Amadou Gaye, history teacher at Nusrat senior secondary school has enumerated some challenges teachers teaching history subject in The Gambia schools are facing.
”There are lots of constraints history teachers are facing and these challenges differ from school-to-school, institution-to-institution and is a shared responsibility,” he stated.
Though, it is not only the teachers that face those constraints but of course students, school heads and head of departments in various schools, policy developers, the Ministry, society, family at home “so it is a collective challenge, “he said.
He commented on the proliferation of history textbooks in schools saying there are different history books circulating in different schools but most of these books are not in line or accurate as regarding the subject.
“It has been detected that some of these books are not in line and are not current they are not up to date. Most of the reference dates in those books are inaccurate. Most of these books are not country focused, you will see some names that are not in the country and in related to the history teaching,” he added.
Local history is another area that has been left out by many history teachers and is not included in most of the sessions by teachers and they feel that local history is boring, he said.
Still on the challenges, he said some history teachers are information communication technology novice, history teachers in the 21st century who cannot even press a keyboard, save a data or familiar with ICT to facilitate the teaching and learning of history, or use ICT to prepare lesson plans and prepare scheme of work to create a chat that will show the performance of his or her students.”
He said there are teachers that cannot still do some of the aforementioned as they are not giving the opportunity nor have the opportunity.
According to him, there are some that might even want to do it; the time and material are not available so it makes some teachers and students limited in some certain areas.