CHAPTER ONE: BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
4.2 A brief description of Micu village
This study was conducted in Micu village, Arua district of Uganda. As
indicated earlier in 3.3.1, Micu is a highly populated rural area. According to the adult learners, URLCODA officials and instructors interviewed in the course of the study, on average, each household or family in Micu village has a minimum of 8 - 10 persons or members. Most of the inhabitants are non- literate, do not have formal employment and depend entirely on the land for their survival. Because of the high population, land in the village is highly fragmented to the extent that the repeated use of it has led to rapid decline in agricultural output per household. This causes health problems, scarcity of food, and reduces chances of earning income among the population, thus worsening the already bad poverty situation.
The village has a savannah type of climate with two distinct seasons namely:
dry season and wet season (Phillips, 1996). The area receives a moderate
amount of rainfall that is adequate for the growing of crops and at the same time, rearing of domestic animals on subsistence scale. Sometimes the dry seasons are prolonged, leading to drought-like situations that cause famine.
This tends to worsen the already bad situation in the agricultural sector of the village, which is the main source of income. Thus, owing to the situations described above, poverty levels among the population are very high.
Micu village is surrounded by several other villages such as Aliba, Alivu, Robu, and Kamuli in which the same socio-economic conditions described above prevail. Each of these villages has had at least a FAL centre in which adult learners, especially women used to converge for classes, but some have now closed down. However, in Micu alone URLCODA has established six adult literacy centres each with mixed participants. The classes are so far running well.
Since the MoGLSD had established FAL centres in the neighbouring villages, I decided to make some brief visits to the four adult literacy centres in Aliba, Alivu, Robu and Kamuli with the aim of establishing the number and composition of the learners, and found only two centres functioning, each with approximately 15 - 20 participants. The two functional centres were Aliba and Robu Centres. These centres were dominated by women and
characterised by the conspicuous absence of child learners.
In Micu village, I also visited all the six centres/sites to make an onsite assessment for selecting the sample for the study. The six centres I visited were: Andruvu Centre, Angunizu Centre, Duka Centre, Ombaderuko Centre, Onezu Centre and Onyiyo Centre. Each of these centres had between 70 - 80 learners in which there were both adult learners and child learners unlike in Aliba and Robu where there were mainly women.
My observation and interaction with the learners during the brief visits revealed that each centre had three levels for purposes of categorising
learners. These were Beginners, Basic and Intermediate levels. Each centre had a minimum of three instructors. The Beginners level was used for teaching learners who had never set foot in a classroom before and had no idea of the letters of the alphabets. The Basic level was used for teaching learners who had earlier gone to school but dropped out in primary one to two. The Intermediate level was used to teach learners who had reached primary three and above, but dropped out due to various reasons and had now stayed out of school for a very long time. The learners were promoted from one level to the other depending on their ability to cope and
comprehend the things they were learning.
The purpose of my brief visits to the six centres was to make a quick
assessment of characteristics of interest to my study. The prevalence of these characteristics of interest to my study in the centres acted as a basis for determining which ones to observe in detail.
The factors that contributed towards choosing the sites for more detailed observation were: the number of child learners in the centre, the number of female instructors and the number of male and female adult learners, so that all the characteristics of interest in the sample could be represented.
Based on the above factors, I then selected two out of the six centres in Micu namely Duka and Onezu, in which the detailed observations of the teaching and learning processes were made. In all, four observations per centre, each of three hours were made, giving, a total of eight observations. The items of interest selected for observation in the teaching and learning processes are as shown in Appendices M - Q.
In the adult literacy programme of URLCODA, two languages namely:
Lugbara (vernacular or the mother tongue of the participants) and English, which is the official language of Uganda as well as the chief medium of instruction in Ugandan schools at all the levels, were used as the media of
instruction. Whereas instruction in the Beginner's level was done purely in Lugbara, the instructors in the other two levels (Basic and Intermediate) tended to use both Lugbara and English. In the Intermediate level, learners were more keen on being taught in English than Lugbara.
As shown earlier in Table 2, a total of 32 participants were interviewed in the course of the study. These included six instructors, 12 child learners, 12 adult learners, and two URLCODA officials. The details of the outcome of the 32 interviews conducted and eight observations made during the study are described in the following sections.