Professionals from 5 Ethiopian Universities trained on Mathematics Textbook Development by MoE and JICA

A technical workshop was conducted by MoE/ JICA MUST Project^[1] on July 12, 2021, for about 20 mathematics textbook writers, illustrators and designers, located in Bishoftu and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) with experts in Japan. It was part of a three-day workshop organized by the Ministry of Education (MoE) and Hawassa University on Grade 9 to 12 Textbook development, where over 300 professionals gathered from five national universities in Ethiopia.

In the workshop sessions, the project gave an opportunity for the participants to revisit and analyze the current status of mathematics education from three perspectives, that is, student achievement, lesson implementation and textbook/teacher’s guide, and to think over how the textbooks should be designed based on the analysis. The project also shared JICA’s experiences of textbook development in other countries and proposed an approach to develop user-friendly textbooks so as to promote learner’s active learning in classroom. In the sessions, it was emphasized that the textbook contents should not be made unnecessarily difficult or complicated, and that, more importantly, it should be structured considering the flow of lessons. The participants then discussed their editing strategy and procedure of the textbook development based on the shared ideas and proposals.

After the workshop, the mathematics textbook developers shall immediately start writing manuscripts following the MoE guidelines as well as the discussed editing strategy of the textbooks. The time allocated for the book writing is as short as two months, until the new academic year begins in the middle of September, 2021. The project is committed to provide technical support in the development process.

Source: JICA Ethiopia