Learning to Teach in Ghana: Local Lessons for Teacher Education Reform in the African Context

• In Event: Beyond Fragmentation: Global Perspectives on Didactics—Learning and Teaching

Abstract

The role that pre-tertiary teacher education institutions play in shaping the professional identity and practice of teachers in the sub-Sahara Africa context, in response to the changing demands of teaching and learning, has been called into question in studies (e.g. Lewin and Stuart 2003; Pryor et al., 2012). Yet, many African governments continue to pour resources into these institutions expecting that they would produce teachers with the capacity to bring about effective learning outcomes (Lewin & Stuart 2003). In instances where teacher education reforms have occurred, the focus has been on fostering learner-centred pedagogy (LCP) to produce teachers who can make teaching and learning interactive or learner-centred to improve learning outcomes. Ghana has been one country which has attempted to reform pre-tertiary teacher education to achieve this goal. In the late 1990s, a five-country study of teacher education entitled “MUSTER ” explored the content and process of learning to teach in teacher education institutions. In the case of Ghana, researchers found that instructional approaches in teacher education colleges were still dominated by ‘teacher-centred’ practices and that, “rarely … were opportunities created for more interactive ‘small group’ work or discussions that would place much of the responsibility for developing personalised understanding of teaching on trainees” (Akyeampong 2003 p. viii). The MUSTER studies, for the first time, began to open the lid on what actually transpires in the classrooms of teacher education institutions in Ghana and other African countries. It argued that LCP borrowed from global north contexts was ‘rejected’ partly because it lacked the input of “culturally relevant and effective teaching strategies” that fit with classroom realities in the global south (Lewin & Stuart 2003 p. xvii). The MUSTER studies and others like it (see, Pryor et al., 2013) have argued that institution-based pre-service initial teacher education in Africa lack the potential to put beginning teachers on a systematic and self-regulated path to promote learner-centred approaches in their own teaching. Pre-tertiary teacher education has to focus a lot more on what happened in real classrooms and use this as the context for learning to teach (Pryor et al., 2013). In this paper, I present classroom observation and focus group data from four teacher education institutions that were studied in Ghana as part of the Teacher Preparation in Africa (TPA ) research project, to illustrate how learning to teach tries to incorporate LCP and what issues it raises for improved practice in teacher education. The findings highlight the potential of using real life episodes of teaching and learning interaction as resource for deepening understanding of learner-centred approaches to learning. It argues that more should be made of images that depict teaching and learning scenarios showing common misconceptions and errors to frame appropriate responses that go beyond pupils manipulating concrete objects as an expression of LCP. In effect, the validity of LCP in institution-based teacher education has to be linked with authentic cases of real life teaching events in classrooms to demonstrate knowledge construction through problem solving. From this analysis, the paper offers some implications for research and teacher education reforms in the African context beyond the specific case of Ghana.

Author

• Kwame Akyeampong, University of Sussex