2.3 Content

This is based on the subjects taught in the primary schools, plus ‘Foundation Studies’. The table below sets out the number of units devoted to each subject, both in the college and school-based parts of the course, which gives a broad picture of the balance of the curriculum. It also shows that the proportion of time allocated at college closely matches the overall proportions, except that Teaching Practice is included, taking up one morning a week

Table 2.1: Organisation of content

It can be seen from this that the emphasis is on subject-related studies, and is confined to those that the trainees will have to teach, with professional studies taking up only one-sixth of the time. Teaching methods, however, form part of the subject-studies. There is no general or personal education, not even communication or study skills, although the trainees enter with relatively low school-leaving qualifications.

The curriculum content is strongly compartmentalised into subjects; there are few common themes. The topics mentioned in the objectives, such as gender, population, HIV/Aids, democracy and human rights - are tucked away in separate units in Foundations, Science or Social Studies, and do not seem to permeate the course more generally.

Looking at the kinds of knowledge presented, considerable differences are found between subjects. The English and Maths units, for example, focus largely on curriculum and pedagogic content knowledge, and the English course is explicitly aimed at skills development, while the Science course consists almost exclusively of subject content knowledge, with minimal attention to pedagogic knowledge or skills. The Foundations course covers, rather briefly, general pedagogic knowledge and skills, knowledge of learners, of educational contexts and of educational aims and values, in that order of priority as measured by unit time. (This analysis is based on Shulman’s work; see Appendix 3).

The following section gives some details of the topics covered in these four subjects. The prominence given to behavioural objectives shows clearly the underlying assumptions about learning on which the course is based.

2.3.1 English

The course begins with five units on curriculum and general pedagogic knowledge (GPK); this includes how to write lesson plans, schemes of work and records for English lessons. The rest of the units during the college period are all focused on how to teach aspects of the primary school curriculum, including identifying pupil errors, testing, and remedial work. The only exceptions to this pattern are three units on ‘phonology and phonetics’, and three more, in Book 3, on English for Study and for Professional Purposes. These are the only units aimed at improving the students’ own language competence.

The school-based units recapitulate and expand on selected topics from the college course, focusing directly on how one can use these in one’s class. For example, ‘oral communicative language teaching techniques’ are explained again, and the student is given detailed examples of how to carry these out with the pupils. The Zonal seminars cover: making visual aids, songs and rhymes, pre-reading activities and ‘wide reading’.

The specific unit objectives are almost all phrased in practical terms, stating what the students will be able to do, such as:

- teach pre-reading activities
- use dialogues/pair work/ role play etc. for language practice
- make and use phonic charts for teaching reading
- construct different types of comprehension questions
- identify errors in pupils’ written work

2.3.2 Maths

Almost all the maths units concentrate on pedagogic content knowledge (PCK), here set out as how to teach the primary maths syllabus; the one exception is a unit on the history of numbers! There are no units on lesson planning or scheming; the zonal seminars are devoted to teaching and learning aids which can be bought or made. As in English, most of the school-based units are expansions of selected topics already covered, but here new concepts are introduced, using formal language; there seems to be much emphasis on definitions and terminology that the teacher should know, and less on how to make things simple for pupils. There is nothing on the theory of ‘maths education’.

Almost all the unit objectives in the college period are phrased in terms of what the student will know and be able to teach e.g.

- define subtraction; teach subtraction of numbers with regrouping.
- define cash account; teach how to enter transactions and balance the account
- define and classify geometric shapes; teach modelling, naming and drawing geometric shapes.

In the self-study units, the objectives are phrased as: ‘able to teach X....’

2.3.3 Science

The first 9 science units look at curriculum and general pedagogic knowledge in the context of teaching science; they review lesson planning and scheming, but also discuss the teaching of scientific skills and attitudes, with use of equipment and resources, and with safety measures. The rest of the units, by contrast to the other main subjects, focus entirely on content knowledge; physics and chemistry during the college period; biology and health education during the school-based period. While the science is clearly intended to be taught at college in practical ways that student teachers could later use in primary schools (if they had the resources) there are no units on aspects of science education such as children’s misconceptions in science or the development of scientific concepts.

The first 9 units combine cognitive objectives with practical ones, so that as well as stating and explaining the students are expected to do something e.g. write a lesson plan, construct a nature table, improvise some apparatus. In the rest of the units, the objectives are all variations on the themes of:

explain meanings, applications of....
state examples, factors, uses....
perform activities, on air pressure, on what forces can do.....

2.3.4 Foundations Studies

The first part of the residential course is mainly concerned with general pedagogic knowledge (GPK), comprising the technical professional skills of writing lesson plans, formulating objectives, drawing up schemes of work and keeping records, as well as introductions to different kinds of teaching methods and how to improvise and use various kinds of teaching/learning aids.

The second part focuses on knowledge of learners - child development and theories of learning - combined in some units with more GPK, for example how to handle children with different learning abilities. Then there are four units on testing.

Books 4 and 5 are more school related, focusing on more practical concerns, such as management and administration of schools, keeping records, school and community relationships, professional ethics and conditions of service. Other units look at general pedagogic knowledge, mainly classroom management skills. Information about the classroom tends to be stronger on rhetoric than on reality i.e. saying what should happen in good practice, rather than focusing on problems and how to deal with them. There are no suggestions for carrying out enquiry-based work into one’s own classroom.

The zonal seminars deal with administering tests, working with colleagues and policy matters; the last two take up the issues of gender and population and environment, in an apparent nod towards the general objectives.

The specific objectives for each unit are typically phrased to emphasise theoretical rather than practical knowledge, even when skills are involved e.g. in studying learners, students shall be able to:

Only in the unit on resources are they asked actually to make things. Even the units on tests are phrased as: explain/describe the types, purposes, advantages, ways of constructing tests - rather than designing exemplars. Such objectives can all be achieved, on a formal level, through learning by rote the information given in the text. The relationship between theory and practice seems rather tenuous; it is left to the students to bring the two together.

Another issue is the relevance of the some of the theories to the local cultural context. Much of the material is drawn from western books on child psychology and presented as universal truth. In the lessons we saw, there were no attempts to relate these theories to Malawian children generally, nor to the student teachers’ own experience either at home or in school. No African research on child development was quoted. (See Foundation lessons in Chapter 3). Both tutors and students accepted the ideas uncritically. It was as though there were two parallel discourses, one developed explicitly in college, and the other, known tacitly but only articulated perhaps elsewhere if at all, concerned with the students’ own experiences as learner and teacher. The two discourses were kept quite separate.

2.3.5 Some general comments on content

In all subjects we found that all tutors stayed very close to the Handbooks, using each ‘unit’ as a ‘lesson plan’. Few introduced any ideas, examples, or activities beyond what was given there: a science teacher demonstrated an extra experiment; an English teacher crammed in a ten-minute lecture on teaching spelling through dictation.

The tutors interviewed did not express strong views on the content, which was by and large simply a condensed version of what they had been teaching before; one said it was shallow, and some regretted that important topics had been left out. Most students thought that all the topics were important, often singling out Foundation Studies and methods as particularly useful.

However, everyone said, and it was clear to us as observers, that the time allocated in this three-month residential course was not adequate to cover all the material. Lessons were time-tabled for one hour, occasionally two in some practical subjects, but many of the units contained too much material for this time. In addition, in some cases tutors were absent attending meetings or workshops which contributed to the shortage of time. Some tutors arranged to teach during the evenings or weekends to make up for the lost time. This shortage of time contributed to the mode of delivery; the tutors felt they had to teach everything in the books in the short time available, and therefore they found themselves rushing through the material.