All over Guinea-Bissau, primary school classrooms are filled with new textbooks for children and guides and digital materials for teachers. After ten years of work, there is talk of a “teaching revolution” that has brought innovation and common curricula to schools in that African country. The change is due to the RECEB project with scientific support from the University of Minho. The initiative began in 2015 with the preparation of the guiding document for the Reform and the programs for the five subjects from the 1st to 4th years of schooling, and later, the manuals for students and guides for teachers. Several training activities and phased testing of the new curriculum followed, which was monitored on the ground and led to the revision of some materials before its generalization throughout the country. The Guinean education system had been using materials that had barely been updated since independence, so it was necessary to develop an inclusive action plan, thinking about all Guinean children, regardless of their condition, and aiming at the continuous and interactive improvement of the educational process.

The delay in completing this phase of the project was due to its various stages, as it was necessary to get to know the country, consult local, regional, national and neighboring country programs, in addition to considering and adapting the specificities of the reality in the production of teaching materials. For example, in the Physical and Social Environment Study subject, it was important to integrate the environmental, geographic, historical, social and economic wealth of Guinea-Bissau. In the case of Citizenship Education, it was important to prepare the student as a social being and address topics such as children’s rights and human rights, positive values ​​and peace.

In the current school year, the new curriculum was expanded to all public schools in the country, with around six thousand teachers receiving tablets with all the materials produced, including audio media, organized in an offline application, to use in their classes.

The project continues in preschool, accelerated education and the 2nd cycle.

 

The RECEB has been registered with the UFMG Rectorate since the beginning. The scientific team is coordinated by Professor Laurinda Leite and includes around 40 teachers from the Institute of Education, the School of Letters, Arts and Human Sciences, the School of Sciences and the Institute of Social Sciences.

The project was soon extended to the 2nd cycle of elementary school, and the programs and content for the manuals and guides for the eight subjects that make up the respective study plan were prepared before the pandemic. However, budgetary limitations meant that it was only now possible to think about resuming the process.

More recently, materials have been developed for preschool education (age 5) and accelerated education (an innovation in the country, aimed at those who did not complete the 1st and 2nd cycles of compulsory education at the normal age), which are currently being tested in some Guinean preschools and schools in various regions of the country. In parallel, training courses have been held for kindergarten teachers and teachers of those cycles, as well as for kindergarten teachers, as the project involves new methodologies and new content that pose a challenge for those who see them teaching.

In Guinea-Bissau, 45% of the adult population is illiterate. Like the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the University of Minho, the Government of Guinea-Bissau believes that, with RECEB, “the future of the country will improve” because “investing in education means investing in all sectors of society”.

 

Researcher and Professor of the History Department, Francisco Mendes, is part of the scientific team of the RECEB project – Curricular Reform of Basic Education in Guinea-Bissau, which is led by the Ministry of Education, through the National Institute for the Development of Education of Guinea-Bissau, also counting on the support of the World Bank, UNICEF and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a partner of UMinho.