Libreville 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 ID: 501662
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Slide1
Outcomes of the African Harmonisation of Higher Education and the Tuning Africa Pilot Project
Libreville 2013Slide2
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 Slide3
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/programmesSlide4Slide5
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
”. Slide6
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.Slide7
The criticisms from the American Project
A useless assessment project(with) standardized curriculum and tests
Allow(s) business interests to define academic goalsAllow(s) foundations to determine academic agendaReduce(s) intellectual development to utilitarian issues of employabilitySlide8
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 Slide9
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 IHESlide10
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.Slide11
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 studySlide12
… 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.Slide13
The Chronology of events in the African Tuning Movement
Feasibility
Study on the Relevance of a Tuning Approach in Higher Education for AfricaValidation of the Feasibility Study at a workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, 2011 and call for participationDakar, Cameroon, Cape Town, Brussels and Kenya project meetings: call for participation…
A report will be released soonSlide14
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. Slide15
For Teacher Education
From the Cameroon discussions:
The teacher as an agent of change for:Social and economic development and growth and for
Conflict resolution and reconciliation for sustainable and peaceful living environmentsSlide16
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. WikipediaSlide17
From the Cape Town discussions
The
meta-profile of the teacher education degree should be viewed as a Venn diagram- the integrated nature of the curriculum
Four Areas of Teacher EducationContext (regulatory, geographic, socio-economic …)(Theoretical) Knowledge/Understanding & PracticeInterpersonal Skills
Values &
Ethics
………………………………………………………………………………….
The meta-profile evolved out of the generic and specific competences, and validated through the surveys Slide18
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.’ Slide19
Context
Values
& EthicsInter-personal
SkillsKnowledge, understanding & Practice
The African Teacher Education Meta-ProfileSlide20
New G1; New G2; 13G;14G; 9G
4S; 5S
2G
8G;28G18G; 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
C
ONTEXT
INTERPERSONAL
SKILLS
VALUES
& ETHICS
KNOWLEDGE,
UNDERSTANDING
&
P
RACTICESlide21
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.Slide22
Comparisons across the World
Africa
Context
Knowledge/
Understanding
& Practice
Interpersonal
Skills
Values &
Ethics
Latin America
Professional
Academic
Socia
l
Russia
Ability to learn
Ability to work
Ability to interact
with others
Ability to live in
harmony with
oneselfSlide23
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?’Slide24
Mega/meta-meta profile?
(Cognitive) Knowledge: Subject + Pedagogical knowledge
Interpersonal Skills
Ability to learn +
Life Long Learning
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?Slide25
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.Slide26
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’.Slide27
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)Slide28
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)liveSlide29
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