Changes required in nurturing life skills and to produce global citizens in a rapidly changing and interconnected global village.

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Children and youth today live in a world of challenges and opportunities, including new technologies, changing labour markets, migration, conflict, and environmental and political changes. To succeed within this current and future environment, all children and youth need access to quality education and learning that develops skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values and enables them to become successful life-long learners who can learn, un-learn, and relearn; find and retain productive work; make wise decisions; and positively engage in their communities. As such, there is an urgent need to expand, rethink and transform education and learning systems to provide all children and youth, especially those who are marginalised with quality learning opportunities that include the skills they need to succeed in school, work, and life.

Historically, the majority of education systems have relied on a content and knowledge-based approach to teaching and learning, with the emphasis on memorizing and recalling facts. The focus has been on academic disciplines— language, mathematics, natural sciences, and history—together with art, music, and physical education. Although religious and humanist values over the centuries (before the call for universal education) might have called for morality, character, and social values, the reality is that in the elementary and lower-secondary school years, information acquisition has been valued. This has been demonstrated through tests and examinations practices, which tend to reward correct answers. Classroom pedagogical practices have been aligned with these goals– focused on presentation of knowledge to students, strategies to aid memorization and storage of knowledge, and exercises to aid in representation of the information on demand and in specific ways. As students progress through the education system, fluency in application of abstract, routine skills becomes more visible, but application of strategies in dynamic situations where standard approaches might not be viable remains invisible.
In the recent past, evidence for inclusive and sustainable education reforms has geared towards acknowledging the need for integration of 21st Century Skills in education curriculum. Simply teaching to test or learning for exams is not going to help a student face everyday life situation.

At a systemic level, despite increasing visibility of concepts such as ‘assessment for learning’ or ‘formative assessment’, the primary use of assessment by national education systems remains summative – for use in certification, identification of eligibility for education progress, and system accountability. Care et al. (2019) argue that the assessment of 21st Century Skills, still in its infancy, does not lend itself easily to the modes of assessment that typically populate summative assessment approaches. Gates et al. (2016) highlight the lack of evaluation tools and approaches to measure soft skills. Similarly, Voogt and Roblin (2010) state that only two (P21 and ATC21S) of the five examined frameworks focus on possible features of formative and summative assessments of 21st Century Skills.

Education systems in East Africa and Africa at large are shifting to competency-based curricula, with priority given to learners acquiring the skills for living and thriving. As much as this is progressive, persistent challenges still exist, including the lack of contextualised frameworks for these competencies and uncoordinated effort among education stakeholders, inadequate local capacity to develop assessments and use data, as well as insufficient policy implementation to support life skills programming. Further, Information on how young people in East Africa develop these skills as well as how education systems can integrate them coherently into teaching and learning is lacking.

Learning is complete and holistic only when a student is able to effectively perform and fulfil his/her responsibilities and duties towards self, school, family, society and above all, the nation. The goal is to enable today’s student to be a good citizen and a responsible human-being who is well-aware of his potential and competence. Since early 2018, the Values and Life Skills (VaLi) thematic cluster of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) has identified with the need for strengthening the integration and development of 21st Century skills and commenced work around this. More than 20 Civil Society Organizations have committed to collaborate in deepening understanding of members on values and life skills, experimenting with what works in nurturing and developing values and life skills, and developing context-relevant assessments to measure progress, share learnings and inform system change across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

The objective of the panel is to share how education can be a catalyst for change by outlining contextual progress made towards integration of life skills education and changes required in nurturing life skills and producing global citizens conversant with 21st century skills.

The panel is comprised of three papers. The first paper will speak to Pathways to the delivery of 21st Century Skills Education in Kenya. The second paper will unpack Nurturing Social and Emotional Skills (SES): Developing and using a school-wide ecosystem approach in Uganda while the third paper examines the case for Life Skills as a standalone rather than carrier subject in the Tanzania curriculum.

Sub Unit

• Africa SIG

Organizer

• Margaret Wawira, Regional Education Learning Initiative Africa (RELI)

Chair

• Khadija A Shariff, Zizi Afrique Foundation

Individual Presentations

• Nurturing Social and Emotional Skills (SES): Developing and using a school-wide ecosystem approach in Uganda - John Mary Vianney Mitana, JM Education and Research Centre; Jean Mary Wendo, JM Education and Research Centre

• Pathways to the delivery of 21st Century Skills Education in Kenya - Michael Babu, Strathmore University

Discussant

• John Mugo, Zizi Afrique Foundation