Implications of the ALiVE process and evidence on policy and practice in East Africa

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

Proposal

Confronting the global learning crisis, and modernizing Africa’s education to embrace 21st Century skills and learning can only be achieved through protest. Protest against education that focuses on academic competences only, protest against the walls that have been erected between families and schools, teachers and parents, and protest against the disuse of research evidence in education systems.
The process and product of the Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE), including the opportunities created by this assessment, provide a useful lens for examining the effective mainstreaming of 21st century competences in the region. This presentation reviews the global and regional landscapes as they relate to life skills and values, and concludes that these competences are increasingly acknowledged and adopted, but much remains to be done in order to achieve this. Perspectives on the use of research evidence points to the need for more than just disseminating evidence, to a larger spectrum of activities that include translation of evidence to speak to decision makers, aligning evidence to social and economic contexts, up to the active engagement and capacity support to the users of evidence.
Given these contexts, this paper proposes and discusses five implications of the ALiVE for policy and practice. First is a call to bolden the focus and fully contextualize holistic learning in East Africa. Second is a call for a paradigm shift in assessment, including the review of assessment frameworks, leveraging technology, and prioritising the use of the evidence generated by assessments. Third is a call to focus on teacher capacities, while considering that these would be facilitated by system-wide focus on capacity development. Fourth is a call for shared space and responsibility between parents and teachers, to perceive assessment as a common project between communities and schools. Lastly, is a call for a resilient and comprehensive approach that secures alignment, timeliness, engagement and institutionalization. Through this, system change may be accelerated to achieve reasonable levels of the development of 21st century competences by the year 2030.

Author

• John Mugo, Zizi Afrique Foundation