Quality Assurance Directorate Engages Writers of the Teacher Education Reform
The Director of Quality Assurance, Prof. Emmanuel Obed Acquah, has held a meeting with the writers of the Teacher Education Reform from the University of Education, Winneba (UEW), to dialogue on how best to improve academic programmes of UEW to suit contemporary trends.
The meeting, which took place at the School of Creative Arts Conference Room, Central Campus, Winneba, was attended by the main writers of the new four-year Bachelor of Education Curriculum and key implementing stakeholders in the University.
Prof. Acquah indicated that UEW, as the leading Teacher Education institution in Ghana and the West African sub-region, has a great responsibility to ensuring that it remains the leading light in all educational reforms.
“You’ll agree with me that you are the people at the helm of affairs as far as the Teacher Education Reform Curriculum is concerned and now, they are talking about T-SHEL. I am so happy that the key people who were at the helm of affairs from the genesis of this whole framework and then the design of standards are all here with us.
“I discussed with the Vice-Chancellor so that this meeting could come on, for us to think about how best your experiences in the Teacher Education Reform Curriculum will inform us, as a University, to see how best our academic programmes can either be designed or redesigned to fit into where we find ourselves now,” he stated.
The Leader of the Curriculum Framework and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Studies Education, Dr. Eric Ananga, who gave an overview of the genesis and journey through the curriculum framework, pointed out that with regards to the Teacher Education Reform, they pioneered most of the work and are still making progress.
“The work that we did on the Teacher Education Reform for Mort McDonald, won us an award. Mort McDonald then suggested that, if we’d achieved success in a sustainable way which they had not seen in any developing country, we could put yourselves together as a team to move this forward?
“So, we put together the Ghana T-TEL and so the T-TEL now is Transforming Teaching, Learning and Education. This is where it’s exciting for us. Apart from UEW, no other University is fully education-based like we are. It’s both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that we have a big hold on the terrain of education and teacher preparation from kindergarten (KG) to University but the curse, on the other hand, is that we have to look at restructuring ourselves internally.
“For example, we have basic education and early childhood departments preparing for KG to Junior High School three (JHS 3). Now, there’re other departments in the University; Science, Mathematics, Home Economics, English, HPERS among others also preparing teachers.
“Some of those departments like Science, are preparing secondary school teachers and so, we need to sit down and see how we can start preparing to reform our curriculum for training teachers but it isn’t something we should also rush because the common core curriculum is written for four years of JHS. However, JHS is three years. So, the one-year Senior High School (SHS) common curriculum is tied to the JHS curriculum and then the two years SHS curriculum is not yet written. Now, we need to work in a tangle to see that while the playground work is being done, we are also developing ours,” he averred.
Among the Curriculum Framework writers present were the Dean, School of Graduate Studies, Prof. George Kankam; Dean, Faculty of Science Education, Prof. Ruby Hanson; Dean, Faculty of Ghanaian Languages Education, Prof. Charles Owu-Ewie; and Prof. Damian Kofi Mereku, Department of Mathematics.
