Developing Quality Teacher Education Programmes:

Towards the Africa We Want Addis Ababa 2013

Matete.madiba@up.ac.za

Outline

• Teacher Education- its fundamental role and Africa’s thorny challenges

• Tuning as a tool for harmonisation: The Tuning Project - A global movement

• The Tuning methodology in the Tuning Africa Project- The process and its critics

• Comparison of teacher-education meta-profiles

• Quality Educational Reform: Teaching values and ethics for the Africa we want: challenges and possibilities

• Ubuntu as a concept and framework

Teacher Education- its fundamental role

• The African Union (AU) vision of integration, peace, prosperity and peerage in the global economy is predicated on the development of Africa’s human resource capital. Education is therefore key in achieving its vision of developing quality human resources.

• The development of a democratic society

• Socio-economic development

Thorny challenges & great opportunities

• ‘If Africa is so resource-rich, why are its people not better educated, its children well nourished and its adults longer-lived?’

• ‘With almost 200 million people aged between 15 and 24, Africa has the youngest population in the world. And it keeps growing rapidly.’

• ‘Africa's youth bulge, if properly harnessed, can also power economic activity over the next 30-40 years, as in Korea's case.’

• ‘But more action is needed for effective and equitable stewardship of Africa’s natural resource wealth to transform the region’.

How best to utilise our resources?

• “It is said … that we cannot even agree among ourselves how best to utilize our resources for our own social needs. Yet all stock exchanges in the world are preoccupied with Africa’s gold, diamonds, uranium, platinum, copper and iron ore.”155

Kwame Nkrumah, 1963

The Tuning Project: A global movement

‘The Tuning Project’ has become an international movement that is currently spreading across the globe.

The Tuning experience was exclusively European and came as a response to the challenge set out in the Bologna Declaration of 1999, involving 175 universities

Spread of the Tuning Movement

From 2004, the Tuning ‘movement’ gradually spread to other areas, including Latin America, North America, Russia, Australia, Africa and China.

Tuning’ as a process is about seeking points of agreement, convergence and mutual understanding in order to facilitate an understanding of educational structures/programmes

Why the movement spread/Reasons for Tuning?

In Latin America reasons include ‘compatibility, comparability and competitiveness’

For Australia: It was to meet the undertaking of the EU-Australia Partnership Framework to “jointly develop a Tuning Australia pilot project to define the learning outcomes representative of higher education degrees in specific disciplines across different degree levels”.

For North America

The North American implementation of the Tuning Project within History as a subject area has led to more recent criticism of and questions on the tuning methodology.

The criticisms from the American Project

• A useless assessment project

• (with) standardized curriculum and tests

• Allow(s) business interests to define academic goals

• Allow(s) foundations to determine academic agenda

• Reduce(s) intellectual development to utilitarian issues of employability

For Africa?

In Africa Tuning was adopted as a methodology to facilitate the implementation of a number of key plans and strategies and these include the AUC’s (African Union Commission) Plan of Action for the Second Decade of Education for Africa and the strategy for harmonisation of Higher Education Programmes.

For mobility of Africans across Africa

Hoosen, Butcher & Njenga, (2009) indicate that the harmonization strategy was developed in order to foster cooperation in information exchange, harmonization of procedures and policies, and attainment of comparability of qualifications, in order to facilitate mobility of Africans across African countries for employment and further study

… ensuring that the quality of higher education

The specific purpose of harmonization is to establish harmonized higher education systems across Africa, while strengthening the capacity of higher education institutions to meet the many tertiary educational needs of African countries through innovative forms of collaboration and ensuring that the quality of higher education is systematically improved against common, agreed benchmarks of excellence.

The Chronology of events in the African Tuning Movement

Feasibility Study on the Relevance of a Tuning Approach in Higher Education for Africa

Validation of the Feasibility Study at a workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, 2011 and call for participation

Dakar, Cameroon, Cape Town, Brussels and Kenya project meetings: call for participation…

A report will be released soon

The African Tuning Project

Academics representing 60 universities across the African continent and across five subject areas produced a list of what they considered to be generic competences of the ideal African graduate, and lists of competences specific to the subject areas. Following after the methodology of tuning, surveys with employers, graduates, academics and students were administered as a way of validating the identified lists of competences, the generic and the subject specific.

For Teacher Education

From the Cameroon discussions: The teacher as an agent of change for:

o Social and economic development and growth and for

o Conflict resolution and reconciliation for sustainable and peaceful living environments

Sustainable and peaceful living environments?

