South Sudan s National Curriculum Framework 2014 A Critique of Change
Article History Received: 04.07.2018 Accepted: 18.07.2018 Published: 30.08.2018 Abstract: This theoretical paper uses document analysis to probe South Sudan"s new National Curriculum Framework (2014) as an official text and its implications as a change agenda with a view to arriving at a perspective about the task of the school in the world"s newest country. The study notes that the country"s curriculum change policy seeks to enact a curriculum model that provides both equality and quality with a pedagogic philosophy that is humanistic in essence, transformative in outlook and historical in perspective. The new model shifts from subject specific to generic curriculum that offers more student choice, relies on environment and accentuates social and life skills in a broader milieu of competencies. The new arrivals on the subject scene are information communication technology, vocational education enterprise, and values education in the form of environmental sustainability, life skills and peace studies to consolidate civics and cement the country"s diverse society. However, the facility of the Framework to promote inclusive education is constrained by its design possibilities and the practical realities of school education in South Sudan as its official launch date of 2019 approaches. The scope for broader learner experience beyond conventionality will remain largely rhetorical or even inimical in as far as the resources for emancipatory practices are held back by the dual force of curriculum novelty and state priority. The prospect of wide gaps between planned, delivered and experienced curriculum is, therefore, real and vexed. It remains to be seen if the Ministry has a strategy at all to deal with any eventual knock on effect. The fact remains, too, that the Framework is heavily prescriptive in nature and as such could potentially prove counter productive to teacher agency with drastic consequences for local teacher appraisal practices. Thus, implementing a new curriculum short of resources and through the political doldrums of shifting timelines is principally an unmitigated disaster. It could lead to a tacit rejection of curriculum change, more out of repulsion than upon reflection. The fortunes of South Sudan"s National Curriculum Framework (2014) are thus defined; and the broader discourse of reform duly confined.