Paved with good intentions: images of textbook development in Afghanistan

Abstract

In 2002, the Afghanistan Ministry of Education adopted a new National Curriculum Framework, created to promote child-centred teaching and learning strategies for the next generation of Afghan schools. As is often the case in post-conflict education development, a cadre of international curriculum consultants was hired to facilitate the production of syllabi and new textbooks. However, much of the available literature about Afghanistan's current wave of curriculum reform fails to present a critical view of the day-to-day contexts and interactions between international consultants and local textbook writers, which may provide a deep understanding of capacity development in this post-conflict setting. This paper uses Paulo Freire's pedagogical strategy of focusing critically on concrete images of life to understand the attendant ambiguities, dilemmas, and limitations of what occurs in international education development. This account is drawn from the authors' experiences as curriculum consultants and the recollections of three textbook writers who experienced three decades of changing professional conditions at the Afghan Ministry of Education. The authors argue that genuine capacity development requires critical scrutiny of intersecting desires, assumptions, perspectives, and histories of all the actors in the development encounter, and outline practical recommendations emerging from their critical analysis.