The current global focus on expanding access to early childhood education (ECE) is accompanied by calls to professionalize the ECE teaching force. In Tanzania, efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning at the pre-primary level led to the development of a new pre-primary diploma training program. In this article, I examine this effort…

Efforts to improve education should not neglect to provide the rich play opportunities that benefit children in so many ways. In Tanzania, the pre-primary curriculum, for example, guides teachers to use play as the primary method of teaching and learning. Despite this policy mandate for play, however, abundant evidence indicates that Tanzanian…