International Journal of Educational Development 80 (2021) 102309 Available online 26 November 2020 0738-0593/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. “I think it was a trick to fail Eastern”: A multi-level analysis of teachers’ views on the implementation of the SHRP Program in Uganda Ruth S. Wenske a, *, Medadi E. Ssentanda b, c a Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University, Israel b Department of African Languages, Makerere University, Uganda c Department of General Linguistics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Uganda Bilingual education Aid to education Mother tongue education Child-centred pedagogy Learner-centred education School Health and Reading Program (SHRP) ABSTRACT This article is possibly the frst qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented in Uganda since 2012. The SHRP program is aimed at scaling up the Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, which was the frst attempt to standardize the use of mother tongues in lower primary schools through child-centred pedagogical practices. SHRP has expanded the TC to additional local languages and dis- tricts, providing new learning materials – including specifc teaching techniques – and teacher training to support it. However, the implementation of SHRP is marked by the fact that it is a donor-led reform that is perceived by teachers as an external intervention not well suited for Ugandan classroom realities. Our research is a multi- layered analysis of how teachers perceive the reform as its grassroots implementers. We ask how SHRP’s pedagogical emphasis on child-centred pedagogy is linked to it being donor-funded, and how teachers translate this perceived link into their classroom practices. We trace the links between the policy, classroom, and com- munity levels to make concrete suggestions on how the SHRP program can beneft from teachers’ resources and creativity, while highlighting which aspects of mother tongue education the Ugandan Government needs to prioritize on a national level, and which aspects need to be better adjusted on a regional basis. 1. Introduction Over the past decades, Mother Tongue (MT) reforms are spreading across sub-Saharan Africa and are increasingly tied to donor-led peda- gogical reforms that seek to make schooling more learner-centered (Demb´ el´ e and Lefoka, 2007). The Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, introduced in Uganda in 2007, is one such large-scale educational shift which combines a new pedagogical model with a change in the Lan- guage of Learning and Teaching (LoLT). Under the TC, pupils are instructed in their mother tongue, or frst language (L1), in the frst three years of primary school (P1 to P3), followed by one transitional year in P4, so that English becomes the LoLT from P5 onward. 1 The TC also changed the structure of the curriculum from being subject-based to being arranged by themes from children’s immediate environment, such as “our school” and “the human body and health” (National Curriculum Development Centre, 2016), with teaching methods promoting child-cenetred education (CCP), also referred to as learner-centered education (Altinyelken et al., 2014). By combining pedagogical changes with a move to MT education, the TC’s rationale is to make classroom teaching more accessible, contextualized, and relevant to children’s day-to-day lives (National Curriculum Development Centre, 2008). This paper seeks to assess teachers’ view on the TC thirteen years after its initiation, focusing on the interplay between the reform’s pedagogical and linguistic aspects from a comparative perspective in schools where Ateso and Luganda are the LoLT. 2 In particular, our research is the frst to consider the changes that have taken place in the TC over the past three years following a donor-funded build-on program that puts stronger emphsis on the TC’s pedagogical aspect. * Corresponding author at: The Martin Buber Society of Fellows, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mandel Building, 3rd Floor, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel. E-mail address: noruthie@gmail.com (R.S. Wenske). 1 MT education in Uganda thus follows an early-exit model of MT education (Altinyelken et al., 2014), also called transitional bilingual education (Garcia and Wei, 2014). 2 We have chosen to keep the standard spelling for the word Ateso and not replace it with the new version according to the 2014 standardized orthography - Atεsɔ - because the new orthography is still not in broad use, and as we show, offers challenges both on practical and conceptual levels. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Educational Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedudev https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102309 Received 28 September 2020; Received in revised form 3 November 2020; Accepted 5 November 2020