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Prologue »
This is a introduction to my book:
Pastoral Care in Education - an educational sociology of the HIV/AIDS
epidemic.
There is a lot of effort in Uganda today to organize education in relation to
the existential needs of the day. This is well noted in the White Paper on
Education for National Integration and Development published in 1992, which
states the governmental policy on education in Uganda. The policy defines
education in relation to the socio-political, economic, demographic,
technological and personal needs of the people of Uganda in the current day era.
The policy considers education as a tool for the development of all the people
of Uganda, and it considers all situations of underdevelopment such as
ignorance, disease, poverty, divisions, and disharmony as unfavourable for
development. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has been one sociological feature that is
giving a new perspective to the education system in Uganda. The high numbers of
the Aids orphans, issues of sexual abstinence and advertising the condom as
means to limit and minimize the spread of the HIV/AIDS, have recently become
part of the controversial topics in Ugandan communities and more so in
educational institutions.
This book is making a significant contribution to further understanding of the
relationship that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has with education. The book is a result
of rigorous fieldwork research carried out in secondary schools of the Rakai
district in Uganda about an epidemic that left its lasting mark on the
communities of the people in Uganda. Because it is carried out in the cradle
land of the epidemic, it gives an ideal setting for analyzing the impact of the
epidemic on secondary school students. It also makes a proposal for pastoral
care in education an approach that takes into account a holistic provision of
education that has to define the ethos of every school. Teachers, school
administrators, and all educational stakeholders have to get involved into the
way of thinking that appreciates the wellbeing of the whole persons of the
students and not only their cognitive domain.
This book is based on a doctoral thesis that I submitted to the University of
Warwick and for which I was awarded a doctorate of education in the year 2003.
I employed a number of methods to collect the information which composes the
main corpus of this book. The methods were mainly ethnographic and
included: participant observations, open-ended questionnaires, interviews and
focus group discussions. There are many knowledgeable persons that contributed
to this study and they included district education officers, head teachers,
teachers, the affected students, non-governmental organizations, many people
from the Rakai community and other persons from other parts of Uganda.
The book explores students’ real life experiences and how students perceive the
problems of HIV/AIDS. It looks at what adolescents considers dilemmas that the
epidemic creates for them. It then discusses the limitations of the available
sources of support that they receive from their schools and from other organs
outside their schools. Ugandan schools vary in their approaches to the climate
of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, this depends entirely on each school’s ethos, the
attitudes of the school’s administration, and its economic status.
The author draws from the strengths of the traditional school practices of
educational support to place in context the new definitions and proposals. He
uses the existing practices of school assemblies, and the presence of school
chaplains, senior women teachers, class teacher, school mottos and mission
statements to redefine the concept of educational pastoral care in its
theoretical and practical richness. It is unfortunate that to-date there is no
book that is written about the invaluable treasure of the existing structures of
care and support to student’s learning and development in the Ugandan
educational system.
This book sets a wonderful precedence and it makes reference to international
practices from which it draws useful lessons for the Ugandan educational system.
Whereas the focal point of the book is Ugandan schools and students, its central
argument is that the ideas and methods of educational pastoral care, as
developed in British literature, are highly relevant to addressing students’
problems in relation to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The book is divided in five chapters as follows:
chapter one, gives the concept of educational pastoral care in its richness and
multidimensional contexts.
Chapter two discusses the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the problems that secondary
school students (adolescents) experience because of it. Chapter three considers
the mechanisms of support that are existent in schools.
Chapter four defines pastoral care in the Ugandan context and suggests useful
changes in school structures to enable teachers create a climate that is fully
beneficial to the learners. Chapter five explains the practical implications of
change for teachers training institutions, schools administrators, teachers,
parents, students and other educational stakeholders.
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