Research spotlight: Saidnazarova Gulshan

When Uzbekistan folded four separate school courses into one compulsory subject called Tarbiya in 2020, the policy solved a coordination problem and created a training one. Someone still had to teach the teachers how to teach character, citizenship, ethics and self-discipline, subjects that don't come with a single right answer the way arithmetic does.

A 232-page book printed in Bukhara in 2024 is one of the answers. Saidnazarova Gulshan, a lecturer in the Department of Pedagogy at Bukhara State University, published Tarbiya fanini o'qitish metodikasi, rendered in English as Methodology of Teaching the Science of Education, through the Kamolot publishing house. It is a guide to the method of teaching Tarbiya, the moral and civic education subject now delivered from first grade through eleventh in Uzbekistan's schools.

The book matters now because Uzbekistan's Tarbiya rollout has passed its founding stage and entered the phase where the difference between a curriculum on paper and a classroom practice is the teacher standing in front of the room. Method texts like this one are the bridge between the two, and they are arriving in volume as universities retrain the country's teacher workforce.

A guide aimed at future history teachers

The full bibliographic record is short and specific: Saidnazarova G.B., Tarbiya fanini o'qitish metodikasi, Kamolot Publishing House, Bukhara, 2024, 232 pages. Some university reading lists catalogue it as a darslik, or course textbook; others list it as an o'quv qo'llanma, a teaching aid. The two labels mark a familiar divide in Uzbek academic publishing between a course-defining book and a supplementary study guide.

One Bukhara State University course list ties the work to the 60220300 History (Islamic History and Source Studies) teacher-training direction. That placement matters because Tarbiya is delivered by teachers drawn from several specialist backgrounds, and history-track students are one of the cohorts expected to carry it.

The course the guide supports is itself well mapped. Syllabi for Tarbiya teaching methodology across Uzbek universities move through the subject and aims of the methodology, its legal and conceptual foundations, interactive methods, and the use of folk oral tradition and the legacy of Eastern scholars. That breadth is why a 232-page treatment is not padding; it has a wide remit to cover. Kamolot, the imprint of the Buxoro Determinant company, printed several Bukhara State University teaching materials in 2024, including a trilingual sports dictionary and a software architecture guide. This book belongs to a local academic publishing ecosystem rather than a one-off project.

The researcher behind the title

Saidnazarova's own scholarship runs through the same territory. Her published articles examine the spiritual and moral views of Imam Ismail al-Bukhari, the ninth-century hadith scholar born in Bukhara in 810. A hadith is a report of a saying or action of the Prophet Muhammad, and al-Bukhari's Al-Adab al-Mufrad gathers 1,322 of them on manners and ethics across 644 chapters. Her work asks how those moral-educational ideas can be used in the pedagogical process, and a Bukhara State University notice listed her doctoral dissertation on that theme for defence in July 2026.

That lineage gives the textbook a local intellectual anchor. A methodology of moral education written in Bukhara can draw on the city's most famous scholar of conduct without treating that heritage as decoration.

Tarbiya: a subject with a policy pedigree

The subject the book addresses is young but heavily legislated. Tarbiya literally means upbringing, nurture or formation. A Cabinet of Ministers resolution adopted on 6 July 2020 merged four existing courses into a single subject:

• Odobnoma (etiquette)
• Vatan tuyg'usi (sense of homeland)
• Milliy istiqlol g'oyasi va ma'naviyat asoslari (national independence idea and foundations of spirituality)
• Dunyo dinlari tarixi (history of world religions)

It entered grades 1 through 9 in the 2020/2021 academic year and grades 10 and 11 the following year. Tarbiya runs one hour a week, about 34 hours a year, and the public education authorities have maintained an online platform at tarbiyam.uz with lesson plans and normative documents. Because one subject spans ages 7 to 17, its teachers need a methodological range that a content-only textbook will not supply.

Why method, not content, is the hard part

Teaching Tarbiya is not like teaching the periodic table. Honesty, responsibility and civic duty do not become knowledge by being recited; they become habits through designed activity. A useful comparison is coaching. A football coach does not spend the session reading the rulebook aloud. The coach runs drills, corrects movement and builds sequences so the right response comes automatically during a match. A methodology of teaching works the same way for moral education, converting curriculum aims into lesson structures, interactive methods, assessment routines and feedback loops.

The 2020 resolution that created the subject also ordered online retraining for teachers from primary education, national idea and law, history, and religious studies specialisms. Many of the people standing in front of a Tarbiya class, in other words, were trained in a different discipline first. A shared methodology guide is how a system gives them a common floor.

That conversion is exactly where the field's own researchers have found weakness. A 2026 study of Tarbiya teaching in primary grades, published on Zenodo, concluded that lessons frequently remain verbal and declarative, with values explained rather than lived. A methodology guide is only as good as the practice it produces, and the gap between the two is documented.

The cautionary read

Independent readers should keep expectations calibrated. The public record for Saidnazarova's book contains its title, author, publisher, year and page count, but no published abstract, chapter breakdown, reviewer list or funding statement. That is common for regional textbook publishing, and it means the book's internal design cannot yet be assessed from the outside.

There is also competition. Several Uzbek authors published Tarbiya methodology guides around the same time, including a 306-page volume in 2024 and a 172-page guide in 2023. A crowded shelf is healthy; it also means a single text's influence depends on adoption by departments and on how it is used in seminars, not on publication alone.

What the next decade will test

The first cohort to study Tarbiya from grade 1 is now deep into primary school, and the subject's full eleven-grade span has been in place since the 2021/2022 year. The next five to ten years will show whether methodology texts like this one change what teachers actually do, and whether that change is measurable in students. Uzbekistan's experiment is unusually visible: a compulsory, state-designed moral education subject delivered nationwide, with a growing shelf of teacher-training literature to support it. Teacher educators elsewhere weighing their own versions of values education will be watching that evidence accumulate.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash