Reclaiming Constructivist Pedagogy from Neoliberal IdeologyTeaching and Learning in Context: Why Pedagogical Reforms Fail in Sub-Saharan Africaby Richard Tabulawa. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA, 2013.

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Any book whose author begins with a caveat about making the reader’s “comfort zone less comfortable” (xviii) may set itself up for sharp critical judgment from its reader. And when a book’s foreword (by Jonathan Jansen) warns about “opening a can of worms” (xiii) in international capitals of global aid, the stakes go higher yet. Richard Tabulawa’s Teaching and Learning in Context: Why Pedagogical Reforms Fail in Sub-Saharan Africa does indeed advance an argument that has the potential to make educationists and policy makers in Africa, and development partners in the global North, very uncomfortable. As is clear from the subtitle of his volume, Tabulawa argues that most pedagogical reforms in sub-Saharan Africa fail, and his book is an attempt to explain why. The argument that reforms fail when transplanted from one setting into another is not a new or strange critique. The particular reforms Tabulawa describes in his book, however, are those that have come to be accepted as current, innovative, and hence most helpful for learners in much of Africa. Tabulawa’s book argues that constructivist learner-centered pedagogies, which have become ubiquitous in classrooms across sub-Saharan Africa (and around the world for that matter), are pushed by international aid agencies as part of a neoliberal economic agenda to produce capitalist consumers in the region and globally. These reforms fail, he argues, because of two related reasons: (a) they are incompatible with the prevailing sociocultural conditions in sub-Saharan African countries and (b) in this case, both teachers and students in schools resist these pedagogical approaches. With such a startling premise, Tabulawa is burdened with the responsibility of marshaling evidence to back his assertion that progressive education is, in fact, a Trojan horse aimed at subjugating sub-Saharan Africa through “colonising and hegemonic tendencies” of neoliberal ideology (xxii). The book’s nine chapters disrupt claims about the efficacy of constructivist and learner-centered approaches to both teaching and learning. Tabulawa postulates that they are, instead, active drivers for promoting neoliberalism.