The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly caused a great deal of fear, panic, and hardships of unprecedented proportion worldwide.
It has rocked age-old foundations, beliefs, families, relationships, institutions, countries, economies, and many more.
Like all other sectors, the education sector has not been spared of severe implications on teaching and learning, the mental health of students and staff, distorted academic calendar, and many more.
As undesirable as the implications of COVID-19 are, the pandemic also presents hitherto invaluable opportunities to improve teaching and learning in our education system in Ghana.
The pandemic has had numerous implications on the entire spectrum of our education system, and it is impossible to touch on all of these aspects in this single piece. Accordingly, this news piece explores some of the unique opportunities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to re-examine and re-imagine teaching and learning in our education system in Ghana.
It is not a scrutiny of our education system, but a beginning of a larger conversation towards reimagining and re-calibrating teaching and learning in the country.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, education authorities have widely recommended ‘building back better’, and to address core questions in relation to ‘what should be kept’, ‘what should be cut’, and ‘what could now be created’. It is this authors’ viewpoint that the opportunities to strategically and tactically address these challenges are quickly slipping by in Ghana. I focus on some pressing pointers on teaching and learning in Ghana, which need careful consideration given the opportunities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Focus on education, not schooling: the COVID-19 pandemic defied much widely held knowledge as health specialists, governments, economists struggled to provide coping and mitigation measures to minimize its overwhelming impacts.
- In the case of the education sector, authorities struggled to deliver teaching and learning under new restrictive conditions. This is partly because our system of skills development has mostly taken on a schooling perspective instead of an educational viewpoint.
- According to the Psychologist, Peter Gray, schooling is the deliberate use of special procedures to teach a specific preselected set of skills, concepts, beliefs, lore, values (a curriculum) to students. Whereas education is the entire set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires any or all of the skills, concepts, beliefs, lore, and values of the previous generation.
- Thus, schooling is restrictive to targeted skill sets but education is flexible, and evolutionary towards building the capacity of learners to adapt to new conditions. In building back better, we need to cut the schooling perspective, while creating and reimagining teaching and learning to be education-focused with critical elements such as play, flexibility, learner responsibility, self-direction, and self-exploration.
- Learner independence: this should be the ultimate aim of our teaching and learning efforts. In some cases, this will mean doing less teaching, less school time, less instruction while creating the environment for more playtime, self-exploration, and active engagement.
- It has been widely reported that independent learners have found ways to sustain their learning during the COVID-19 pandemic than those who were dependent learners. Most traditional teachers are inclined to create more courses to teach and get students to spend lots of time in the classroom and under their supervision.
- But this approach is the schooling viewpoint and impedes learner independence and creativity. Just as kids choose the plays they engage in, learners must be free to choose the skills they want to develop and the pathways to gain those skills.
- In Ghana, our education system especially for children is like a full-time job: full-day at school, and even at home there is school homework. Worse of all is that the majority of the school time is spent in the classroom under a teacher’s supervision, where there is limited playtime and self-exploration.
- Even the higher education system in Ghana burdens students with too many courses, where lecturers feel they have the knowledge to impart and do all the talking. This approach discourages playtime, self-exploration and endangers creativity and learner independence. In building back better, we need to cut school time, cut the number of courses, cut teacher-centered classrooms, while reimagining approaches to empower learners to become more independent and responsible for their learning.
- In-person (or playtime) contact is golden: during the COVID-19 pandemic, the in-person meeting time was highly restricted. Online video platforms were used as a substitute for in-person contact, but most people agree that it was never the same. In the education sector, any in-person contact especially between a teacher and learner(s) was highly valued. That is, in-person contact is golden, or put in another way, playtime is unrivaled.
- The pandemic has re-emphasized that in-person contact meeting is indispensable in our teaching and learning efforts. Yet in our traditional classroom settings, the teacher takes center-stage during this invaluable time, which is a wrong approach. The in-person contact meeting should be learner-centered, playtime, self-exploration, active engagement, and time for feedback.
- This is natural for kids because they are inclined to play with each other during in-person meetings. In building back better, we need to re-imagine in-person contact time to be learner-centered towards addressing their concerns on their learning journey.
- Out-of-classroom learning: this idea focuses on preparing learners adequately for out-of-classroom activities, which has been recognized before but it took center-stage during the pandemic. Typically, out-of-classroom activities were used to assign poorly thought-out homework.
- Thankfully, the pandemic has given new meaning to out-of-classroom learning activities, requiring instructors to adequately plan for it with targeted learning outcomes. There are now learning approaches dedicated to ensuring that instructors do all their talking out-of-classroom, so that in-person contact meetings are learner-led or learner-centered. In building back better, we need to keep out-of-classroom learning activities and re-imagine them to better enhance learner independence and self-exploration.
- Unequal access to learning resources: the COVID-19 pandemic heightened societal inequalities with glaring implications on teaching and learning, where some populations have unrestricted access to learning resources and others have limited access.
- Today, learning is resource-intensive and those with limited access may lack the opportunity to develop certain skill sets. While it is difficult to provide a variety of resources at the individual or household level, some common learning resources can be provided at the community or district level. Imagine the benefit of a district-level learning center where resources from all higher education institutions can be accessed?
- Alternatively, imagine all the Universities leveraging their resources to develop learning centers at the various districts or municipalities? This way, learners should be able to access learning resources from any University in the country at the district or municipal level, an approach that will greatly improve access to learning resources.
- Consideration of access should include the learning space and environment that is well equipped with ICT infrastructure, making them safe, inclusive, and welcoming. In building back better, we need to keep and create new distributed learning and mobile learning infrastructure and re-imagine them to be inclusive and improve access for all persons.
- Technology: the role of technology cannot be over-emphasized as it played a critical part by minimizing the damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology is already being used in education, however it took a prime focus during the pandemic. Yet, technology can be further re-imagined in pushing the frontiers of teaching and learning to address issues such as equity, unequal access, play, self-exploration, mobile learning, learner independence, and many more. In building back better, we need to keep technology in education but it needs adequate investment, and re-calibration to facilitate learner exploration, independence, equity and equal access.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a great chance to re-imagine and re-calibrate our teaching and learning in the country with critical consideration to the above pointers by all stakeholders, particularly education authorities, teachers, learners, parents/guardians, government, industry, and civil society groups.
These aspirations will not happen by chance, they need deliberate efforts and the creation of the right environments to foster and boost their realization. Thus, more is anticipated from education authorities in seeking diverse and well-tested viewpoints towards creating an education system which works for all persons.
Gift Dumedah is a senior lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
Source: Ghana News
