About the model
Transforming Higher Education for Social Change: a model from East Africa is a rigorous methodology of pedagogy and curriculum redesign that supports lecturers to rethink their teaching and to become facilitators of student-centred teaching – helping students learn how to think, not what to think.
This improved learning experience fosters the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and allows for practical learning beyond the classroom that can improve a graduate’s employability.
Developed by the East African TESCEA partnership, our online courses, toolkits and case studies are specifically designed to support lecturers and institutions in low resource settings to transform their teaching and learning practices.
Critical thinking and problem solving
Our model supports teaching for critical thinking and problem-solving. This isn’t about teaching a specific set of skills, or body of knowledge, but about equipping students to be able to think for themselves, to appraise and assess information and evidence, and to use it to formulate arguments, and to solve problems.
Gender-responsive teaching and learning
Pedagogical practices can reinforce gender inequalities in the classroom, restricting learning outcomes for women, and perpetuating gender stereotypes. Our approach to gender-responsive pedagogy addresses this by integrating gender-responsiveness into the processes of curriculum design, teaching and learning, class management and assessment.
Responding to the needs of your community
Our model supports you to involve business, industry, public sector and community from the very beginning. Engaging business-people, NGO professionals and social entrepreneurs will help you to understand what kind of graduates are needed in the world, and how your programmes can meet that need.
Supporting rapid change
Many initiatives to improve teaching and learning have sought to re-design a whole degree programme. This is valuable, but also takes time. Instead, our model supports a course-level approach to transformation, enabling you to design, test and refine courses iteratively. By re-designing courses in one semester and teaching them the next, you are able to put ideas into practice sooner, to see how courses work in the classroom, and to make rapid adjustments.