrial organisation have intensified international economic competition, prompting nations globally to restructure their education systems in an attempt to position themselves favourably in an increasingly competitive economic environment. This is an environment t...

Incl. abstract, bibl. The University of Botswana has not escaped the reform fever currently gripping higher education institutions the world-over. In the late 1980s the University initiated and administrative/management restructuring exercise whose resultant structure was implemented between 1998 and 2000. The exercise, in many respects, was a resp...

This study reports on the strategies (overt and subtle) employed by students in one senior secondary school in Botswana to keep their teachers in an information-giving position. Contrary to the prevailing view that the 'teacher dominance' of classroom activities so often reported in classroom studies results from teachers' desire for social control...

Recent pronouncements by international aid agencies on their interest in and preference for a learner-centred pedagogy so far appear not to have attracted much scholarly attention. This paper attempts to explain this interest. It argues that although the efficacy of the pedagogy is often couched in cognitive/educational terms, in essence, its effic...

Curriculum reviews during the past two decades in Botswana have had mixed fortunes for geography in secondary schools. While the subject has modernised over the years it has at the same time shrunk in terms of its spread over the entire secondary schooling period. This paper describes this contradictory development, teasing out some of the most sal...

Attempts to improve the quality of education in Botswana have, inter alia, included an emphasis on a learner-centered pedagogy. Attempts at implementing this pedagogy have been made within the ambit of the technical rational model of curriculum development. The attempts, however, have produced inconclusive results, and these results have often been...

Attempts have been made in Botswana to change teachers' didactic classroom practices. These attempts, however, have not been successful. More often than not, this lack of success is attributed to technical problems associated with the innovation delivery system. In this paper I argue that this technicist approach to problems of pedagogical change i...

Two hundred and four teachers responded to a questionnaire which sought information on their support, or not, for the teaching of AIDS‐related topics in schools, the isolation of AIDS‐infected students from schools, and their preference for three AIDS prevention messages as prepared by the Botswana Ministry of Health. Results indicated that the vas...