Please note that the project has ended and the website is no longer updated.
The challenges regarding the situation of education in Kenya called for an urgent development of a comprehensive training of trainers programme to empower lecturers, teacher trainers and their students to deliver the changes that had been made in the previous basic school curricula, Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF), towards student-centered inquiry-based approaches (KICD 2017; Kenya Vision 2030; World Bank report 2018). The introduction of Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) in Kenyan schools called for a comprehensive change in the instructional approach in terms of teaching, learning and assessment. This required improvement in teacher education and training programmes in order to equip teachers (both pre-service and in-service) with the competencies that would enable them to handle effectively the challenges associated with CBC implementation in schools. There was thus a strong need to support the Kenyan universities’ teacher education and teacher training colleges in embracing the CBC while in basic education institutions that was already being rolled out.
The target of the TOTEMK project was to strengthen the capacity of teacher education and institutional management in Kenya and get more teachers for the labour market who are competent to deliver Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) in the Kenyan schools. The TOTEMK project strongly contributed to well functioning, relevant and accessible higher education to the students by modernizing partner country’s HEIs’ teacher education, responding to the learning crisis by teaching crisis (Reinikka et al., 2018), and developing students’ learning to correspond to current education needs. This was done with the help of new pedagogical tools, application of modern pedagogical technology and with empowering lecturers and their students on socio-cultural issues to respond effectively to Kenyan CBC under The Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF). In the short term, the project contributed to improving institutional management and teaching capacity in partner country HEIs. The learning/teaching crisis (Reinikka et al., 2018) was jointly addressed among Kenyan and Finnish partners in socially and culturally sensitive ways.