Kenyan universities are staring in the face of admitting the 2017 introduced Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) graduates from the country’s secondary schools. The CBC key stakeholders are the students, the parents, the teachers/lecturers, the schools, colleges and universities, the Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU), the Commission for University Education (CUE), and the Government. There are others.
Let’s look at some key terminologies.
- A competency is a combination of knowledge (cognitive learning domain or learning with the Head), attitudes (affective learning domain or learning with the Heart), and skills (psychomotor learning domain or learning with the Hands) that are required to perform a specific task.
- Competency based education is an educational system that focuses on helping students master core competencies in their fields of study.
- CBC is learner-centered with teachers emphasizing what students can do (psychomotor learning aspects or learning by the hands) rather than what they should know (cognitive aspects of learning or learning by the head).
- CBC focuses on real-world applications and problem solving and assesses pupils along the practical lines of what they can do.
Being a university professor and therefore a CBC stakeholder, I can say without fear of contradiction that CBC was both hurriedly and controversially introduced with incomprehensive stakeholder participation.
I have visited some CBC schools in my subcounty of kimilili in Bungoma and can attest to the fact that where there is a conducive or right infrastructure including the CBC trained teachers there are good results. My own grand son of grade 4 has transferred his school CBC knowledge, skills and attitudes home and is running a home project on rabbits which produce urine which he uses in his other project, kitchen garden, irrigated by kitchen waste water which we are harvesting for him. This is a kid who is therefore developing a blue collar attitude that will be handy should he not get a white collar job opening. You can capture him on my tiktok and you tube channels.
Are we at the Kenyan universities well prepared to absorb the CBC graduates? I see some key challenges
- At the university we currently focus on helping students expand their knowledge and skills; express their thoughts orally and in writing; understand abstract concepts and theories and improve their understanding of the world and their community
- To achieve the said goals universities have employed, in the main, lecturers who are guided by the CUE regulations to give lectures in lecture halls using, in the main, the didactic method which is a teaching method that focuses on the teacher and the information the teacher imparts implying that the teacher knows it all.
- A lecturer is an academic who, in the main, delivers lectures with a lecture being an academic talk containing (verbal) information with little or no participation from the students. It’s an approach where the teacher gives instructions to students who are mostly passive listeners.
- Being teacher-centered university lectures emphasize what students should Know (cognitive learning aspects) more than what they should do (psychomotor learning aspects). The students are assessed through sit-in written examinations by how much they know (or remember what they heard in the lecture hall).
- The consequence has been the university churning out graduates devoid of blue-collar job attitudes hence they keep looking for elusive wage employment opportunities even in the face of unsaturated self-employment opportunities.
I am convinced that the current approach to learning at the university is deficient in matters of adequately absorbing the incoming CBC graduates. The irreducible minimum of what must be done to create a seamless transition from secondary to university education in my opinion is:
- Universities working together with the Universities’ Academic Staff Union (UASU) have no option but to retool their staff
- The government having introduced CBC must fund the universities to transit from the old to the new to avoid pouring new wine in old wineskins
- The Commission for University Education (CUE) must review its regulations and guidelines to help universities transit from the old to the new. For example, insisting on assessment of students via sit-in written examinations on 70% pass to earn an A will continue to produce thinkers more than doers; job seekers more than job creators.
Prof. Henry M. Bwisa