Children’s Fiction as a Tool for Instruction

Over the years, Uganda has witnessed a decline in the quality of education in schools. The problems range from the mode of instruction and community involvement to laxity and poor inspection from quality assurance and standards officers from the Ministry of Education and Sports. Using the pedagogical/instruction flaws in Mr Mukibi’s fictional school as a starting point for reflection, this article explores how Barbara Kimenye’s Moses Series can be utilized as a tool to improve the quality of education in Ugandan schools. I focus on three major pedagogical flaws as depicted in the series: Failure to make the formal curriculum attractive to students; the ill-guided focus on discipline as the primary goal of education; and the poor supervision of schools by the Ministry of Education and Sports. The argument I advance in the paper is that there are many lessons that teachers, school administrators and government officials in charge of education can learn from the Moses series to help them improve the quality of education in the country. Data for the article was collected through a close reading of selected storybooks in the Moses series (Moses and Moses in Trouble) and a review of relevant secondary materials. Data analysis involved identifying the themes that emerged from the data collected regarding the pedagogical flaws depicted in the primary texts (Moses and Moses in Trouble).