Investigating teacher educators’ integration of critical thinking pedagogies in social science subjects: the case of four selected teacher training colleges in Malawi

Abstract

The objective of educational innovation, wherever it takes place, at college or at national level, is to improve current practices. In its recent attempt to improve the quality of education in Malawi, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) through the Malawi Institute of Education (MIE) has revised the Primary Teacher Education curriculum. One of the main aims for the review of the curriculum was to include critical thinking pedagogies as an effective tool for improving the quality of teacher education in the country. So far, little is known about the teacher educators’ practices in integrating critical thinking pedagogies including the possible challenges which the teacher educators might be facing in the integration of critical thinking in the classroom. It is against this background of the knowledge gap on how teacher educators are integrating critical thinking in their lessons and the possible challenges which they may be facing, that this study was undertaken to investigate in-depth the teacher educators’ practices in integrating critical thinking pedagogies at lesson delivery level in the classroom. The study was conducted in four teacher education colleges of which two were from the Southern region and the other two were from the Central region of the country. Qualitative research method which employed a case study design was used and data was analyzed using thematic approach. Fourteen of the participants involved in this study were teacher educators while four of the participants were college principals. Following a qualitative research design, data was collected through document review, face to face interviews with the college principals and teacher educators and classroom lesson observations of the teacher educators in order to provide methodological triangulation of the data. The study has found that the majority of teacher educators have insufficient knowledge on the aims and importance of critical thinking. This lack of enough knowledge has contributed to a number of challenges in teacher educators’ integration of critical

thinking methods in their lessons. The challenges of teacher educators’ knowledge gap on the aims and importance of critical thinking has been aggravated by the insufficient and ineffective training in critical thinking received by teacher educators. As a result, the majority of teacher educators are unable to include critical thinking methods during some specific phases of their lessons especially development and conclusion phases. For those teacher educators who make some effort to include critical thinking methods in their lessons use unsuitable methods for specific lesson phases. The study further found that the majority of teacher educators were not able to use assessment tasks which promote critical thinking but they predominantly use lower levels of assessment tasks which focused on simple, parochial recall questions. The study has concluded that the introduction of critical thinking was poorly managed such that primary teacher education colleges did not have adequate capacity to successfully integrate critical thinking in primary teacher education. The study recommends that in the future, the implementation of innovations such as critical thinking in the new teacher education curriculum is adequately planned in terms of orientation and in-service training for teacher educators. On the same, Ministry of Education should stop the use of the cascade model in training teacher educators. There is also need to revise the time allocated for teaching each subject to address the issue of limited time in the integration of critical thinking. Finally, the study recommends that government should ensure that instructional materials that promote critical thinking are available in all teacher education colleges.