Gender and Active Citizenship in Tanzanian Teacher Education: Curriculum Analysis and Student Teachers' Reflections

Active citizenship is core to social justice for both women and men. This paper explores how gender and active citizenship are addressed in teacher education training programmes in Tanzania. We applied qualitative methods in analysing two teacher education institutions' curricula documents and conducted thee focus group discussions with final year teacher student teachers. Our review of the curricula focused on (1) the course names, (2) course aims, (3) learning outcomes, (4) teaching/learning contents or (5) reading lists. This was supported by the findings from focus group discussions. The findings show that, although both gender and active citizenship were incorporated in the existing teacher's education curricula in Tanzania, the weight given to these topics were marginal. We argue that more content in combination with contextualised and gender-responsive teaching and learning resources or materials could give student teachers better competence necessary for linking knowledge they get with everyday gender and citizenship challenges in Tanzanian schools and their communities.