New O-Level curriculum should not be subject-based
The article in Daily Monitor of January 19 titled, ‘New O-Level curriculum to be implemented in 2020’ left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was happy that President Museveni had rightly chosen to defer the implementation of the proposed resource-demanding lower secondary curriculum from 2017 to 2020.
Nobody wants a repeat of the ineffectual outcomes that resulted from the hasty and underfunded implementation of the lower primary thematic curriculum. At the same time however, I was disappointed to learn that the President still prefers a subject-based curriculum format to the “learning areas” typology which the National Curriculum development Centre (NCDC) had opted for. He has actually asked the curriculum developers to review the draft O-Level curriculum with a view to have a maximum of only 14 subjects. This is somewhat worrisome. Why?
First, because, a rigidly “compartmentalised” examinable subject or knowledge-based curriculum is, by its very nature, restrictive, exclusivist and limits the scope for interdisciplinary inquiry and learning.
Secondly, the classification of knowledge into what are considered to be “specialised” branches of study inadvertently helps to reinforce and even perpetuate the age-old misconception that the main aim of a trained subject teacher is to “give” or pass pre-determined higher level pieces of knowledge or subject matter to students.
This does not only present a teacher as the only person with a monopoly of that type of preset knowledge but it also depicts students as empty vessels that have nothing to bring to the teaching-learning table!
And, because this examinable knowledge that the students get exposed to in this manner is considered to be a given “from above”, they are not motivated to explore and extend the frontiers of their knowledge, to challenge it, to relate it to their own lives/experiences and understandings or to apply it in their daily problem-solving.
These are the very curriculum concerns and issues which the NCDC in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Sports (MoESTS) had initially sought to circumvent when they drafted the reformed Lower Secondary Curriculum. The new curriculum framework proposes to deliver a competence-based holistic education comprised of eight “learning areas” for both personal and national development.
It aims to empower students to become self-assured individuals, to take pride in being responsible and patriotic citizens, with willingness to make a positive contribution to national development. In order to help attain this holistic educational development agenda, learners are taught some meta-cognitive skills, generic skills and values of a cross-cutting nature.
None of these universalist cross-cutting values, skills and attitudes can be achieved using an encumbering subject-based curriculum and teacher centered instructional strategies. We need to stick to NCDC’s proposed flexible and innovative competence-based curriculum as it comes with several points of departure. For example, unlike in the expert knowledge-based curriculum, students are also presumed to have knowledge and experience which they can be prompted to bring to the learning process.
Knowledge accordingly ceases to be a rigidly defined “given” to be single-handedly delivered by an “expert” teacher but rather a jointly constructed product of the teacher acting in concert with his/her students.
Learning then becomes a truly experiential shared process with active student engagement. The teacher’s job is to build on students’ knowledge and experience, by using well-targeted questions to tease out their opinions, enriching these opinions with newer ideas and insights and challenging students to apply this expanded knowledge to real life situations.
In that way, the students become inculcated with the requisite cognitive capabilities, life skills, competencies, values and attitudes.
