The Western Gaze: Learner-Centered Pedagogies and Moral Education in Kenya

• In Event: Education Policy and Educational Reform

Proposal

In response to Kenya’s perceived ‘moral crisis’ (Wamahiu, 2017), the recent 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 Kenya for centuries, with unique histories and journeys to their insertion into Kenyan education. Now, teachers must incorporate national morals in every lesson and use learner-centered ideas in teaching, learning, and assessments instead of previous rote ‘chalk-and-talk’ techniques (Chisholm & Leyendecker, 2008). This paper aims to investigate the historical reasonings for introducing the pedagogies by asking how specific discourses on morality, education, and politics have shaped strategies of regulation and control in Kenya.

Scholarship on postcolonial African education illuminate the discourses and tensions (Tabulawa, 2013; Vavrus & Bartlett, 2011) felt after Kenyan colonization, which undergirds moral and learner-centered pedagogies. One posits freedom and critical thinking, while the other implies an authoritarian structure (Noddings, 2010). However, both come together to create a representation of Western and capitalist ideals about a self-regulated and self-disciplined Kenyan child. The pedagogies regulate and create a self-disciplined student, alongside hosting fears of a populous without these morals and ways of thinking. By shaping expectations of Kenyans children’s internal morals and feelings, I see the pedagogies as disciplinary technologies in the curriculum.

Drawing from Foucault (1990), Rose (1989), and Fendler (1995), I apply poststructuralist theories to the discourses of children, learning, and morals in the new Kenyan reform. There has been a shift in education from teaching behaviors to governing life’s inner workings, specifically regarding minds and souls. Here, soul can be thought of as the inner workings of child mind. As Fendler (1995) explains, previously the soul was off limits in education. “…fears, desires, and hopes were not…rationalized as objects of scientific intervention in educational discourse. Now, curricula are designed to engage a child's soul in order to facilitate its normal development” (pp. 6).

In my paper, I first look at the histories and discourses undergirding the two pedagogies. Moral education has a long history in East Africa, from missionaries to independence. Learner-centered pedagogies have an equally long history of representation in indigenous learning. On a broader scale, I contend that the introduction of these two ideas are older discourses that have been recovered, modified, and ‘encrusted’ (Stoler, 1995) into new forms. I trace the various discourses that created both, from colonial religious education to Kenya’s first educational reform. I intend to show that both ideas are born out of Westernized ways of thinking and racial grammar that aims to order the minds, souls, and behaviors of young children. With these backgrounds, I examine how both became incorporated through policies and broad, global discourses. Moral education continues to be pushed by religious backers while NGOs and Western influences posit learner-centered pedagogies. Both have been affected by anxieties around East African politics, morality, and human capital. My paper then moves into analyzing the learning standards of the Kenyan curriculum.

My research focuses on the early childhood learning standards in the Kenyan curriculum. Early childhood (ages 4-6) are the newest grade levels to be formally incorporated into public school system. This makes these grade levels’ content the newest and least likely to be regurgitations of previous curricular materials. Early childhood is also a highly anxious time for policy, political, and educational elites as a time to instill ways of thinking into malleable minds. According to the curriculum framework,
“The Framework will take advantage of the fact that learners spend most of their formative years in school, which presents opportunities for the curriculum to mould and reinforce values upon which the learner’s character is formed. The Framework will adopt a values based approach to education that will create learning opportunities within the formal, non-formal and informal curriculum dimensions to inculcate the desired values in all learners” (KICD, 2017).

By combining discourse and textual analysis, the paper looks at where these concepts merge, separate, and overlap in the curriculum. I used textual analysis software to track, mark, and record where certain morals and practices emerge in the learning standards. Alongside archival work conducted in Kenya, 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? The research seeks a common core of the seemingly disparate ideas that work to create an ideal Kenyan citizen while poking holes into the overarching discourses. I argue that while these ideas are seemingly imposed in every subject and lesson, the burden of values is still on religious education while learner-centered ideas are clustered in several rote practices. Furthermore, I aim to show that while these two ideas are positioned as exciting and new to the reform, they are reiterations of previous discourses that have tried to control and regulate Kenyan souls and lives.

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.

In summary, this paper, based upon several years of research in Kenya, and a focus on recent curriculum documents and reforms, illustrates how Westernized discourses related to pedagogy come to be recirculated and reinscribed in curriculums.

Author

• Meredith Whye, The University of Wisconsin-Madison