Teachers´wievs on HIV/AIDS related issues in the Dodoma region, Tanzania

This study is about how Tanzanian primary schools teachers look on HIV/AIDS related issues in relation to education, and how the teachers use their education to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. The data to this study has been collected over a period of eight weeks. Fifteen randomly selected Tanzanian teachers from three different primary schools in the Dodoma region have been interviewed, where five of the interviewed teachers have been working in an urban school, another five in a semiurban school, and further, five of the teachers in a rural school. The theoretical foundation of this study is pedagogical. We have in our study emanated from the African pedagogue Julius Nyerere´s and the Latin American pedagogue Paolo Feriere´s thoughts around education as liberalization, when we asked teachers about how they educate around questions concerning HIV/AIDS. Our conclusion from this study is that the Tanzanian teachers have a substantial knowledge about HIV/AIDS, and that all of the teachers are teaching their students in questions around HIV/AIDS. Further, all of the teachers are using innovative ways to transmit knowledge around HIV/AIDS to their students, though there is a difference between pedagogical methods in the three different schools. Moreover, all of the teachers think that teachers have a responsibility to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and that education can prevent the spread of the disease. Concerning sexual interactions in school environment, the teachers in the urban school did not consider pregnancy among school girls as a problem, comparative to the teachers in the semiurban and rural school, who considered this to be a problem in their schools. The teachers direct or indirect stressed the importance of education for all people to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. The knowledge about the disease could be transmitted through different kinds of ways, where some teachers mentioned public meetings, massmedia, counselling from parents and spiritual/religious education