Fostering Educational Participation in Pastoral Communities Through Non-Formal Education: the Ghanaian Perspective

A review of 8 years of the history of one school-university partnership and detailed field work for 3 years offers some new insights into this undertheorized organizational arrangement. Although much attention has been given to the advantages and disadvantages of working across the cultural boundaries between schools and universities, this work points to divergent interests and resources within each participating organization and several points of intersection between the two. Therefore, the authors suggest that a micropolitical perspective be used to analyze such partnerships. They speculate that partnerships sharing elements of the professional community may promote more improvement but that only subunits within partnerships are likely to become professional communities. Finally, they suggest that although people in a number of positions may be able to offer leadership for such partnerships, those in boundary-spanning roles are especially well placed to do so

Mfum-Mensah, Obed, An Exploratory Study of the Curriculum Development Process of a Complementary Education Program for Marginalized Communities in Northern Ghana, Curriculum Inquiry, 39(March, 2009), 343-367.

Reports an ethnographic study of the process of curriculum development employed in two Northern Ghanaian communities; describes four stages: deliberation, design, implementation, and outcome; the model employed both technical and critical approaches

Education Collaboration to Promote School Participation in Northern Ghana: a Case Study of a Complementary Education Program

This article first examines why the homeschooling movement in the USA emerged in the 1970s, noting the impact of political radicalism both right and left, feminism, suburbanization, and public school bureaucratization and secularization. It then describes how the movement, constituted of left- and right-wing elements, collaborated in the early 1980s to contest hostile legal climates in many states but was taken over by conservative Protestants by the late 1980s because of their superior organization and numerical dominance. Despite internal conflicts, the movement\u27s goals of legalizing and popularizing homeschooling were realized by the mid-1990s. Since that time homeschooling has grown in popularity and is increasingly being utilized by more mainstream elements of society, often in conjunction with public schools, suggesting that ‘homeschooling’ as a political movement and ideology may have run its course. © 2009, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved

Empowerment or Impairment? Involving Traditional Communities in School Management

This study explores the perceived benefits and challenges of the collaboration model of a complementary education program which operates in marginalized communities in northern Ghana. The scope of the paper includes the background, collaboration as a transformative process, research methodology, findings, and discussion. The study revealed that: (a) the collaborative partners\u27 shared values were a major drive of the collaboration; (b) the collaboration model was fluid, contextual, and an unstructured process; (c) the process provided new strategies promoting school participation in northern Ghana; and (d) the collaborative partners\u27 idiosyncrasies posed a major challenge to the collaboration. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd

An Exploratory Study of the Curriculum Development Process of a Complementary Education Program for Marginalized Communities in Northern Ghana

A teacher educator and college librarian collaboratively designed and taught teacher education workshops about finding and evaluating what works in teaching. This study investigated interactions of self-efficacy for information literacy, self-efficacy for solving problems with evidence-based practices, skills of searching for and citing sources, verbalized reasoning, and writing about evidence-based teaching practices. Students completed pre- and postsurveys, recorded screencasts while researching, and submitted papers regarding the effectiveness of one teaching practice. Students made significant self-efficacy gains in response to training. Furthermore, results demonstrated that early experience with information literacy and the self-efficacy that develops is a strong predictor of self-efficacy and performance later in the discipline-specific task to find, evaluate, and write about evidence-based teaching practices. © College Reading and Learning Association

Education and Communities at the “Margins”: The Contradictions of Western Education for Islamic Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper employs postcolonial framework to discuss the contradictions of promoting western education in Islamic communities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Prior to colonization, Islamic education was an important socializing process that instilled strong Islamic identity in Islamic communities in SSA. European encounters in SSA and the introduction of western education shifted the socializing process and reconfigured SSA societies and dislocated Islamic communities in the region. I argue that Islamic communities’ marginalization educationally since the colonial era is partly the result of their resistance to western colonization and all its forms. In the first part of the paper I discuss postcolonial discourse and education. The second part discusses education and religion nexus in sub-Saharan Africa. It uses recent Pew Research for example as evidence to delineate the Muslim-Christian gaps in education by age categories and gender. The third part outlines ways western education became a tool for reconfiguring Islamic communities and the rationales behind Islamic communities’ resistance to this form of education. The concluding section discusses contemporary efforts to promote education in Islamic communities in SSA within the rubric of Education for All (EFA)

Whose Voices are Being Heard? Mechanisms for Community Participation in Education in Northern Ghana

This paper is an investigation of the impact of the Shepherd School Program, a non-formal basic education program implemented in seven pastoral communities in northern Ghana. The paper argues that non-formal basic education programs can have an important impact on the educational development of a community. However, for this to be possible, the context of such programs must answer to communities\u27 social, cultural, economic and other immediate needs. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved