What Kind of Higher Education Transformation is Needed on the African Continent?
Is a Liberal Arts Foundation Right for the African Continent?
Could the foundation of a modified liberal arts push higher education on Africa’s continent to a new level?
Here are my thoughts and five ways how universities in Africa can integrate liberal arts philosophies into their curriculum to create the next generation of leaders for the continent. My thoughts are not new, but they can be transformative if they start implementing our tertiary education system.
Working in Teams
University can create small group learning in class through interactive activities and break groups with discuss topics. Increase the number of seminar-style courses and classes, allowing students to be more participatory and collaborative.
Teaching Critical Thinking
Bring into the curriculum topics and courses in philosophy, anthropology, theology, sociology, and psychology. Classes of this nature help students push boundaries and thought processes. It allows the next generation to realize there is no one answer to decade-old questions or the ones generated yesterday.
Teaching Problem-solving
Help students learn and understand that there are multiple solutions to a challenge or problem in life, work, or community. Teach to be innovative in developing resources and solving issues in their local communities to improve their quality of life at all levels of society.
Creating Social and Educational Experiential Learning
Let’s be honest — learning happens in and outside the classroom. However, let’s be intentional about how to develop and teach outside the classroom. Often referred to as the “soft” skills and what I have come to call essential life skills are as critical as the words in a textbook.
The ability to network, communicate, facilitate a team meeting, lead and follow are all learned mainly by experience.
Being socially adept, adaptable, resilient, and innovative are all developed through student engagement in the student programming provided on each campus.
Nurturing Innovation and Multiple Solution Results
As faculty and administrators, it is our responsibility to foster our students’ creativity and thought processes. Help to think beyond what they can see, smell, touch, taste, or hear.
Help awaken their mind to find multiple solutions for a single idea and test each. Each time we encourage students to take a different path, it opens doors in their minds and boosts their imagination plus their confidence.
Creating Collaboratively, Inter-disciplinary, and Cross-Functional Spaces
At many institutions, the academic and non-academic barely connect. It is the unspoken tragedy of our higher education system globally. The student development and academic units need to find ways to collaborate and be role models.
How can we teach collaboration and talk about being interdisciplinary in our course work with our daily campus activities are in silos? Let’s step beyond the contradiction and into the practical.
We can find opportunities for faculty in education and computer science, and student government to co-create a program or project for tutoring rural students. Where can we join science lab students with our housekeeping staff to develop betting cleaning products?
In Conclusion
As our connectivity globally expands, emerging market countries need to rapidly prepare the next generation for economic growth. Our society will continue to require employers, employees, or freelancers.
The African continent’s economic sustainability rests in today’s educators and our ability to develop for 21st and 22nd-century leaders.
It is the broad responsibility of the higher education systems and the continent’s industries to invest in the teaching and learning methods such as a modified liberal arts program that will best move the society to the forefront as global leaders.
Are these five thoughts helpful for African higher education? What should be added or changed? How do we transform while keeping an enriching local context?
To explore how your college or university can boost their digital/virtual student engagement and activities connect with me, explore my website, or consider a conversation to discuss a review of your program
Author Karla Fraser is a senior administrator in higher education with 20 years of experience globally. Currently, she has contributed to evolutionary concepts in higher education on the African continent. Her goal is to share her talents, skills, knowledge, experiences, and expertise with the African institutions of higher education seeking to reform, transform or start anew.
Originally published in Linkedin.
