Towards a Competency Based Curriculum: A Pedagogic Perspective

Abstract

Education remains the powerful tool to engender competencies in the learners to make them adaptable to the context of work, personal and professional development. The competencies are significant for achieving sustainable development. This calls for the world education systems to rethink and re-orient their educational curricula in terms of pedagogies from early years’ education through higher education to make them adapt the learners to the demands of the century and future societies. The Kenyan national philosophy of education focuses on the acquisition of knowledge and skills as well as provision of lifelong learning. In pursuit of this philosophy, the government has made a bold step in adopting the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) designed by Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) which is at the infancy stage in terms of implementation in the lower grades at primary school level. The key competencies emphasized in this curriculum are communication and collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, imagination and creativity, citizenship, learning to learn, self-efficacy and digital literacy. In addition the core values of this curriculum are love, responsibility, respect, unity, peace, patriotism and integrity. The implementation of the curriculum content will consequently lead the evolution of pedagogy to increase the quality of teaching and learning. The CBC demands a shift of emphasis from teaching to learning. This paper provides a conceptual understanding of CBC while drawing from the conventional concept of the curriculum; Describes a repertoire of pedagogic strategies and how they can be employed to engender these competencies based on decades of pedagogic research, presents some of the challenges that are likely to stand on the way of implementing CBC drawing examples from past experiences of curriculum implementation in Kenya and other countries and offers some suggestions on how to surmount some of these challenges.