The ‘breadth of skills’ phenomenon: Visibility in East Africa

• In Event: The Power of Protest: Embedding 21st Century Competences in Education Systems in East Africa

Proposal

The ‘great divide’, as signified by terms such as the ‘global south’ is bearing unexpected fruit. As developing economies take charge of their educational directions, they increasingly self-reference. One symptom of this shift lies in research and practice that adopts a ‘contextualisation’ approach. The approach, epitomised by the Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALIVE) initiative, does not seek the substantive guidance of aid and development providers from high income economies, notwithstanding a U.S. centric perspective that the latter are responsible for empowering and enabling ‘locally led development’. ALiVE’s exploration of life skills and values represents a perspective on education that is distinctly different from recommendations by some global agencies that literacy and numeracy are what constitutes ‘learning’ and accounts for ‘learning poverty’ (meaning those unable to read and understand a simple story) in low- and middle-income economies.
With growing concerns about the directions and implementation of education provision world-wide, the visibility of curriculum reform stands as an acknowledgement of the need to broaden the nature of that provision. Such acknowledgements are an essential step which can stimulate wider discussion of new directions, with possibilities of stimulating further reforms in pedagogy and in assessment. The challenge has however remained that curricular reform that incorporates 21st century skills has typically not been accompanied by timely reform initiatives in teacher training, or in provision of aligned learning resources. This trend points to continued lack of acknowledgement of the need for systemic integration of the skills, requiring a major rethink of how teachers, particularly in the secondary sector, can incorporate the skills in their teaching—through modelling and through focus on process. As increasing numbers of countries and regions begin the journey towards more holistic concepts of education, such acknowledgement has the power to inform more successful shifts in these countries.

Author

• Esther Care, University of Melbourne