Syllabusism and adoption of supplementary teaching resources for cross-cutting environmental awareness in secondary schools in Uganda

Supplementary teaching resources are helpful in augmenting mainstream syllabus-specific materials for teachers in order to achieve effective teaching and learning in schools. In this paper, we present a case of teachers’ adoption of a supplementary teachers’ guide for cross-cutting environmental awareness in secondary school education in Uganda. Document review and interview methods were used to collect data in 22 secondary schools in Northern Uganda that are implementing one of the nationally-approved supplementary teaching guides. Our findings show that teachers entirely use curriculum-prescribed teaching materials, and rarely deploy other relevant extra-syllabus ones. We conceptualize this as a product of a rigid and structural curriculum regime that we term as syllabusism, and present evidence of how it is affecting the adoption of supplementary curriculum materials for cross-cutting environmental awareness. We recommend that teaching should focus on mastery of content rather than syllabus coverage, empowering teachers to exercise professional judgement in implementing the syllabus, and adoption of competency-based assessments.