Sunday December 20, 2009

Bringing change to curriculum

By DR THEVA NITHY

A FEW weeks ago, the dean of my school wrote on 1Session in 1School for 1Malaysia. Today’s article is about the foundation of the school system – The curriculum.

Malaysia stands at the brink of a decision.Choose to acknowledge that new economies and market places, technology and knowledge through the Internet are bringing about a rare but total reversal and transformation in the landscape of education; or choose to pretend that change is not occurring.

Either way, there is a choice and a decision to be made. The right choice will help Malaysia make a real change in her curriculum. The wrong one will cause outside forces to compel Malaysia to change, and when people are neither ready nor willing to change, then change becomes catastrophic — instead of purposeful and meaningful.

The stark reality is that countries as a whole will find it difficult to initiate this change process, so the initiators of this transformation process must be communities of concerned stakeholders and experts funded by private industry and citizens, or by educational organisations with the will, commitment and tenacity, and driven by missions, philosophies and visions founded on the reality of what the future holds.

We at the USM School of Educational Studies obviously believe in the latter, and have taken on the task to ensure the sustainability of Malaysia and her people.

Systems of Education

Education systems first evolved when man discovered that there were interesting details about our world that needed discussing and passing on; and along came books that were expensive, beyond the reach of the common man and represented an inefficient way to transmit knowledge beyond the realms of purely factual presentations.

Hence the creation of lecture-centred classrooms, from the Latin “lectus” — to read. Today, that is what education has come to mean — reading from books TO and AT students in pedagogic and andragogic styles that make no sense in a world that is shifting to learner-centric systems.

The industrial revolution that enabled education to come within the grasp of society at large also shaped and evolved the present education system that we have come to know.

It had meaning and purpose in yesterday’s societies, but is, or perhaps a better word is should, not be applicable in today’s societies; due to the breakneck speed of the evolution in technology. This evolution catalysed the current education revolution, and largely delivered to the public by the Internet.

The Internet has enabled educators to focus on learners who independently create their own learning pathways, and in ways that cater to their different multiple intelligences.

The Internet has also created the peculiar situation where vast amounts of consistent, differentiated and reliable knowledge are available about minute topics, thus creating the need for the development of new skills and talents in purely asking the right questions and choosing relevant information, in an environment that is breaking new ground and reaching new heights.

How has this education revolution impacted the real world?

It has not, and even if it has, it has only done so in largely insignificant volumes.

New demands

Private organisations and many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs or better known by its Malay acronym IPT for Institut Pengajian Tinggi) have only just started responding to the new demands in transformed societies with new, inclusive ways of thinking, but the number of governments that have started responding to this is negligible, if not zero.

Thus, National Curriculums have been left behind, and the gap between public schooling systems and the demands of new market economies and industries, and somewhat transformed IPT are widening rapidly.

Students are graduating from public secondary schools and pre-university courses and finding that their talents and skills are unsuited and even irrelevant to the demands of the IPT, industry and economies.

How must a national curricular transformation start?

It must be based on an idealistic, comprehensive theoretical construction that takes into account every aspect of ideal curricular guides - content, instructional strategies in pedagogy, andragogy, evaluation tools and transformations in learning spaces.

Any other approach would result in a simplistic process that would never realise the full extent of any transformational process.

It should be clearly understood that a curricular transformation is dealing with curriculum, an entity that represents the means and the ends to a system that is the great enabler of a country’s greatest resource – its people.

It must address the philosophical beliefs of its people and their values, expectations, epistemology and humanity. These not only determine the content of any curriculum, but will also determine how that curriculum is delivered and assessed and how the transformational implementation programme will be carried out.

New initiative

The faculty of the School of Educational Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia has embarked on an initiative to provide a solution to bridge the gap between the demands of HEIs and the capabilities of the students coming out of our national schooling system.

This process hopes to provide a platform for all experts and stakeholders to mobilise and self-organise into expert groups that will provide input into this project to develop a framework for national curricular transformations that will be representative of the needs of Malaysia’s communities and government.

To begin the process, we have tried to make sense of the problems confronting the our students, the products of our schooling system. They are:

·Schooling systems and curriculum are the foundation of bridging tolerance and unity among communities with different cultures, races, religions and languages. In Malaysia, our schooling system serves to drive and plant the wedge among these communities.

·Students are still being taught by teachers in teacher-centred classrooms instead of learners being developed by talent facilitators in learner-centred learning spaces.

·Our teachers and lecturers are trained to deliver content and knowledge rather than develop talents and skills in enquiry and thinking, research, problem-solving, content analysis and to make relevant and correct choices when dealing with overwhelming knowledge and information.

·Our curriculum does not give meaning and purpose to our students’ lives and so does not provide spiritual, moral and ethical directions in their lives — on a globally relevant future platform.

·Students are not articulate, independent nor committed to life-long learning.

·Students are not motivated to assume greater responsibility in managing and directing their own learning.

·Students are not prepared to meet the severe challenges of global and environmental transformations to create a sustainable future.

·Students play at follow the leader and have no concept of disruptive thinking and calculated, planned risk-taking to affect transformation and to attain self-constructed ambitions.

·Our education system is designed to provide workers for an outmoded market economy and industry which will not be relevant to future industries and careers.

In my next article, I will present a proposal for a new education model where technology and higher levels of awareness and demands by stakeholders of education systems are creating new pressures that the Education and Higher Education Ministry must be held accountable for.

> Dr. Theva is a senior lecturer at The School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia. He is currently working with his colleagues on a proposal to transform the landscape of Malaysian Schooling and Higher Education Systems.

He can be contacted at
theva@usm.my

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