Does Learner-Centred Pedagogy Typify a Dependency Relationship? Stakeholder Interactions and Negotiations during Policy Formation Processes in Ghana

• In Event: Examining the Role of Global Educational Policies & Practices

Proposal

Considered a ‘best practice’ or ‘universal panacea’ in education reforms, learner-centred pedagogy (LCP) has been widely borrowed and lent from one culture to another. Several scholars (Carney 2008; Guthrie 1990; Tabulawa 2003) claim that LCP is an ideological enterprise rather than a mere educational project and that the transferred policy of LCP attempts to inculcate Western values associated with liberal democracy. Thus, LCP has been labelled as a process of Westernisation (Guthrie 1990) and of cultural imperialism (Carney 2008) that contribute to maintaining hegemonic relationships between the former colonisers and the colonised.

Framed by dependency theory (Dos Santos 1973; Frank 1966; Rostow 1959), this paper untangles the particularities of ‘cultural imperialism’ allegedly manifested within LCP transfer in the context of Ghana. By exploring policy relationships formed through personal and institutional connections and negotiations during the formation of LCP policies in the country, we unpack whether and in what ways LCP policy transfer embodies a process of pedagogical dependency. We ask the following research questions:

• How is LCP incorporated into an educational development project and ultimately into official education policies in Ghana?
• Whose intensions lie behind the project, and what are those intensions?
• Does the incorporation of LCP into official policy in Ghana contribute to perpetuating hegemonic relationships between international and national stakeholders during the policy formation process, and if so, in what ways?


To examine the views and experiences in formulating LCP policies, this research investigated the roles played by international aid workers and Ghanaian national policy officials, taking the Transforming Teacher Education and Learning (T-TEL) project in Ghana as a case. T-TEL was a six-year pre-service teacher training programme operated from 2014 and 2020, funded by the United Kingdom (UK) Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCDO) and managed by Cambridge Education, UK.

This research employed semi-structured interviews with T-TEL stakeholders conducted virtually in Ghana and the UK. The participants were selected purposively through internet searches and reading policy documents published by T-TEL, as well as through personal connections of the research team. The interviewees included nine policymakers in Ghana and nine development workers in the UK.


T-TEL did not envisage promoting any specific pedagogical approach from the outset; its primary focus was placed on structural and institutional reform and, in particular, on breaking the monopoly control over teacher education held by one university. In doing so, T-TEL left the responsibility of decision-making and project implementation power in the hands of Ghanaians, notably to a team leader, who was well connected to Ministerial staff. With the involvement of the new Minister and the new Cambridge Education project manager, this trend intensified; the Minister exercised strong leadership, and the project manager replaced many of the international consultants and experts with Ghanaian policy officials.

It appeared that T-TEL offered a space for breaking the conditional situation embedded within colonial power relations to change the internal structures of the education system in Ghana. Ironically, however, within the T-TEL mechanism, the perpetual hegemonic relationships existed, brought by LCP transfers via highly educated local elites. LCP, which was not the initial focus of the T-TEL project, gained momentum with the backing of Ghanaian policy officials at the apex. Here LCP seems to have acted as a vehicle to establish dependency on a Western-oriented ideology and pedagogical approach. In explaining their understanding of LCP and rationales for its promotion, the Ghanaian interviewees draw on knowledge and experiences that they gained in the West. The form of educational exchange, where elites in the Global South are educated to the highest degree level in the metropole, has been perpetuated since independence. It is these educationists with the highest qualifications from the West who occupy the top of the policy pyramid in Ghana. They set the policy direction of, and share a commitment to, the educational vision inspired by LCP principles for the next generation of Ghanaian children. In this study, the elite Ghanaians brought back the tenets of LCP from the UK and North America and sought to integrate the LCP ideals into their country’s educational policy reform. This may have contributed to a persistent colonial relationship between Ghana and the West.

Although it was not an ‘ideological project’ of LCP furtherance set up by the metropole through an aid package, the policy formation process seemed entrapped as an ideological project, or in Carnoy’s term, ‘cultural alienation’ where ‘desired values and norms are taken from the metropole, not from the local experience’ (1974, 55). What signifies in T-TEL is that, whilst Carnoy continues to assert that such cultural dependency obstructs new forms of institutional restructuring happening, T-TEL successfully broke the monopolistic power held by University A and restructured the existing mainstream structures which are harnessed in a refined improved network system.

The findings from this research encourage us to reconsider (post)colonial relationships in the context of LCP (Schweisfurth 2011), and more broadly, within the architecture of aid (Arnove 1980; Moutsios 2009). This case study shows a complex entanglement of educational policy transfer rather than a straightforward path of cultural and educational exchanges between the metropole and satellite states. A form of cultural dependency (on LCP) and independency (institutional reform spearheaded by local policy actors) coexisted within the T-TEL project. In addition, the dependency relationship epitomised in this research was not instituted through conventional means, whereby international aid agencies advocate LCP as a universally effective pedagogy (à la UNESCO, UNICEF) in order, in part, to instil particular ideology in the periphery (Guthrie 1990; Tabulawa 2003). Instead, the Ghanaian elites at the apex espoused the LCP approach in their own terms within a seemingly locally led aid mechanism engineered by T-TEL.

LCP may not warrant rejection simply due to its association with democratic and capitalist systems. More nuanced understanding of the process of LCP implementation and aid projects is necessary in considering the postcolonial relationships within the pedagogical aid mechanism, especially where a periphery country is negotiating its own trajectory away from postcoloniality and breaking through old mechanisms of external control.

Authors

• Nozomi Sakata, Hiroshima University

• Hannah Benyaba Edjah, University of Cape Coast