Equivalent Curriculum Construction as Situated Discourse: A Case in the Context of Adult Education in Namibia

Abstract

Globalization, an all-encompassing phenomenon of our times, is economic, political, social, cultural, and technological all at the same time. In education, globalization has compelled a two-tier educational policy agenda for the world: (a) in the developed world, democratization of higher education, and universalization of secondary education; and (b) in developing countries, basic education for all, and secondary and postsecondary education for the selected few. Basic education provided to the youth and adults in developing and developed countries is to prepare all learners for democratic participation at home and to equip them with work skills for higher productivity to compete in the global economy.

National educational policies, however, are riddled with contradictions as different nation-states seek to balance democratization with modernization, and the search for political legitimacy at home with the need for social reproduction of labor for economic competition abroad. To that end, programs of basic education have sought to develop curricula with dual objectives: (a) to fulfill the “quality of life” needs of learners in the immediate present; and (b) to enable learners to earn portable “qualifications” for advancement and mobility across the modern sectors of the economy.

The above has created the need for developing “equivalent curricula” for illiterate and semiliterate adults, as also for special groups such as migrants, refugees, inner-city kids, the disabled and the incarcerated—both in the developed and developing countries. As part of a recent consultation, a model for equivalent curriculum development was designed within the context of adult education in Namibia. Using a participatory approach, a training workshop was organized for Namibian educators to develop a curriculum for Adult Upper Primary Education (AUPE) in Namibia that would be equivalent to the Formal Upper Primary Education, comprising grades 5, 6, and 7 of the formal education system in the country.

The process of curriculum construction described in this article was implemented in the context of a consultation with the Directorate of Adult Basic Education, Ministry of Basic Education and Culture, Government of the Republic of Namibia, from January 11 to February 2, 1998. This consultation subsumed a two-week training workshop, conducted in the participative mode, to prepare a curriculum for the soon-to-be-launched Adult Upper Primary Education (AUPE) program in Namibia.

The emergent model viewed curriculum development as a matter of constructing a discourse situated in the particular realities of Namibia. The discourse combined the “disciplined didactic design” of curriculum in the theoretical tradition of competency-based education with “imaginative reconstruction of knowledge” to capture the utopian futures imagined by leaders in the state and the civil society in Namibia. In so doing, it combined in a situated discourse the two needs of qualification (Q1) and improvement in the quality of life (Q2) for adults entering an Adult Upper Primary Education Program.