The Western Gaze: Colonial and Neocolonial Effects on Kenyan Pedagogical Reform

• In Event: Unsettling the Coloniality of Knowledge: Curricula as Inscriptions of Westernized Order

Abstract

Objectives:
In response to Kenya’s perceived ‘moral crisis’ (Wamahiu, 2017), the Kenyan educational reform promises to turn young students into engaged, empowered, and ethical citizens. To create this citizenry, the new curriculum introduces two pedagogical tactics: moral education and learner-centered pedagogies. Framed as novel to this reform, moral education and learner-centered pedagogies have been circulating formally and informally in Kenya for centuries, with unique journeys to their insertion into Kenyan education. Teachers must now incorporate national morals in every lesson and use learner-centered ideas in teaching, learning, and assessments instead of the previous rote ‘chalk-and-talk’ (Chisholm & Leyendecker, 2008). This paper aims to investigate the historical reasonings for introducing two pedagogies by asking how colonial discourses on education have shaped strategies of regulation and control in Kenya, and understanding where the reasonings manifest.

Theoretical Framework:
Drawing from Foucault (1995) and Rose (1989), I apply poststructuralist frameworks to the discourses of children, learning, and morals in the reform. Postcolonial scholarship illuminates discourses and tensions (Tabulawa, 2013; Vavrus & Bartlett, 2011) felt after Kenyan colonization which undergird moral and learner-centered pedagogies. Learner-centered discourses posits freedom and critical thinking, while the other frames discourses related to authoritarian structures (Noddings, 2010). However, both come together to create a representation of Western and capitalist ideals about the self-regulated and self-disciplined Kenyan child. Together, they regulate and create a self-disciplined student, along with hosting fears of a populous without these morals and ways of thinking.

Modes of Inquiry:
By combining discourse and textual analysis, the paper looks at where these concepts merge, separate, and overlap in the curriculum. Alongside my archival work in Kenya, I use textual analysis software to track, mark, and record where certain morals and practices emerge in the learning standards. I link these insights with discourse analysis to ask, which morals and learner-centered practices are most prevalent in early learning standards? Moreover, who benefits from including these two pedagogies?

Data:
My research focuses on the early childhood learning standards in the Kenyan curriculum. Early childhood (ages 4-6) are the newest grade levels incorporated into public schooling. Therefore, the content for these grade levels is the newest and least likely to be regurgitations of previous curricular materials.

Results:
I argue that while these ideas are seemingly imposed in every subject and lesson, the burden of values is on religious education while learner-centered ideas are clustered in several rote practices. Broadly, I contend that these two ideas are related to older discourses that have been recovered, modified, and ‘encrusted’ (Stoler, 1995) into new forms. I intend to show that both ideas are born out of Westernized ways of thinking that aim to order the minds and behaviors of young children.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
Kenya’s education choices impact the larger community of East Africa and a growing, youthful population. As Kenya creates a new educational system for its nation, introducing these ideas sheds light on the dual paths to one idealized type of person.

Author

• Meredith Whye, University of Wisconsin - Madison