This research handbook provides meaningful coverage on current trends in the dynamic education systems of Africa. It presents the main findings on current issues in the education systems from different African countries. Specifically, it examines education policies and what can be done differently by African nations to strengthen these policies. The objective is to highlight African nations’ capacity to address issues of social justice to generate ideas that can help translate the increasing strengths of the continent into achieving sustainable development.
Quality and Qualities: Tensions in Education Reforms is a provocative call for understanding and further exploring the elusive concept of quality in education. Although education quality has acquired high priority in the past few decades, the multiplicity of conceptualizations of quality also reflects the concerns and foci of multiple stakeholders. Coming to an understanding of quality education involves careful analysis of the context from which any particular reform or program emerges and of the continuing struggle to define and achieve it. Two main questions persist: who benefits from particular policies focused on quality? And what are the potential tradeoffs between a focus on quality, equitable distribution of education, and inclusion of various traditional expectations? This book explores notions of quality as understood within various systems of national, formal, and nonformal education. Also it considers the tensions that arise with the introduction of new standardized notions of quality in relation to international measures and educational reforms in developing countries. In all cases, specific national issues and concerns compete with global agendas.Challenges to quality that are given particular attention in the book chapters include changing definitions of quality, high expectations for education and issues with implementation, and the introduction of English as a means to achieve quality in a globalizing world. Special attention is also given to possible actions that support a more equitable education without ignoring the requisite of quality. The final chapter suggests three models/choices for seeking higher quality and guiding the educational future of nations.
Gender and Education in Kenya explores the intersections of curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and gender. The contributors study depictions of gender in textbooks, the presence and roles of girls and women within classrooms in Kenya, and female leadership in education, arguing that, despite recent policies put in place by the Kenyan government to ensure gender parity in education, there is still a need to make curriculum more gender responsive. Gender and Education in Kenya examines the disparity between male and female representation in education and advocate for more training for teachers about gender-related educational policies and implementing gender-responsive objectives in classrooms. The collection concludes with a study of the intersection of gender and disability with a chapter that explores the additional challenges for a blind girl in school and the lack of policies in place to help disabled students.
While many school districts and institutions of higher education still cling to the traditional agrarian school year with a factory model delivery of education and Carnegie units based on seat time when most people are no longer farmers, factory workers, or reliant on learning in a classroom, there are bursts of promising practices that buck the norm by questioning the educational value of these traditions. Though researchers have investigated the potential of students learning in their own homes via personalized instruction delivered by computers rather than attending traditional institutions, the status quo in education has remained stubbornly resistant to change. Mixed-reality simulations, year-round schooling, grouping students by competencies instead of age, and game-based teaching are just a few of the educational innovations that seek to maximize learning by recognizing that innovation is essential for successfully teaching students in the modern era. The Handbook of Research on Innovations in Non-Traditional Educational Practices is a comprehensive reference source that examines various educational innovations, how they have developed workarounds to navigate traditional systems, and their potential to radically transform teaching and learning. With each chapter highlighting a different educational innovation such as experiential learning, game-based learning, online learning, and inquiry-based learning and their applications in all levels of education, this book explores the issues and challenges these educational innovations face as well as their impact. It is intended for academicians, professionals, administrators, and researchers in education and specifically benefits academic deans, vice presidents of academic affairs, graduate students, faculty technology leaders, directors of teaching and learning centers, curriculum and instructional designers, policymakers, principals and superintendents, and teachers interested in educational change.
There is growing pressure on teachers and faculty to understand and adopt best practices to work with diverse races, cultures, and languages in modern classrooms. Establishing sound pedagogy is also critical given that racial, cultural, and linguistic integration has the potential to increase academic success for all learners. To that end, there is also a need for educators to prepare graduates who will better meet the needs of culturally diverse learners and help their learners to become successful global citizens. The Handbook of Research on Diversity and Social Justice in Higher Education is a cutting-edge research book that examines cross-cultural perspectives, challenges, and opportunities pertaining to advancing diversity and social justice in higher education. Furthermore, the book explores multiple concepts of building a bridge from a monocultural pedagogical framework to cross-cultural knowledge through appropriate diversity education models as well as effective social justice practices. Highlighting a range of topics such as cultural taxation, intercultural engagement, and teacher preparation, this book is essential for teachers, faculty, academicians, researchers, administrators, policymakers, and students.
In an open cart Elspeth Huxley set off with her parents to travel to Thika in Kenya. As pioneering settlers, they built a house of grass, ate off a damask cloth spread over packing cases, and discovered—the hard way—the world of the African. With an extraordinary gift for detail and a keen sense of humor, Huxley recalls her childhood on the small farm at a time when Europeans waged their fortunes on a land that was as harsh as it was beautiful. For a young girl, it was a time of adventure and freedom, and Huxley paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up among the Masai and Kikuyu people, discovering both the beauty and the terrors of the jungle, and enduring the rugged realities of the pioneer life.
This open access book is a comparative analysis of recent large scale education reforms that broadened curriculum goals to better prepare students for the 21st century. The book examines what governments actually do when they broaden curriculum goals, with attention to the details of implementation. To this end, the book examines system level reforms in six countries at various levels of development. The study includes system level reforms in jurisdictions where students achieve high levels in international assessments of basic literacies, such as Singapore and Ontario, Canada, as well as in nations where students achieve much lower levels, such as Kenya, Mexico, Punjab-Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The chapters examine system-level reforms that focus on strengthening the capacity to teach the basics, as in Ontario and Pakistan, as well as reforms that aim at building the capacity to teach a much broader set of competencies and skills, such as Kenya, Mexico, Singapore and Zimbabwe. The volume includes systems at very different levels of spending per student and reforms at various points in the cycle of policy implementation, some just starting, some struggling to survive a governmental transition, and others that have been in place for an extended period of time. From the comparative study of these reforms, we aim to provide an understanding of how to build the capacity of education systems to teach 21st century skills at scale in diverse settings.
This book is a broad survey of the development of education in Africa, with a special focus on Kenya. The main purpose of the book is to investigate the development of education as influenced by the English and French colonial powers; thus it focuses on francophone West and Central Africa and anglophone West, Eastern and Southern Africa. The chapters follow major historical events such as colonisation, the two World Wars, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, and the achievement of independence which are important landmarks in the history of education.
Studies of the retention of literacy and numeracy by adults who have only obtained primary schooling have given little encouragement to the belief that the cognitive effects of schooling are enduring for many school leavers. How these findings can be reconciled with the claims made for the importance of schooling as an instrument of social and economic change is the subject ofinvestigation in this volume. The cognitive outcomes of literacy acqusition and secular schools in coastal Kenya are the focus of this ethnographic study, which stresses the relevance of an international understanding of the particular problems and dilemmas that face the educational systems of individual countries.
