Greening education : Prospects and conditions in Tanzania

Sammanfattning: Environmental education in Tanzania after independence takes the Education for Self-Reliance policy as its starting point. This policy dominated the curriculum from 1967 to the 1980s.The study explores the development of environmental education components in the curriculum in a historical, political and economical context and maps out frame factors in the teaching situation. It describes and analyses the differences between the formulated and the realised curriculum of environmental education in the formal Tanzanian education system. These external factors are supplemented by an analysis of primary and secondary school teachers' ways of experiencing the concept of the environmental education.Among the frame factors for the teaching in schools, important elements are teachers'access to syllabi, teaching resources, the content of the questions in the national examinations, pupils' language proficiency in Swahili and English and pupils' access to textbooks. The teachers' socio-economic status and professional training background are other important frame factors. On a macro level, non-governmental actors such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and aid organisations have played an important role in influencing the educational policy.There are a large number of environmental education components in the syllabi for primary school and less in secondary. These components are strongly related to the Education for Self-Reliance policy in the syllabi developed before the mid 1980s. However, it seems that the impact of environmental education has been minimal due to several frame factors.Teachers' ways of experiencing the concept of environmental education constituted threequalitatively different categories: environmental education is about natural and social surroundings; about how the environment supports human beings through its resources andabout conservation and improvement of the environment.The outcome suggests that the prospect of education for sustainability in the least developed countries is complex but also that the use of Western research tools in a non-western cultural context is not fully satisfactory.