Education by Radio and Television: how to develop basic teaching skills in Burkina Faso

This paper analyses aspects of the educational system of Burkina Faso in an attempt to envisage how it will be in a nearer future. We take a retrospective look of the achievements, the opportunities, and also the constraints and risks with regard to the quality of teaching methods. The significant headways achieved by the national policy in the expansion of access to education in Burkina Faso must be coupled with an effort to maintain and improve quality because Education For All must be conceived of as quality Education for all. The fact that we adopted the competency-based approach is laudable but it may be at odds with the prevailing teaching methods that remain frontal, talk-and-talk partly because of the overcrowded classes. One positive phenomenon noticeable among pupils is the development of parallel informal ways of acquiring knowledge. Many children now exploit ICT, particularly the internet to access useful knowledge that may be more decisive in their lives than what they painfully accumulate at school. We wanted to lay emphasis on radio and television as very available means of efficient teaching. We are convinced that these media have sometimes negative effect on teaching and learning. But we can also use them as ways to improve teaching system by using them as classrooms tools. In that way, radio and television will be seen as audio-visual aids that can be frequently used in classrooms activities and even out of the classrooms. By the end of our study, we proposed a guideline to be used by teachers in their daily activities both in classrooms and out of the classrooms. To strengthen this way of doing, we thought about a relative way of gaining parents��� participation and also policy makers��� involvement. With a suggested methodology, we believe that teachers may participate actively to make radio and television more useful to education areas