The leatherback sea turtle, sometimes called the lute turtle, is the largest of all living turtles and is the fourth largest modern reptile behind three crocodilians. It is the only living species in the genus Dermochelys. Wikipedia

From the Cape Town discussions

The meta-profile of the teacher education degree should be viewed as a Venn diagram- the integrated nature of the curriculum Four Areas of Teacher Education 1. Context (regulatory, geographic, socio-economic …) 2. (Theoretical) Knowledge/Understanding & Practice 3. Interpersonal Skills 4. Values & Ethics …………………………………………………………………………………. The meta-profile evolved out of the generic and specific competences, and validated through the surveys

A meta-profile within the Tuning Methodology

González (2012) defines a meta-profile as ‘a group´s representation of the structure and combination of competences which gives identity to a thematic area.’ She further states that meta-profiles ‘are referential elements and they are always mental constructions, destined to reflect and analyse possible classifications behind the reference points.’

Context

Values & Ethics

Inter- personal Skills

Knowledge, understanding & Practice

The African Teacher Education Meta-Profile

Teacher Education Tuning Outcomes

This view of the meta-profile presupposes specific pedagogies in the teacher education curriculum delivery, informed by an integrated approach. It begs the question, what frameworks and methodologies will be able to deliver on these competencies? It demonstrates the ‘layered’ nature of quality issues in education, and creates a strong link between the ‘what’ to teach and learn with the ‘how' part of it.

Comparisons across the World

Africa Context Knowledge/ Understanding & Practice Interpersonal Skills Values & Ethics

Latin America Professional Academic Social

Russia Ability to learn Ability to work Ability to interact with others Ability to live in harmony with oneself

Similarities & Differences

Similarities

Emphasis on knowledge, including pedagogical knowledge

Interpersonal skills & interaction

Differences

The social role of a teacher: a common feature in LA & Africa; the teacher as an agent of Change Central role of values and ethics Africa: sustainable & peaceful environments

In Africa and LA there is a strong emphasis on values and the

Social and ethical role of the teacher, from Russia there was an

emphasis on what is measurable…‘instrumental?’

Mega/meta-meta profile?

1. (Cognitive) Knowledge: Subject + Pedagogical knowledge 2. Interpersonal Skills 3. Ability to learn + 4. Life Long Learning 5. Role of the teacher in society/Teacher as an Agent of Change/Values and ethics

? How to teach and assess values and ethics. Do good

practices exist?

Criticisms within Africa

‘… their implementation does not adequately involve higher education and quality assurance stakeholders’ (Shabani, 2013): A valuable criticism in the sense that it does not only raise questions in terms of how stakeholder participation is organised when initiatives that involve the quality of academic programmes are implemented (and who should participate), it also revisits the tension between quality enhancement and quality assurance.

Fear: The Lowest common denominator

… That the methodology can create elitism on the one hand, and mediocrity on the other as it seeks to create a comparable system across large constituencies.

… That ‘the quality of something is poor because it is designed or intended to appeal to the largest possible number of people’ :

? The Lowest common denominator

The Eco-systems of Quality in Higher Education

Following developments and arguments in the European Quality Systems in HE (Kehm (2010) some form of evolution, shifts and contradictions around the various notions of quality in higher education are exposed. A useful perspective emerge: The Tuning project should be seen as part of the quality eco-system within higher education . It has brought a ‘further quality-enhancement effort’ into the notion of quality, where quality is viewed ‘as the development of comparable criteria and assessment methodologies for collegiate learning’ … quality ‘at the classroom level’.

The different layers?

How does one successfully traverse the many layers, from the exo to the macro, the meso and the micro levels and successfully weave in all the intended quality principles (as far as curriculum development is concerned)?, … which curriculum script prevails; will it be the intended, the planned, the taught, the learned or the assessed? (Madiba 2010)

Instrumentalism and the ‘measurables’ versus values and ethics

The emphasis on the instrumental and knowledge that is measurable from the Russian teacher education SAG highlighted the challenge the other groups faced: How to teach and assess values and ethics? Can these be measurable? Do good practices exist?

What frameworks and methodologies will be able to deliver on these competencies?

Ubuntu- the concept

Doubts were expressed in including the concept within the list of generic competences because of what was perceived to be its limited familiarity across the continent. There were also arguments about whether the concept has acquired a form of standardised meaning.

Can the concept offer a framework for quality reform?

Ubuntu- the concept

The application of the concept by Archbishop Desmond Tutu during the South African Truth and Reconciliation process is one of the well-known practical appropriations and applications of the concept (Tutu, 1999). The concept has also found expression and is applied in law

Ubuntu- the framework?

There is emerging literature on ubuntu wherein the concept is poised

as a conceptual framework (Nkondo, 2007),

as a theology (Louw, 1997, Battle, 2000)

as social theory (Nussbaum, 2003),

a traditional world view (Nafukho, 2006),

a contemporary academic contrast (Bewaji and Ramose (2003)

and a political ideology by others.

Latest approaches on student success

To redistribute power relations in the learning environment and hence distribute responsibility and accountability and ownership

To enhance the strategies around Learning Communities

To take peer learning and peer support to another level

Ubuntu can serve as a critical lens for quality educational reform in the continent