Outcomes of the African Harmonisation of Higher Education and the Tuning Africa

Pilot ProjectLibreville 2013

The Tuning Project: A global movement

‘The Tuning Project’ has become an international movement that is currently spreading across the globe.

The Tuning experience was exclusively European and came as a response to the challenge set out in the Bologna Declaration of 1999, involving 175 universities

Spread of the Tuning Movement

From 2004, the Tuning ‘movement’ gradually spread to other areas, including Latin America, North America, Russia, Australia, Africa and China. Tuning’ as a process is about seeking points of agreement, convergence and mutual understanding in order to facilitate an understanding of educational structures/programmes

Why the movement spread/Reasons for Tuning?

In Latin America reasons include ‘compatibility, comparability and competitiveness’For Australia: It was to meet the undertaking of the EU-Australia Partnership Framework to “jointly develop a Tuning Australia pilot project to define the learning outcomes representative of higher education degrees in specific disciplines across different degree levels”.

For North America

The North American implementation of the Tuning Project within History as a subject area has led to more recent criticism of and questions on the tuning methodology.

The criticisms from the American Project

• A useless assessment project• (with) standardized curriculum and tests• Allow(s) business interests to define academic

goals• Allow(s) foundations to determine academic

agenda• Reduce(s) intellectual development to

utilitarian issues of employability

Criticisms and Questions

The criticisms and questions expose the contradictions embedded within the tuning methodology and what it can enable:

eliticism on the one hand, and mediocrity on the other as it seeks to

create a comparable system

The Student Success Movement

The role of Foundations like Lumina do not make the contradictions less in that besides Lumina’s own declaration of their ‘Big goal’: that by the year 2025, they want ‘60 percent of the American population to hold high-quality college degrees or credentials’- they are dubbed the ‘mafia’ of the student success movement by IHE

For Africa?

In Africa Tuning was adopted as a methodology to facilitate the implementation of a number of key plans and strategies and these include the AUC’s (African Union Commission) Plan of Action for the Second Decade of Education for Africa and the strategy for harmonisation of Higher Education Programmes.

For mobility of Africans across Africa

Hoosen, Butcher & Njenga, (2009) indicate that the harmonization strategy was developed in order to foster cooperation in information exchange, harmonization of procedures and policies, and attainment of comparability of qualifications, in order to facilitate mobility of Africans across African countries for employment and further study

… ensuring that the quality of higher education

The specific purpose of harmonization is to establish harmonized higher education systems across Africa, while strengthening the capacity of higher education institutions to meet the many tertiary educational needs of African countries through innovative forms of collaboration and ensuring that the quality of higher education is systematically improved against common, agreed benchmarks of excellence.

The Chronology of events in the African Tuning Movement

Feasibility Study on the Relevance of a Tuning Approach in Higher Education for Africa

Validation of the Feasibility Study at a workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, 2011 and call for participation

Dakar, Cameroon, Cape Town, Brussels and Kenya project meetings: call for participation…

A report will be released soon

The African Tuning Project

Academics representing 60 universities across the African continent and across five subject areas produced a list of what they considered to be generic competences of the ideal African graduate, and lists of competences specific to the subject areas. Following after the methodology of tuning, surveys with employers, graduates, academics and students were administered as a way of validating the identified lists of competences, the generic and the subject specific.

For Teacher EducationFrom the Cameroon discussions: The teacher as an

agent of change for:

o Social and economic development and growth and for

o Conflict resolution and reconciliation for sustainable and peaceful living environments

Sustainable and peaceful living environments?

The leatherback sea turtle, sometimes called the lute turtle, is the largest of all living turtles and is the fourth largest modern reptile behind three crocodilians. It is the only living species in the genus Dermochelys. Wikipedia

From the Cape Town discussionsThe meta-profile of the teacher education degree should be viewed as a Venn diagram- the integrated nature of the curriculumFour Areas of Teacher Education1. Context (regulatory, geographic, socio-economic …)2. (Theoretical) Knowledge/Understanding & Practice3. Interpersonal Skills4. Values & Ethics………………………………………………………………………………….The meta-profile evolved out of the generic and specific competences, and validated through the surveys

A meta-profile within the Tuning Methodology

González (2012) defines a meta-profile as ‘a group´s representation of the structure and combination of competences which gives identity to a thematic area.’ She further states that meta-profiles ‘are referential elements and they are always mental constructions, destined to reflect and analyse possible classifications behind the reference points.’

