Nairobi, Kenya 10th August 2015 – The Global Peace Education convenes a meeting for the Initiative for Transforming Education task force committee at the Center for Mathematics Science and Technology Education in Africa to deliberate on strategies to the implementation process of trans-formative education program into the national curriculum.This was the second meeting since its inauguration on June 11th, 2015.
The Global Peace Foundation in collaboration with other education stakeholders is in the lead to push for a review of the education curriculum through the Initiative to Transform Education that is currently working on the activities to be implemented that would lead to quality education.
The meeting identified the following as target areas:
- Education policies; To review current policies to fish out salient issues that can assist in transforming education.
- Values; To focus on a social component that would instill values through relevant campaigns and best practices.
- Entrepreneurship and Innovation; To inculcate an entrepreneurial culture among youth as well as an environment that encourages innovation.
- Teacher transformation; To enable teachers become role models who facilitate learning and classroom management through relevant professional development.
- Vocational Education.
The Task Force agreed on the following implementation strategy to be proposed to the ITE members;
- Lobbying through sensitization workshops to get the buy in of the Ministry of Education Science and Technology (MoEST), the Teachers’ Service Commission (TSC) and other stakeholders including Quality Assurance.
- Publishing a handbook that highlights relevant areas in education that need improvement.
- Building the capacity of teachers through National Master Training and cascade the model through County Directors of Education.
- Distributing of materials and a national roll-out of the Character and Creativity Initiative (CCI) currently being demonstrated by GPF in 10 counties.
- Creating public awareness through radio and TV shows as well as newspaper features.
- Making “Community Service” a compulsory and measurable requirement for students.
For successful implementation of the initiative, the task force proposed the implementation budget to be met through various collaborations with the Ministry of Education (MoEST), Corporate CSR, donor funding and like-minded NGOs, for example, UNESCO, UNICEF and UNEP.
Additionally, the Task Force crafted the mandate of ITE as an initiative to spearhead relevant activities for trans-formative education towards the development of a total child. It recommended the importance of utilizing the use of social media to reach for a wide audience and proper documentation of the success areas of the education programs.