Cultivating Places for Indigenous Kenyan Knowledge to Thrive: Innovations Catalyzed by the New Nationally-Mandated CBC Curriculum

• In Event: Poster Group 10
  In Poster Session: Cultivating Places for Indigenous Kenyan Knowledge to Thrive: Innovations Catalyzed by the New Nationally-Mandated CBC Curriculum

Proposal

This poster will be an impetus to critical conversations about the merits, risks, and challenges of the imminent Competency Based Curriculum (CBC), the new nationally mandated reform in Kenya. Based on visual anthropological evidence generated with Indigenous communities and school partners during our long Fulbright Hays GPA in Kenya, we will engage viewers via a graphic synthesis of the CBC’s domains. The seven core skills in the new CBC are: communication and collaboration, imagination and creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, citizenship, learning to learn, self-efficacy, and digital literacy. These differ radically from the British colonists’ rigid, rote, Euro-centered curriculum that emphasized servility and silence. This legacy system is demoralizing, overly test-driven, and requires teacher-centered unison recitations of predetermined answers. Young Kenyans, who comprise more than half of the country’s population, need much more to thrive. To these transformative ends, the CBC has great potential, yet faces real challenges, to recenter Indigenous Knowledge Systems that would distinguish Kenyan educational innovations.

Protests for an authentically “Kenyan,” more “African”, and yet “globally relevant” schooling experience are grounded in a more humane and dignified approach to child-centered learning. Advocates of CBC see great potential for fostering citizenship and forging cross-ethnic friendships. The imminent shift to CBC requires much more than a replacement of the tightly constrained curriculum content; it needs the depth of Indigenous expressions of living wisdom traditions. Hands-on pedagogies are impoverished and unsustainable if they do not integrate and valorize Indigenous Kenyan ethnic communities’ moral worldviews and senses of place. From lessons on ethnobotany to reclaimed historical heroic figures, from developing fluency in pan-African Swahili to rethinking “scientific inquiry” itself, CBC innovations are concurrently transforming, reclaiming, and re-imagining traditions that were once lost or forbidden.

These skills and modes of learning are further fortified by Indigenous philosophies of collective uplift. Indeed, we have concrete illustrations to share that the CBC’s project-based learning can exceed colonial straight-jackets and prepare youth for life-long, life-deep, and life-wide learning. But this depends on it being rooted in Ubuntu, a core concept that equally values the mutual uplift of ethnic communities and individuals. The poster visualization will, literally, recenter core Indigenous concepts of place-based, collectivist civic education as a promising mode of living out the larger goals of CBC. Photos, classroom products, government coursebooks, and novel arts-based learning products will further illustrate how Kenyan teacher-innovators are accomplishing this in real time at the grassroots level. We eagerly anticipate collegial questions about this once-in-a-generation radical school reform’s potential to reclaim and extend Indigenous Knowledge Systems as part of strategic nation-building.

Author

• Maureen K Porter, The University Of Pittsburgh School of Education