This article presents critical reflections on a teacher professional development initiative in Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya. Drawing on critical development studies, it examines the successes and limitations of efforts to facilitate a community-based participatory process that aims to respond to local refugee teachers'…

Investment in girls' education is offered as a salve to the Global South that will alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence. Rather than treat this thesis and its evidentiary basis as axiomatic, we examine some of the conditions for the intelligibility of this crisis, prevalent in much international development and…

This paper investigated the impacts of education on women's empowerment in Kenya using six waves of nationally-representative KDHS data. Our study utilizes the change in educational structure in 1985 as an instrument and finds that women under the new system enhanced their schooling by approximately two years. One year of education prolongs…

This article is written within a conceptual space that considers engineering as a heteronomous discipline. In this context, we analyse how the state has intervened in the development of the body of knowledge of engineering discipline in a developing country in a process known as decolonisation and the political dynamism this has created. We take…

This paper examines the historical background of the Assumption Sisters of Eldoret (ASE), its Charism and apostolate and the secondary schools run by the ASE. It seeks to understand how the Sisters deal with discipline and performance in their schools. The paper also looks at the role of ASE in the management of the schools especially in…

For a long time since the banning of corporal punishment, character education is back on the agenda in Kenyan education policy. However, there is much uncertainty on how it should be implemented in schools and there is no one definition of what it means. This is not surprising since there has clearly been a long history of ill-conceived,…

Teachers are key to provision of quality education and as noted by Mompoint-Gaillard (2011), they have a great opportunity to facilitate development of values in learners. However, it is not clear whether lecturers in Primary Teacher Training Colleges (PTTCs) in Kenya are prepared for training teacher trainees in development of values. Instilling…

Much development has happened in the education sector in African countries. In Kenya, there has been a proliferation of institutions of higher learning. Severe cuts in government funding for public higher education have resulted in the privatization of higher education and the need for adjunct faculty as a way to cut costs. Research suggests that…

Purpose: In the last few years, the interest on professional identity development (PID) and the factors that influence PID has become central in higher education (HE) literature. However, the knowledge developed in this domain has focussed on a factor at a time and on a degree or discipline, thus being difficult to have a general picture of all…

This commentary discusses three articles (Jukes et al., 2017, McCoy et al., 2017, and Aber et al., 2017), which respectively focus on Kenya, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They all cite poor educational outcomes as a key motivation for developing and implementing new programs, and all three articles provide helpful evidence…

With Kenya having rolled out the Competence-Based Curriculum effective as from 2019, anchoring in it preschool education as an integral component, there is still a level of indistinctness as to the role of the preschool teacher in the core domains of curriculum development and reform. The perspective brings to light insights of preschool teacher…

This paper is a discussion of the relationship between women education and sustainable economic development in Kenya and its implications for curriculum development and implementation processes. The argument advanced in this paper is that the solution to the development problems in Kenya and other developing nations lies on women education.…

Kenya's 2017 competency-based curriculum, the Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF), seeks to address the skills gap in the education system and make the curriculum relevant to learners. Using Soka education as the philosophical framework, we provide a comprehensive review of BECF. The analysis in this essay covers the noteworthy provisions,…

Across the globe, the learning goals of elementary, secondary, and higher education curricula emphasize the development of the critical thinking approach. In Kenya, the curriculum mentions developing critical thinking as one of its objectives, but a critical review reveals that the education system prioritizes competitive exams and rote…

The collection of papers presented in this issue of Critical Studies in Education adds to the expansive body of work on teachers and teaching. Collectively, the papers draw our attention to new ways the field is problematising the emerging and evolving conditions that shape the work, lives and identities of teachers. With this editorial…