Leading change
Focus on improving and innovating in curriculum development
Prof Elize du Plessis of Curriculum & Instructional Studies was invited recently with other curriculum experts to take part in the Consumer Guard talk show on the African News Network Channel.
The discussion was about the standard of schooling, private versus public education in South Africa, the accessibility thereof, and curriculum development.
Du Plessis indicated that curriculum development should focus on improvement and innovation in education. She sees curriculum development as a cyclical process of situation analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation to achieve concrete results in practice, and these processes take place interactively.
She thinks for us in South Africa it is important if we can design a holistic, Afrocentric curriculum within diverse learning environments—whether these were derived from traditional African or Western cultures. In other words, the curriculum should be collectively created.
She also spoke about Unisa’s role in teacher training and its collaboration with the Department of Basic Education: “Higher Education in South Africa faces a number of challenges. Unisa trains 52% of our country’s teachers and we have to work in collaboration with the Department of Basic Education. We develop our teaching programmes in line with the minimum requirements for teacher education qualifications policy, or better known as the MRTEQ document. We also make use of a framework for a team approach towards curriculum and learning development where we involve different stakeholders, like teachers and students.”
*By Elize du Plessis and Dineo Horner
Publish date: 2017-08-23 00:00:00.0
Mental health among men in the workplace needs more attention
"I owe everything to Unisa and my late supervisor's priceless mentoring"
Majikijela - a queer scholar raising homosexuality awareness through his work
Unisa and Inqaba Biotec unveil groundbreaking DNA research platform
College of Law appoints esteemed scholar as executive dean