Teaching multilingual literacy in Ugandan classrooms: The promise of the African Storybook

Abstract

Abstract For over a decade, the authors have worked collaboratively to better understand and address the challenges and possibilities of promoting multilingual literacy in Uganda, a country of over 44 million people where over 40 African languages are spoken and English is the official language. This article focuses on the diverse ways that teachers promote early literacy in large multilingual classrooms, and how the innovative African Storybook digital initiative might support primary school teachers in both rural and urban areas. We begin the article with a description of our collaborative work on the African Storybook (http://www.africanstorybook.org/) and one of its derivatives, Storybooks Uganda (https://global-asp.github.io/storybooks-uganda/). Then, drawing on a collaborative study of primary school classrooms in eastern Uganda, we analyze four common strategies that Ugandan teachers use to promote multilingual literacy in their classrooms: the use of the mother tongue as a resource; songs and multimodality; translanguaging; and linguistic strategies for classroom management. We follow this with a discussion of a 2015 teacher education workshop in eastern Uganda, which illustrates how the African Storybook can help support Ugandan teachers as they navigate the challenges of large classrooms. We conclude that the African Storybook has much promise for addressing the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.