Ensuring Quality by Attending to Inquiry (original) (raw)
Journal of Teaching and Learning, 2013
Questions about what constitutes effective teacher education compatible with today’s changing educational demands have been frequently raised. This article is an overview of ideas about the elements of effective teacher education in view of the 21st century demands. Drawing on literature and the authors' knowledge of teacher education in the East African context, the article argues the case for the different elements of effective teacher education program that would help the region, and perhaps, by extension, other developing countries, meet their educational obligations in the 21st century. The paper also highlights the theoretical underpinnings of these elements and their implications for teacher preparation in East Africa
The provision of basic education for all children by 2015 is now one of the world’s major educational objectives. Through UNESCO’s Education for All (EFA) commitments and the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) national and international attention has been focussed on measures to achieve this end. There has been some progress. The number of school age children with no access to schooling is dropping (from x to y in the period 1999–2005?). There is, however, some way to go in terms of the basic provision and the gender parity that the MDGs seek to achieve. Most significantly attention has now turned to the challenge of providing sufficient teachers of the appropriate quality to staff such rapid expansion. The focus of enquiry of this proposed keynote symposium is the ways in which different forms of research are contributing to: • analyses of factors impacting on teacher supply and retention; • developing conceptual understanding of the ‘life’ experiences of teachers working in ...
Global Education Agenda and Teacher Training in Sub-Saharan Africa - Some Initial Thoughts
Academia Letters, 2021
National education systems are socio-economic, political, cultural, and geographical complex realities with their own specificities. When we look to Global Agendas that defend the promotion of equitable and equal access to education, in a broad, global, and simultaneously globalizing perspective, we are faced with the need to deepen knowledge about the socio-educational reality, in a perspective framed in time and space, but also in power relations. It becomes necessary to take into account national context perspectives’, the belonging to regional organizations, to be integrated into multilateral communities, and the participation in cooperation to the achievement of goals from international education agendas, such as the SDG 4 from United Nations Organization (UN) Agenda. In Sub-Saharan Africa, teacher training is a very important issue, since it is necessary to guarantee access to education for children and adults, in quantity and quality. Teachers' training is also needed in quantity and quality so that they can master school content and have pedagogical and human interaction skills, which are fundamental for motivating learning and trajectories of school success. In this context, some questions may stand out, such as: what are the main challenges facing teacher training in sub-Saharan Africa? Has the participation of sub-Saharan African countries in the construction of the global agenda been translated into commitments to be achieved in national educational contexts? Have sub-Saharan African countries achieved results in terms of quantity and quality of teacher training? These questions must take into account the greater proximity or distance between the global educational agendas goals and the social reality of teachers training contexts, on a continent where education is a strategic and essential factor for the development and where demographic growth is both an opportunity and a challenge for national systems.
Towards an Enhanced Status for Teachers in Africa
Academic Leadership: The Online Journal
For sometime now there has been a tremendous increase in the demand for formal education inAfrica. As a result of this development, individuals, organizations, communities and the governmenthave invested huge sum of money in educational expansion. However, noble as this trend is, thequality of teachers remains one of the major factors that could mar or improve the overall educationalresults.It follows therefore that if the entire education enterprise in Africa will not be grounded in the distant ornearest future, it is imperative to ensure that teachers are appropriately positioned to play the cardinalroles that belong to them in the educational enterprise. In order to ensure that teachers in Africa areappropriately positioned for this cardinal role that can only be played by them, one of the cardinalissues that need to be addressed is the diminished status of teachers in Africa. With this background,attempt is made in this paper to closely examine the status of teachers in Africa, ...
Capability enhancement of the African Education
The political systems and emerging economies need to focus more on education, emphasising Teacher-Education, Curriculum Development, and teaching methods-as a national-building framework with a new knowledge pool and better educational delivery system. Education policy is a national issue, and it ceaselessly focused on society. Its procedure is identified with political, monetary, and scholarly factors. And additionally, it is identified with human advancement and the fate of new ages. Albeit, the instructive approach is a necessary piece of the general strategy of the nation. Yet, it is considered a national and administrative task that the specialists put in their needs. It must be steady with the specific objectives confronting alternate areas of work and generation. It communicates targets of a philosophical and social nature and mirrors the general public's requests and its broad political, formative, and instructive purposes. In this report, we studied and examined the challenges of education in Africa before and during the outbreak of covid-19. The results showed the following, a) regardless the diversity of techniques to change the framework of instructions during the past three decades, the achievements of the indicative measures are very modest and have led to a decrease in the formative status of these countries. b) Also, the learning outcomes are suffering from the power of quantity over quality, c) A real failure to meet another information age's essential requirements. To overcome these challenges, we propose to apply the capability determination educational strategy model in identifying all activities and practical processes for developing educational management, curricula and teaching methods in the school and university education stages.
Teacher Education and Development in Africa: A Modern Perspective
Journal of International Cooperation and Development
Teacher education programme is a critical component of education and the life of any society. It normally lays the very foundations of the society. It spurs and pushes the various aspects of development in the society through well-established culture and character of such a society. But for this programme of education to perform this development function efficiently it must be well designed, developed and constantly reformed and modernized so as to keep it abreast with the emerging issues both in education and society. This process is only possible through the conduct of regular studies in education and society to establish new developments and also facilitate the generation of relevant innovations to promote the quality of Teacher education programme. However, there is no evidence that such a process has ever been initiated and conducted in Teacher education programme since the inception of this programme in modern Africa. This paper is designed to explore the importance of Teacher...
2013
Since its inception in 2005, TESSA has been closely associated with primary education. The current TESSA OERs are a toolkit of subject-specific pedagogical resources for teachers, for teaching primary-school level literacy, numeracy, science, social science, creative arts and life skills, created to map onto the national primary curricula of countries across Africa, versioned for specific countries and written in Arabic, English, French and Kiswahili. The OERS are written to provide innovative and active teaching and learning, and to deal with the challenges of teaching in schools with large classes and few resources. That the ambition of TESSA in 2005 focused on primary education was due to the influence of the EFA agenda and MDG goals, and the success in the early years of the 21st century in increasing access to primary education in many countries across Africa. In 2013, globally, the world is looking to its new agenda post-2015. Early indicators and draft recommendations suggest...
This research investigates the changes in the status of the teaching profession during the EFA years (2000-present). Using a modified version of Quinn (1997) as the framework, the study has used the following components to assess changes in the status of the teaching profession: credentials, induction, professional development, authority/self governance, and compensation. Teacher commitment is used as a proxy for educational quality. This study finds that the overall trend in the status of the teaching profession has improved at best and unchanged at worst. While induction and professional development displayed negative trends, credentials and authority both showed positive increases. Compensation (by contract type) and commitment were unchanged. These results are influenced by the positive trends in job satisfaction. Three case studies-Indonesia, Kenya, and Morocco-provide deeper context into the complicated nature of adjusting the status of the teaching profession and introduce a framework to help mitigate potential challenges for measuring the status of the teaching profession for future researchers.