Let’s embrace standard-based curriculum for creativity - Lecturer
A senior lecturer at the Department of Education and Psychology at the University of Cape Coast, Dr Kenneth Asamoah Gyimah, has said the country must embrace a standard-based curriculum that will enable students to move away from the “chew and pour” way of learning and develop their creativity.
Dr Gyimah said the country should completely do away with the use of an assessment-based curriculum, which focused on high stake examination that made students only memorise what they had been taught just for the sake of passing their examinations.
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“With the standard-based curriculum, whatever everybody gets, he or she can get something to do with it. In that case, the emphasis will not be on chewing, pouring, and passing the exam but will be on the individual's ability to do individual’s own performance.
“So, we should strive best to achieve this standard-based performance so that we will not over-rely on assessment, but be looking at individual capabilities and what he or she can do”, he said.
Dr Gyimah was speaking at the Armstrong and Amissah Memorial lecture of Wesley College of Education (WESCO) centenary anniversary in Accra on the theme: “Shaping Ghana’s educational transformation,” as part of activities earmarked for the celebration of the centenary anniversary of the Wesley College of Education in Kumasi.
The senior lecturer noted that with the standard-based curriculum if a student completed the junior or senior high school, he or she could develop his skills or creativity for a future career even though he or she did not pass well in the examination.
He acknowledged that the new educational reforms introduced by the Ghana Education Service (GES) had been designed to develop human capacity through skills and, therefore, must be embraced by all especially teachers to develop more skills for the nation’s development.
Research Tools
Talking about the importance of mobile phones to learning, Dr Gyimah said there should not be a total ban on mobile phone usage in schools.
Mobile phones and computers, he said, were communication and research tools needed in reforming education and so depriving students their usage in school only denied them the opportunity to compete with their peers globally.
He said in foreign countries, students of were allowed to have access to their mobile phones and that helped them to do research that aided their learning.
The lecturer, however, said the usage of the phones should be under the guidance of teachers to ensure that the students used them for academic purposes.
Dr Gyimah, therefore, called on the GES to reconsider the policy of not allowing the use of mobile phones and other gadgets in senior high schools as part of its educational reforms.
Contribution of College
The Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of Ghana and a past student, Most Rev. Paul K. Boafo, said the Wesley College of Education over the years had contributed immensely to the educational sector of the country by building its human resource capacity.
A senior lecturer at the Centre for Social Policy Studies at the University of Ghana, Dr George Domfe, said the college was a force to reckon with in the education sector and had proudly produced trained teachers over the past 100 years.