Most societies around the world strive to transmit their culture and world view to
succeeding generations through education. This is important because individuals with
strong cultural identities become independent and self-reliant people who are functional
in their own environment. People who have little sense of their cultural identity or have
been alienated from their culture often become dependent and lack the skills of
meaningful survival in their own environment.
Societies that have suffered colonial domination in the past can find themselves
socializing their children with the cultural values and world view of the colonizing power
which obviously undermines their own cultural identity. In the republic of Kenya, this
problem has been acknowledged and documented by academics and educators but there
seems to be a lack of political will to make effective and lasting changes to the
curriculum.
This study explored the kind of curriculum that fosters cultural relevance. It
examined ways in which curriculum can become a place in which cultural values,
knowledge, skills and beliefs that provide foundations for identity can be understood,
defined and interpreted. Five teachers and I came together to explore the possibilities of
tapping the local resources to enrich the school curriculum in Kenya so that teachers
begin to use both material and human resources which are locally available to meet curriculum goals. By using the local resources, the learners began to view the local
knowledge and skills as being important to school knowledge.
The study employs participatory action research which derives strength from its
emphasis on shifting the power balance between the researcher and researched,
encouraging dialogical relationships, providing a voice and feelings to disenfranchised
peoples and showing commitment to social transformation through action and reflection.
The research methods were primarily dialogue and conversations, discussions, creation of
discourses and reflections. The thesis documents some of the struggles, tensions and
frustrations associated with participatory action research for educational change. This
research makes clear that experiential knowing emerges through participation with others
and people can learn to be self-reflexive about their world and their actions within it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9578 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Maina, Faith |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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