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1 April 2004

Chairperson
Professor Callie Pretorius, Vice Chancellor, University of Pretoria
Vice Chancellors and other representatives of universities and technikons
The leadership of staff and student organisations in higher education
Members of the Council on Higher Education
Representatives of science councils
Distinguished guests
Ladies and Gentlemen.

It is truly a pleasure to open this Conference on Curriculum in Higher Education. I have been looking forward to this event. I thank the University of Pretoria for its generosity in hosting tonight's dinner and for making the university's facilities available for this conference.

Our deliberations and discussions on curriculum development, quality, and relevance will be important for the future of higher education in our country.

I was reminded of the importance of this conference two weeks ago when I was receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape. As part of the ceremony, the President of the Student Representative Council delivered an inspirational speech. He interrupted his speech, however, to "lecture the Minister of Education", as he put it, about the urgent need to review the entire university curriculum. Were students getting a quality education? Were they getting a relevant education? Were they getting an education that empowered them with creative and critical skills that would enable them to participate fully in their changing society?

When it was my turn to speak, I also interrupted my prepared speech to assure the President of the SRC that I was aware of the concerns that he was raising on behalf of his university community. In fact, I told him, we were convening a conference on the 1st and 2nd of April to deal precisely with challenges he identified in reviewing the curriculum in higher education.

So, I want you to know that I have a lot riding on this conference. I gave my word to a student leader that we would be attending to the challenges of higher-education curriculum at this conference. I am counting on all of you to help me in keeping that trust.

The last ten years have seen remarkable changes in higher education. Although these changes are most evident in the transformed institutional landscape, I can quite confidently say that key components of the "single co-ordinated higher education system" envisaged in Education White Paper 3 (A Programme for the Transformation of Higher Education) have been put into place.

The policy discourse in higher education in recent years has been characterised by a focus on key themes of access, equity, 'size and shape', funding and governance. We have not focused the same attention on curriculum. Even a cursory analysis of major policy documents of past decade or so, including the Post-Secondary Education report of the National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI), the "Yellow Book" ("A Policy Framework for Education and Training") of the ANC, report of the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) and the Education White Paper 3, will reveal a lack of sustained reflection on issues of curriculum in higher education. As a result, there has, indeed, been much criticism from a range of constituencies that insufficient attention has been paid to the curriculum.

The National Commission on Higher Education acknowledged this shortcoming but advanced the view that:

Part of the difficulty of addressing curriculum issues in a national policy framework arises from diverse ways in which the concept is used and understood. Many definitions of the curriculum are broad and encompass full range of teaching, learning, and assessment activities in higher education, including course content, relevance and design, the organisation and presentation of knowledge, and degree and diploma structures. (NCHE, p. 110)

The National Commission on Higher Education therefore concentrated on key macro-curricular issues, such as development of quality assurance systems, and took the view that although curriculum reform at more micro-levels is of utmost importance to transformation, it should be primary responsibility of higher education providers. The NCHE argued that the "precise nature of 'micro-curriculum' cannot be determined at a national level and is closely related to the context within which it is located".

To a large extent, this view has shaped Government's approach to curriculum in higher education. We have ensured institutional autonomy in dealing with the curriculum. Nevertheless, we need to identify broad principles for curriculum transformation in our institutions of higher education. While recognising the innovative work that has been done in curriculum development at our institutions, we still need to ask: How can we be guided by the best of that work?

The purpose of this conference is to open up policy discussion on higher education and curriculum and to ask important questions, especially in ways that will mobilise our key constituencies for change in higher education. Here, I believe, national policy has an important role to play as a catalyst for curriculum development.

If it is the case, as the National Commission on Higher Education observed, that one of our problems is the diverse and perhaps irreconcilable ways in which the word, "curriculum", is used, then how should we understand the scope of our task in reviewing the curriculum in higher education?

On the one hand, we must be comprehensive in our approach. Yes, we do find different ways of understanding our key term, "curriculum", but that diversity might be a function of the unavoidably comprehensive nature of the curriculum. A curriculum is all of these many things. As we find in the "Yellow Book", a curriculum is more than merely a syllabus. A curriculum is:

* The aims and objectives of the education system as well as specific goals of learning institutions
* What is taught: the underlying values, the selection of content, how it is arranged into subjects, programmes and syllabuses, and what skills and processes are included
* The strategies of teaching, learning, and the relationships between teachers and learners
* The forms of assessment and evaluation, which are used
* How curriculum is serviced and resourced, including organisation of learners, and of time and space, and materials and resources that are made available
* How curriculum reflects the needs and interests of those it serves including learners, teachers, community, the nation, employers and the economy. (ANC, A Policy Framework for Education and Training, Chapter 13)

Therefore, our understanding of curriculum must be comprehensive because the curriculum in higher education is comprehensive, incorporating many dimensions that we will be exploring in the sessions of this conference.

On the other hand, while being comprehensive, we must also be focused. In focusing our minds, we always need to ask: What is our strategic objective?

Speaking personally for a moment, when I was actively involved in curriculum development for higher education, during my nearly thirty years as a university academic, I was profoundly influenced by the intellectual ferment in this area emerging from socialist options that were being explored from the late 1960s and women's studies that was coming into its own during the early 1980s.

Looking back on these creative developments, what they had in common was their strategic engagement with the curriculum. The curriculum had to be liberated. It had to be liberated from any trace of oppression or discrimination that disabled students from being themselves in their own education. But the curriculum could also be liberating. It could provide intellectual framework and resources for liberation by enabling students to acquire skills, demonstrate ability, gain confidence, realise their potential and even achieve greatness through education.

What is our strategic objective? We want to produce graduates who are well rounded and thoroughly grounded; who are skilled and competent; who are creative, flexible and adaptive to new challenges; who are adept in critical thinking and cultural literacy; who are enabled and empowered to participate fully in their economy, their society and their globalising world.

In many of our university mission statements, this strategic objective-the multi-faceted, multi-skilled graduate-is presented as a response to new demands placed on our economy and society by globalisation. But I would also like to think that we can still find traces of an older ideal of human freedom and human fulfilment. What Marx called "polytechnical education"-an awkward term-was intended as harmony of mind and hand, the co-ordination of thinking and doing. It was not "vocational training," narrowly conceived, but a vision of multi-faceted and multi-dimensional education. Today, we might replace the word, "polytechnical", with something like "multi-skilling", or "holistic", or some other equally awkward term. We need to find a new term. But our strategic objective in higher education must take seriously Marx's injunction that "the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialised social function, must be replaced by totally developed individual."

By raising issues of strategy-in its comprehensive scope, in its focused objectives-I know I am asking us once again to go to the very heart of our "idea of the university." What is our "idea" of the South African university?

Last December, President Thabo Mbeki and I met with the National Working Committee on Higher Education to talk about our idea of a university. I would like to see more discussion and debate on this question, not as an academic exercise, but because we need to focus our strategic attention.

In clarifying our idea of a university, we are also asking ourselves to reflect on processes of knowledge production.

First, we look for knowledge production in processes that link theory and practice, basic and applied, mind, and hand. These are not opposites. They are necessarily integrated in the curriculum. In terms of curriculum development, conventional distinctions between programmes-formative, professional and vocational-will be challenged by necessary integration of thinking and doing. This is especially relevant to the mission of our proposed comprehensive institutions. However, it applies to all our institutions of higher education, which all must grapple with the challenge of ensuring that all of our graduates are equipped with skills and competencies required for their full participation as citizens in a democratic society and contributors in a productive economy.

Second, we look for knowledge production in the relationship between knowledge and identity. We explore what constitutes knowledge base for the development of an African university that is firmly rooted in and draws its inspiration from cultural traditions of the African continent, rather than from some "universal" view, which actually so often refers only to institutions of the developed world in general and the Anglo-Saxon world in particular. Surely, we can best contribute to the pool of universal knowledge by focusing our attention on finding local solutions to local problems, by finding African solutions to African problems.

Against this background, I want to identify some of the broad principles that guide curriculum development. The National Commission on Higher Education offers us a very important formula, "the promotion of teaching and learning approaches which are student-centred and problem based, which encourage students to become independent and critical thinkers, and which foster development of generic, transferable academic skills".

I believe that this formulation can be usefully related to goals that have been set for higher education system in White Paper 3. Of particular relevance are the following goals:

* To improve the quality of teaching and learning throughout the system and, in particular to ensure that the curricula are responsive to the national and regional context.
* To produce graduates with the skills and competencies that build the foundations of lifelong learning, including, critical, analytical, problem-solving and communication skills, as well as the ability to deal with change and diversity, in particular, the tolerance of different views and ideas.
* To establish an academic climate characterised by free and open debate, critical questioning of prevailing orthodoxies and experimentation with new ideas.
* To promote human resource development through programmes that are responsive to the social, political, economic, and cultural needs of the country and which meet the best standards of academic scholarship and professional training.

In the context of these general guidelines, we look forward to the creative and critical contributions of this conference towards advancing our work in curriculum development in higher education.

I am sure you will all agree that this conference is long overdue. But the time is now right for us to turn our attention to the curriculum in a more systemic manner, through robust and critical engagement with issues, which will enable us to be true to our trust with our students.

Our discussions at this conference should help to focus our strategic attention on curriculum in higher education within the context of a transforming education system and a transforming society.

Under apartheid, we must remember, the curriculum at all levels of education was a vehicle for perpetuating racial, class, gender and ethnic divisions. In the process, the curriculum denied our common citizenship; it blocked the emergence of a national identity; and it failed to prepare learners for living and working in their society and their world.

The far-reaching processes of curriculum change that have unfolded over the past ten years in General Education and Training and in Further Education and Training have been at the heart of our transformation. Our new approaches to teaching and learning are designed to support learners to develop to their full potential, making them better prepared to actively participate in the of social and economic development of our country.

This year, children who entered Grade 1 in 1994 will be in their final year of schooling. Many will be poised to enter higher education. These children will be coming to higher education with different experiences and different expectations than earlier generations.

In many ways, these students will be catalysts for change in the curricula of higher education. The young people coming out of our schools, who have become accustomed to problem-based approaches and active teaching methods, will certainly challenge older assumptions and approaches in higher education. At the same time, as we create space for more adult learners in the higher education system, we will see how their input affects teaching and learning in the university.

I am delighted to open this discussion, even if this conference comes at a time when I am nearing the end of my five years as Minister of Education. As I look back over those years, I see substantial accomplishments. But I also see ongoing challenges. In higher education, we have taken on the challenges of equity and access, of restructuring and transformation, and many other necessary tasks that were mandated by our transition to democracy.

Although our initiatives over the past five years might sometimes have looked like battles, especially in the newspapers, I always understood our interventions in higher education as collegial. We have always respected academic freedom. We have always consulted as widely as possible. And we have always sought to be true to our motto-Tirisano, Working Together-in every aspect of our work with all of the stakeholders in higher education in our country.

As I look to the future, I look to this conference as an important beginning in moving issues of curriculum development, quality, and relevance to the centre of our work of transformation.

During our first ten years of freedom, democracy, and transformation, we have laid the groundwork. The policies are in place. Now, as we go forward, let us strategise together about how we liberate our curriculum and make our curriculum liberating for students who are in our trust.

I thank you.

Siyabonga.

Issued by: Department of Education
1 April 2004

Source: Department of Education (http://www.education.gov.za)