About 200 people including teachers, church representatives and members of the private sector and civil society gathered in Musanze District on Monday to take part in curriculum review exercise. The comprehensive curriculum review of the current pre-primary, primary and secondary school started last year and will take 18 months to be completed. The review is part of the Ministry of Education’s reforms that seek to shift to skills development. Dr Mathias Harebamungu, the State Minister in charge of primary and secondary education, said the aim is to revamp education to provide essential knowledge, values, attitudes and competent skills for Rwandan children. The new curriculum is expected to help students gain skills and have a competitive edge regional and international labour market, he said. Harebamungu said the next phase of syllabus writing will involve elaboration of the syllabi in which competencies and learning outcomes, which are key components in the learning processes, must be packaged. “The phase will determine what the children must learn, how they should learn and how they should be assessed,” he said. He urged participants to dedicate their time and focus on the syllabus writing phase through debates and sharing experiences. “An exercise like this calls for enriching debates and varying views basing on individual backgrounds in different education systems or on how each one of you was taught,” he said. “You ought to go beyond individual mindsets and look at what is worth for the Rwanda we want. There are national aspirations, regional and international best practices to guide you in this exercise,” he added. Harebamungu said since Rwanda is a member of East African Community, there is need to have the existing protocols that were signed between member countries in mind. “The East African curriculum framework as well as Unesco recommendations are very clear about the minimum components. These should guide you as you develop the syllabi,” he said. “The Rwandan syllabi must be comprehensive with content that must be comparable to international standards,” Harebamungu told the participants. Dr John Rutayisiye, the director general of Rwanda Education Board, said the current education syllabi focused on reconstruction after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi but the new one needs to cater for more practical skills. The new curricula, will come into force in 2016, and all schools will have adopted it by 2018, according to Rutayisire. Jean Baptiste Kasuma, a Chemistry teacher at GS Saint Andre in Kigali, said for many years Rwandan education was theoretical and learners lacked practical skills. He said future learners will have an opportunity to do more experiments. He appealed to government to ensure that education reforms go hand-in-hand with providing necessary school equipments.
