Competence based Curriculum (CBC) in Tanzania Tutors' Understanding and their Instructional Practices
The overall aim of the study is to investigate tutors' understanding of a competence based curriculum (CBC) and how they train the student teachers to implement CBC in actual classroom situations in ordinary level (O level) secondary schools in Tanzania.The study employed a qualitative research approach informed by the interpretive paradigm. It involved a total of 12 methodology tutors. The tutors were purposively and conveniently selected from four teachers' colleges in Tanzania that offer the Diploma in Secondary Education. Data were generated through semi structured interviews, classroom observations, and document review methods. Deductive and inductive approaches as well as the hermeneutic phenomenology tradition informed data analysis and interpretations, respectively.The findings, in brief, reveal that in certain respects tutors understand CBC in relatively different ways and thus give it different meanings. Two main understandings with regard to CBC's meaning and intentions are identified: CBC as an application oriented curriculum and CBC as an activity based curriculum. In the former, CBC is understood as a curriculum emphasising the building of learners' ability to become practical, creative, and applying the skills they receive to solving real problems in daily life and become functional in society. In the latter, CBC is understood as nothing but a curriculum emphasising learning through activities in the classroom. The key difference between the two categories of understanding is that, in the latter category, tutors are less sensitive to applying what is learned beyond classroom and subject contexts. As for reasons for the CBC introduction in Tanzania, five categories of understanding are identified, such as education being too theoretical, coping with global trends, the desire for a creative and independent generation, external influences, and poor academic performance. Interestingly, all tutors held an understanding that the teaching approaches relevant for CBC are learner centred approaches.Moreover, the findings reveal that tutors' instructional practices contradicted their understanding of CBC as a curriculum that basically emphasises invisible pedagogic practices. The tutors' instructional practices could be described as more teacher centred, theoretical, and maintaining instructions of an authoritarian, rather than a learner centred character, as the new curricula seem to emphasise. Lecture dominated instructions characterised by strong framing and classification are the norm. The findings of tutors' understandings and their instructional practices can be attributed to the various contextual factors coined as administrative, pedagogical, and physical and ecological factors. The results show that contextual cues are possibly more powerful factors to explain tutors' instructional practices and they may thus need to be accorded due attention. The tutors proposed some conditions to establish a long term framework for tutor learning to support educational change. The tutors' ideas are theorized in a framework constituting a combination of such conditions as reflection, community, conceptual inputs, action, and an institution dealing with education change.