The objective of educational innovation, wherever it takes place, at school or at national level, is to improve current practices. In its recent attempt to improve the quality of education in Malawi, the national government in 2001 embarked on curriculum reform and adopted an Outcomes Based curriculum which was implemented in 2007. The design features of the Malawi Outcomes Based Education were influenced by South Africa’s Curriculum 2005. Following the implementation of the curriculum reform, the purpose of this study was to investigate the enactment of Expressive Arts, its theme-based design and content, facilitative pedagogy and continuous assessment in a selection of six state primary schools – three urban and three rural in Zomba district where teachers were first trained to teach Expressive Arts. The study is framed by the theory of Illuminative evaluation (Parlett and Hamilton, 1976) and Productive Pedagogies (Lingard et al., 2001). Following a qualitative research design, data were collected through observation and post-observation interviews. Data analysis showed limited productive pedagogies in most lessons. The majority of lessons were characterised by lower intellectual quality, a focus on instrumental knowledge, integration at a superficial level, dominance of communalising practices, gendered practices, prevalence of localising discourses and a pedagogy aimed at national examinations. The overall picture from these findings is that classroom atmosphere in the twelve classrooms gave students limited opportunities for the acquisition of knowledge and development of skills, values and attitudes required for them to actively participate in the changing Malawian context and to be able to compete successfully in other contexts. It appears that dominant pedagogic practices in the Expressive Arts classroom serve to position learners in parochial orientations and issues. Therefore, there was an obvious discrepancy between the state’s intended curriculum and the teachers’ enacted curriculum. The implications of these findings for Malawi education have been raised. The most salient of these implications include the need for Malawi Institute of Education, the main change agent of primary school curriculum in the country, not only to consider revising the Expressive Arts curriculum but also to focus on the development of teachers in line with their needs for deeper content knowledge and productive pedagogic strategies.

An illuminative evaluation of the final year prosthodontic component of the Oral Health Science curriculum (OHSC 501 Component 1) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa was conducted. This evaluation method was employed to illustrate how an evaluation strategy was used to assess classroom practices following institutional curriculum reform. The aim was to use a qualitative evaluation process to assess the impact of the curriculum change at classroom level and to evaluate how a department had reformed its’ teaching and learning strategies within the hybrid problem based learning curriculum that had been implemented. Additionally, it was to evaluate how this curriculum operated in its own terms. From July through October 2007 small group teaching involving problem based learning, led by two faculty from the department of prosthodontics were observed. Six two hour long small group sessions (equivalent to twelve forty minute lessons), were observed and they revealed a variety of pedagogic strategies utilised. The plan, as outlined in the instructional system was held up against the reality through observations of what happened in the classroom. By and large the findings illustrate that much of what was planned was realised, with the more experienced staff member teaching more or less to the plan. However, from the themes that were inductively derived from analysis of the data, it was clear that integration of content knowledge and critical thinking necessary to assist in the comprehensive management of dental patients was not as robust as would be expected from the students at this level during their training. As part of the objectives of the curriculum innovation instituted, content knowledge integration and critical thinking skills are key to the success of the innovation and employing illuminative evaluation methodology afforded the opportunity to delve deeper into these. This finding illustrates the importance of using qualitative evaluation approaches as a mechanism to assess curriculum change efforts.

This study explores what happens as the ideals of a learnership, envisioned in the South African legislation, become real practice in a workplace within the financial services industry. Learnerships are at the centre stage for illuminating the processes of acquiring a vocational qualification, which combines education with work readiness. The constructivist philosophy to this research and its qualitative paradigm resonates well with the postmodernist thinking that knowledge has different purposes strongly linked to performance, demanding education that is value adding. It is through this postmodern lens that the broad theoretical framework for study is located. It encompasses theories of learning and workplace learning, such as Wenger’s (1998) perspectives on communities of practice and Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning circle. Mezirow’s (1981) transformative learning theory adds the dimension of dialogue. The method of illuminative evaluation is used to examine one event in order to explore its contextual insights. Qualitative inquiry has a fundamental people orientation and, for this reason, observation adds depth to the information gathering possibilities of interviews and document analysis. This report is enriched by narratives of people’s perspectives on events. This illuminative evaluation brought out rich and varied insights into the acquisition of knowledge, skills and work identity (values and attitudes), with some surprising and unexpected insights on success and failures. The workplace’s control of the learning process, while impacting extremely positively on the quality of the theoretical learning (which is interesting as education is not its core purpose), compromised in some respects the success of the end product of the learnership, the work readiness and employment possibilities of learners.