Editorial

The critical role of continuous professional development for teachers in Africa

Kakoma Luneta

Copyright: © 2022. The Author Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Teacher education in Africa has undergone some transformation but the actual act of teaching has stagnated to the old apprenticeship model for both instruction and learning (Wolhuter 2006). In research that has permeated teacher training, teaching and teacher development in Africa, there has not been radical reviews to transform instruction and development. The decolonisation of the curriculum in Africa has been but fallacy and talk for African scholars that purport without pure social or natural scientific scrutiny of the critical role a curriculum, indigenous or western, plays in shaping knowledge and intellectual dialogue. Reform of teacher education and interventions in both the epistemological and methodological perspectives require grounded and research-based acknowledgements from teachers and those in the teaching fraternity teacher (Mukuka, Shumba & Mulenga 2021; Tesfamicael & Ayalew 2021).

Embedded in teacher reform, pedagogical and content redress in Africa is context-based, as imported professional development intervention programs will not yield the desired goals (Bakker, Cai and Zenger 2021). According to Workman (2021), context:

… relates to everything to do with the school, both implicitly and explicitly – the values of the community and the guiding principles that underpin such values, the culture of learning and the customs and traditions embedded in the school ethos. (p. 1)

The African teacher education context, educational challenges and aspirations are similar, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank 2020; Bethel 2016).

The World Bank (2020) has identified professional development programs for teachers in Africa as the most promising and appropriate interventions to address teachers’ education challenges in Africa. Evans and Acosta (2021), and Khechane, Makara and Rambuda (2020) document the challenges that require effective intervention programs as: under qualified and unqualified teachers, especially in poor rural disadvantaged communities, inadequate teaching and learning materials, ineffective assessment systems that fail to provide teachers with the information they need to improve student achievements and instruction, and fragmented teacher training programs that have not moved with time and have failed to adopt new ways of instruction and technology. Intervention professional development programs that address these challenges have been regarded as pivotal to achieving the indicators of teacher development in Africa (UNESCO 2015). While some intervention programs have proved successful, the lack of continuity has rendered them ineffective and research has therefore advocated for continuous professional development programs, instead of once-off initiatives (Durandt 2021; Jacinto & Jakobsen 2020).

Research (Adeniran et al. 2020) with rigorous evidence on teacher education, learning and effective instruction has been conducted and archived in many African university repositories and research centres with little dissemination outlets. The African Journal of Teacher Education and Development’s main objective is to provide a double blinded, peer reviewed and open access research outlet for scientific African and African relevant research.

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