Education and Social Change: Policy Discourse Analysis of Education Reform Policies in Malawi

• In Event: 14.028 - Educational Change: Examining Policies and Practices in the Caribbean and Africa

Abstract

Three education policy reform documents – Mass Education Policy (1948-1952), Malawi Education Sector: Policy & Investment Framework (1995-2005), and the National Education Sector Plan (2003-2017) – were selected to represent three historical periods covering colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary Malawi. Through textual and discourse analysis, dominant recurring themes were identified and analyzed to expose hidden assumptions embedded in and influencing education policy reform process. Four major themes with common threads connecting seamlessly the three policies were identified and these themes are: provision of education to everyone; economic empowerment; education as human rights; and global capitalism discourse. These recurring themes have exposed how external policy designers have defined and set the agenda of education in Malawi.

Authors

• Ezra Maxwell Chapola, University of Maine at Orono

• John Maddaus, University of Maine