School Leaders' and Teachers' Preparedness to Support Education in Rwanda during the COVID-19 Emergency

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all Rwandan schools were closed in March 2020; they started to reopen in November 2020. To understand the Rwandan schools' level of preparedness to teach remotely during this unprecedented emergency, and for the eventual return to school, we conducted phone surveys with school leaders and teachers in 298 secondary schools in August 2020. Drawing from knowledge mobilization theory and quantitative data, our results indicate that there were gaps in school leaders' and teachers' access to technology and training, a lack of preparedness that could inform policy and practice in future emergencies. Our findings reveal that, before the pandemic, the male teachers in Rwanda had more access than the female teachers to both technological devices and online experience, and that the teachers from well-resourced schools were more likely than teachers from regular schools to own some kind of device to use for teaching. We found that the teachers whose school leaders had received guidance on how to continue education during the school closures were more likely to receive their support. Two additional findings were that younger teachers were more likely than the older ones to support their students during the school closures, and that the school leaders and teachers we surveyed believed that students from low-income families and rural areas benefitted the least from remote learning. These findings indicate that, in Rwanda, the level of preparedness to support schooling during the COVID-19 emergency was negatively affected by preexisting and ongoing inequalities in access to both material and nonmaterial resources.

Adoption of Education Technologies for Learning During COVID-19 Pandemic: The Experiences of Marginalized and Vulnerable Learner Populations in Kenya

“…In Africa, and SSA in particular, varied distance learning solutions (EdTechs) were utilized to ensure learning remained uninterrupted. Diverse EdTechs were utilized across SSA countries including smartphones, internet-enabled media (e.g., Google classrooms, Zoom, Blue Jeans, WhatsApp, email, and YouTube), radios, TV, and computers/laptops among others in Kenya (Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, 2020; Ngware & Ochieng, 2020;Otieno & Taddese, 2020), Rwanda (Carter et al, 2020), Ghana (Agbe & Sefa-Nyarko, 2020), and Nigeria (Akogun et al, 2020). The adopted EdTechs were perhaps due to the perceived confidence in their capabilities in delivering teaching and learning to learners as they were deemed to be accessible to both teachers and learners (Dhawan, 2020).…”

Changes in perceptions of teaching quality in secondary schools in Rwanda during the COVID-19 global pandemic and the subsequent closing and reopening of schools

“…This finding, alongside the finding that levels of teacher motivation associated with classroom teaching was the next most negatively affected, followed, respectively, by perceived teacher knowledge and pedagogy, and satisfaction with resources and material, might reflect the wearing of masks, social distancing laws, and/or other changes which resulted from the COVID-19 rules and regulations that were in place in Rwanda at the time this study took place. Indeed, the period of school closures, wherein teaching had to be conducted remotely (i.e., virtually)—a mode of teaching for which most, if not all, the STEM teachers had little or no experience ( Carter et al, 2020 )—likely made it more challenging for them to teach diverse classes, compounded by a lack of perceived teacher knowledge and pedagogy and a greater need for resources and material, which, in combination, negatively affected their levels of motivation associated with classroom teaching. In particular, the finding that the COVID-19 context negatively affected levels of satisfaction with the resources and materials that were available to them has logical appeal because it likely reflects the fact that teaching remotely necessitated different resources and materials compared with teaching face-to-face at school.…”

Approbation of Emergency Education Strategies for Internally Displaced Ukrainian Children under the Martial Law Conditions

“…Qualitative research by E. Carter, A. C. Ochoa, P. Leonard, S. Nzaramba, P. Rose, D. G. Regasa, and I. Lietaert was conducted among teachers and parents on the provision of education and psychosocial support to refugee children or children living in other emergencies in Rwanda and Ethiopia. Despite the lack of integrated psychosocial support, teachers and schools are recognised as having an important role, especially in terms of meeting emotional needs (Carter et al, 2022;Regasa & Lietaert, 2022).…”