Curriculum development in the floriculture sector in Uganda: A design- based validation-research study

This chapter describes an Educational Design Research (EDR) project on curriculum development in agriculture aimed at analysing the impact and efficacy of competence-based educational design principles in floriculture education in Uganda. The purpose of this study is to generate a better understanding of these principles. The competence-based education design philosophy was chosen because of the necessity to firmly align the content of the curricula that needed to be developed for senior secondary agricultural-vocational and higher agricultural education with the national, regional and international developments in the floriculture production chain. An asset of competence-based education is the strong relationship between the demands in the labour market and the design of the educational program. In previous studies, principles of competence-based education (Biemans et al 2004; 2009) have been proposed (Mulder, 2004), elaborated (Wesselink, 2010) and further explored in vocational education (Sturing et al, 2011) and higher education (Nederstigt et al, 2011). In various stages of the research process, the principles of competence-based education emerged from practice and theory. In the study reported in this chapter, curricula for two educational institutions were developed and implemented. The validity of the design principles and the effectiveness of the educational program were evaluated by various stakeholders, including graduates and their employers. Based on the employment and evaluation data, it can be concluded that the project has been successful, although there are concerns about the sustainability of the practical component, 1 The project on which this chapter is based was funded by the Netherlands University Foundation for International Cooperation (NUFFIC). 2 | P a g e especially the field attachments of the program. The competence-based design principles were working as intended. Further research is necessary to identify the efficacy and impact of the design principles independently. Introduction to the problem Professional and vocational education need to be well-aligned to the needs of the labour market and society at large. The competence-based education philosophy (Mulder, 2011; 2014) addresses this issue and tries to establish insights as to how to design curricula that meet these needs (Mulder, 2012a; 2012b). The approach is applied in many professional fields, like in medicine (Frank and Jabbour et al, 2005), purchasing (Mulder, Wesselink and Bruijstens, 2005), extension (Karbasioun, Mulder and Biemans, 2007) and agriculture and rural development (Pant, 2012). A matrix of principles and implementation levels of competence-based education was constructed which is based on an extensive literature review and expert consultations (Wesselink, 2010; see Box 1). This matrix is being validated in Dutch vocational education, but wider validation of the efficacy of the competence-based education design principles is necessary. Furthermore it is important to evaluate the outcomes of a competence-based curriculum. A problem in vocational and higher education is that the alignment of many education programs with the needs of the labour market is limited or even non-existent. Regarding the notion of competence-based education, we would like to point at the fact that the competence-movement started in the USA in the fifties of the last century with publications of White (1959, McClelland(1973), Gilbert (1978), Boyatzis (1982), Spencer and Spencer (1993) and many others. Grant et al (1979) reviewed a series of the early competence-based attempts to align higher education to the labour market. The competence-based education movement of this period were heavily criticized because of their behaviouristic nature (Mulder, Weigel and Collins, 2007). In a later stage competence theorists pointed at the necessity to stress the interpretative (Sandberg 2000), holistic (Velde, 1999) and comprehensive (Wesselink, 2010) nature of competence. These notions of competence are more related to integrated occupationalism and situated professionalism (Mulder, 2014) and object against the reductionist behaviouristic nature of the early competence-based education programmes. In the matrix of competence-based education, these considerations have been taken into account.