From the past 10 decades, most fields have really transformed and
embraced technology so much. If you compare a car made in the 20s and a modern
car, it is clearly evident how fast things have changed. Looking at the
medicine field, there has been a big revolution for the better. The change is
similar into the electronic, aviation as well as many other sectors that
contribute hugely into global economy. Sadly, unlike many fields, it has
been noted by scholars that education remains largely unchanged even with all
the technology advancement and the ever-evolving problems in the world that
need a different approach to solve them.
I have been a victim of the 8-4-4 system of education in Kenya,
which is simply a system that has made most of us believe passing exams is the
key to success in life. This is not the case in 21st century. This
system rarely encouraged innovative ways of solving problems. It makes students
become so self-centred because they want to beat everyone else in class. This
discourages greatly collaborative learning between the students and everyone is
actually fine with it because the bright ones have their way always to beat
everyone else. This has led to lots of half baked graduates who get a big shock
when they realise they learnt very little from their well passed exams that
would help them to deal with realistic and real-life problems. These graduates
are actually not very useful in solving the society problems because they don’t
have the appropriate skills.
My favourite example is a case where in 2015 we ran a survey at
AIMS (African Institute of Mathematical Sciences) Tanzania, which is one of the
six pan African network of centres of excellence that offer an intensive
Masters in Mathematical Sciences. We administered the survey to 54 very bright
students from 16 different African countries who were admitted to pursue the
Mathematical Science masters with majority having had statistics courses. You
would expect that statistics students would have interacted with data and at
least a statistical analysis software but to our surprise, more than half had
not dealt with data, not even on an spreadsheet. How would these people carry
out quality research to solve the current problems? This actually showed that
the problem of poor learning methods and education is everywhere. The
education needs to be transformed.
Since time immemorial, teaching and learning is usually in a
class, with a teacher impacting knowledge to students. This has been the case
for so long. It needs to change. This mode of teaching and learning is
ineffective in impacting students with the skills in the 21st
century. Looking at our current problems, learning should be a team effort not
just the teacher teaching and the students wanting to outshine others. From my
experience, I have found that collaborative learning is the most effective way
of learning.
I have been involved with projects that work directly with
students across all levels since 2014 and it has been great learning experience
for me in understanding how learning should be. These include the
CS4HS(Computer Science 4 Highs School program)in 2014,Intel trainings and
Google training for students. I have also been involved in outreach activities
and recently the Africa Code week. In addition, I have also worked as a
volunteer in two annual maths camps that have organised by African Maths
initiative. All these used the unconventional teaching methods and
concentrated more on teaching methods like involving the students by using
games physical activities and real-life problems. Among
the skills that I strongly believe students need to acquire after this
experience are creativity, problem solving skills, collaboration, proper
communication skills, digital literacy and critical thinking. It’s not clear
how well these are taught in schools.
I strongly believe that, the people who understand this need
should be in the front line advocating for a better-quality and transformative
education and learning processes to make sure the education systems produce
able and sufficiently skilled professionals and leaders for this century.
