Chapter 9: Curriculum Midwives: Teachers, Instruction, and Students

Teaching in many Zimbabwe secondary schools is increasingly becoming examination-driven. Teachers are so much absorbed in learning about and using examination-taking strategies in an education system built upon a transmission model of teaching (Freire, 1993). Teaching that privileges the utmost involvement of the student and seeks to dig into the depth of a subject is dying slowly as teachers race through the curriculum to meet the expectations of examinations. This is how many of my colleagues and I experienced teaching in Zimbabwe when we taught in high school in the last 2 decades. We focused more on helping students pass their school-based and national examinations than we read about and discussed curriculum issues and the efficacy of our instruction. We were so engrossed in our work that we did not step back to (re)examine the purposes of education and how our instruction closely aligned with those purposes. With the inordinate emphasis placed on examination results by the various stakeholders, whose eyes were and still are glued on schooling, the teacher can easily be pressured and swayed away from rigorous instruction and the important purposes of education. Rote learning which encourages the learning of facts rather than the promotion of comprehension and knowledge application is the definite consequence of a singular focus on examinations in our schools (Baine & Mwamwenda, 1994).