Competence-Based Education and Training (CBET): Sensible, Seductive, Spurious

Competence-Based Education and Training (CBET) - Sensible, Seductive, Spurious

 

 

Knock, knock

Who is it?

Plastic ... oops … RLO, here, if you please …

RLO (Re-usable Learning Objects) appears to be the ‘new’ buzz word in learning today!

In case you are wondering what is the relationship between RLO (Re-usable Learning Objects) and the first plastic invented in 1907, by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born American living in New York State – well ... today, PLASTIC, the world over spells DISASTER!

Viable and cheap – Plastic in 1907 was first ushered in as ‘revolutionary’... ‘re-usable’ and then degenerated into ‘use-and-throw’ and today, ‘God forbid!’ Not unlike the current day, ‘learning outcomes framework’ and ‘competency frameworks’ that have garnered scant regard from ‘unhappy teachers’, ‘persuaded to implement’ – Happiness Curriculum 1.0. A bit later on the Happiness, if you please!  

Dominant discourses, in India, continue to metaphorically represent teachers as cogs in the bureaucratic machine, who need to be told ‘what to do’, ‘when to do’ in-order to become a ‘good’ teacher. Teachers are referred to more as passive agents of the state who are expected to be “persuaded and trained” to magically translate the vision of the NCF 2005 in schools.

The emerging ‘corporatized’ understanding of quality, viewed in terms of ‘learning guarantee’, ‘teacher accountability’ and ‘the scientific management of education’, is antithetical to the understanding of quality seen as being integral to the concept and process of education. Yet, Performance Assessment in Education concerned with the assessment of a performed behaviour, the mainstay of Competence-Based Education and Training (CBET) has charmed the socks out of most policy makers, into believing

•          Life will seem to be better in a multitude of ways

•         People will appear to be happier, the economy will appear to grow and there will be an increase in people gaining educational qualifications

The efficiency and perverse beauty of Performance Assessment in Education is seductive, what appears to be real is merely a pastiche of what a self-conscious species should be like (Preston, 2017).

Competence-Based Education and Training that supports competency frameworks through Performance Assessment in Education in school education aids and abets in the de-professionalisation, alienation and loss of professional autonomy and identity of the Teaching Learning Community endowed with complex, diverse and dynamic belief systems and mindsets

Performance assessment in education envisions the full capitalisation of humanity (Rikowski 2002) and constitutes the human as merely a vessel for the production of labour power with no regard to consciousness or resistance, and designed to cage, or capture, humans bereft of every freedom of action. The latest wave threatens to wipe us out as experiencing beings within a generation or so, leaving us with no conception of learning (Preston, 2018).

Addressing the questions, whether CBET is a form of human learning, and what are its implications for human existence as we currently know it. Preston (2018) demonstrates CBET is an existential threat designed to displace the Human. A displacement of the human in three ways, namely:

•         The acceleration of the processes of the capitalisation of humanity and the redefining of human capabilities as labour power as part of the continuing social domination of capital,

•         The caging of human capacities in a digital frame and

•         The acceleration of the transformation of humanity into a dystopian form of transhumanity.

Competence 3.0, indicative of the ‘newest’ manifestations of CBET in education, Sornson (2016) considers that Taylorism was behind the curriculum-driven model of education rather than the personalisation model which is possible with a CBET-informed vision of education ( pp.11–13).  Sornson (2016) sees a revival of CBET throughout the education system including a return to this method in teacher education (pp.130–138). Prognosis, the latest wave, Competence 3.0 threatens to wipe us out as experiencing beings within a generation or so, leaving us with no conception of learning.

In the face of such a bleak learning future, Luis Armando Gandin’s analysis of the reforms in Porto Alegre in Brazil demonstrates how the growth and acceptance of critically democratic educational policies and practices have been possible because of the active participation of critically reflexive teachers (2006, cited in Apple 2011).

Reflexive Teaching and Learning calls for “the deliberate cultivation of discipline-specific learning theories - encourages instructors to integrate the intellectual frameworks and identities of their teaching and scholarly lives and thus provides an effective vehicle for faculty dialogue and teacher development” (Garnett and Vanderlinden, 2011, p. 629).

While the quest for the sensible, seductive and the spurious confines itself to, ‘Am I doing it right?’ Reflexive Pedagogues are called to deliberate, discern and dedicate themselves to ‘Is this the right thing to do?’

‘Happiness Curriculum’ not bad at all … well done … Delhi … looking for another FIRST, how did you ever anticipate - Indians aren’t too happy as a people. Well, you are certainly on the right track, the United Nations in its 2018 World Happiness Report (WHR), ranks India 133 out of 156 countries surveyed by the UN.

Nursing a 11-places drop from last year, and 15 spots behind the year before, India ranks below all developed countries in the world on the happiness index, and finds itself in the bottom two of SAARC nations as well – Are we looking to plastic to bail us out ?