Context

Values& Ethics

Inter-personal Skills

Knowledge, understanding & Practice

The African Teacher Education Meta-Profile

New G1; New G2; 13G;14G; 9G

4S; 5S

2G

8G;28G

18G; 27S;17G; 26G; 24G; 13G12S;17S; 16S; 15S; 21S;1G; 1S; 7/8S; 2S; 3S; 9/10S;4G; 6S; 5G; 19/20S; 16G; 6G;18S; 7G; 11G

29G; 30S;31S; 3G; 7G; 12G; 10G

CONTEXT

INTERPERSONALSKILLS

VALUES& ETHICS

KNOWLEDGE,UNDERSTANDING& PRACTICE

Teacher Education Tuning Outcomes

This view of the meta-profile presupposes specific pedagogies in the teacher education curriculum delivery, informed by an integrated approach. It begs the question, what frameworks and methodologies will be able to deliver on these competencies? It demonstrates the ‘layered’ nature of quality issues in education, and creates a strong link between the ‘what’ to teach and learn with the ‘how' part of it.

Comparisons across the World

AfricaContext Knowledge/Understanding& Practice Interpersonal SkillsValues & Ethics

Latin America Professional Academic Social

Russia Ability to learn Ability to work Ability to interact with others Ability to live in harmony with oneself

Similarities & Differences

Similarities Emphasis on knowledge, including

pedagogical knowledge Interpersonal skills & interaction

Differences The social role of a teacher: a common feature in LA & Africa;the teacher as an agent of Change Central role of values and ethics Africa: sustainable & peaceful environments

In Africa and LA there is a strong emphasis on values and the Social and ethical role of the teacher, from Russia there was an emphasis on what is measurable…‘instrumental?’

Mega/meta-meta profile?

1. (Cognitive) Knowledge: Subject + Pedagogical knowledge2. Interpersonal Skills3. Ability to learn + 4. Life Long Learning5. Role of the teacher in society/Teacher as an Agent of Change/Values and ethics

? How to teach and assess values and ethics. Do good practices exist?

Criticisms within Africa

‘… their implementation does not adequately involve higher education and quality assurance stakeholders’ (Shabani, 2013): A valuable criticism in the sense that it does not only raise questions in terms of how stakeholder participation is organised when initiatives that involve the quality of academic programmes are implemented (and who should participate), it also revisits the tension between quality enhancement and quality assurance.

The Eco-systems of Qualityin Higher Education

Following developments and arguments in the European Quality Systems in HE (Kehm (2010) some form of evolution, shifts and contradictions around the various notions of quality in higher education are exposed. A useful perspective emerge: The Tuning project should be seen as part of the quality eco-system within higher education .It has brought a ‘further quality-enhancement effort’ into the notion of quality, where quality is viewed ‘as the development of comparable criteria and assessment methodologies for collegiate learning’ … quality ‘at the classroom level’.

The different layers?

How does one successfully traverse the many layers, from the exo to the macro, the meso and the micro levels and successfully weave in all the intended quality principles (as far as curriculum development is concerned)?, … which curriculum script prevails; will it be the intended, the planned, the taught, the learned or the assessed? (Madiba 2010)

The Ecosystem Approach to Quality in Higher Education

Ecosystems are defined by the network of interactions that occur within them. The study of ecosystems (a biological perspective) mainly consists of the study of certain processes that link the living, or biotic components to the non-living, or abiotic components. An ecosystem quality perspective: creating the links and interactions, and making them (a)live

The Quality Ecologists in HE

There is then a need for Quality Ecologists to study the existence (and non-existence) and the quality of the links and interactions within the African Higher Education Quality Ecosystem.Quality Ecologists must serve as strategists for continuous improvement of higher education in Africa, to bring together efforts in quality assurance, promotion, enhancement, accreditation, ranking, etc. to make continuous improvement an achievable ideal