Dr. Laban Ayiro

As we grapple with what will constitute the appropriate education for our country, the temptation of embracing technology comes to the fore.

However, technology, by itself — no matter how much we add — will not move our learners into the 21st Century.

Nor will rearranging our the 8-4-4 system or truncating the current amorphous curriculum for the ECDE, primary, secondary and tertiary levels, as developed by the Kenya Institute of Education.

If we want to see a positive, constructive and productive education system that will give birth to functional citizens for our country, we are focusing in the wrong place.

21st century pedagogy

The only attribute that will move our education into the 21st Century is changing our teaching methods, and what we teach in classrooms: I am advocating that we need 21st Century pedagogy, along with 21st Century curriculum.

In my article last year titled Reforming our Education system in the 21st Century must be Evidence Based, I made the case that our education reform initiatives have so far been trying to marry systems of the last century with technological infusion.

Although this approach may, in fact raise the number of A’s in national examinations, or even get more students to meet public university entry requirements, it will certainly not prepare our youth for today’s expectations.

One of the reasons we struggle so hard to raise examination scores, which at times defeat the statistical theorems such the normal distribution curve ( a school raising for example 65 A’s from a class of 72 students! ), and also see so many dropouts( too much pressure to craft an attractive mean for the school at whatever cost), is that our pedagogy — how we teach — is both outdated and out of sync with today’s needs.

Today, the pedagogy in most classrooms still consists mostly of ‘telling’, writing notes and testing that is aligned to the setting of the Kenya National Examination Council (Knec).

This approach results in passive learners and ‘curiosity’ has literally been edged out of the Kenyan classroom, yet it is an indispensable attribute of meaningful learning.

Today’s learners require much more practical applications in the learning process, including finding information for themselves and constructing knowledge that demonstrates their own understanding and conceptualization.

The reform to our curriculum, therefore ,should put its thrust on what goes on in the classroom.

We should thrive for learning that encompasses inquiry-based, problem-based, case-based, student-centered, and other up-to-date types of teaching and learning. The teacher’s role in this pedagogy is not to tell, but rather to facilitate, coach and guide, to provide questions and context, to assure quality and rigour of student work.

skills of the past

A second important reason for our failure to give our youth the education they need for the future is that our curriculum (what we teach) is anchored in the past.

Although change in this area is admittedly harder, we ought to pay attention to what we teach, deleting skills of the past, and introducing those of the future.

Teaching an aspect such as programming, for example, from ECDE (disguised as game design) is not only possible but is already happening in progressive curricular for countries such as South Korea, Malaysia and Norway.

I have witnessed in the USA here nursery children programming competitive robots!

Given how important and powerful technology will be in their lifetimes, our children need to learn early on that they can make it do what they want, rather than become, as too many of us are today, digital immigrants or slaves.

Unless we begin the hard job of deleting the huge amount of the overloaded curriculum that is no longer needed and replacing it with useful items such as programming, systemic problem-solving, understanding and correctly using statistics, literacy in non-textual and mixed media, using technology to effect change, and the basics of communication- all starting in the earliest grades-our children will be ready only for what was, not what will be.

I am not suggesting that we completely abandon all that things we now teach, but it now time to put a great many of them on the reference shale, for retrieval only when and If needed by particular students.

Finally, our teachers need to focus their thinking on learning to teach with pedagogy and curriculum that prepare our youth for their future in the 21st century..