The bachelor of education programme at a Kenyan university : a case of curriculum coherence in the preparation of secondary school history teachers?

D.Phil. (Curriculum Studies)The study highlights the conceptual and practical challenges in providing initial teacher education that promotes, amongst other factors, coherence with the prescribed school curriculum. It investigates a History Teaching Methods (HTM) course offered by a university in Kenya to clarify how course related documents, lectures, students’ microteaching lessons, and perceptions about these three aspects obtained from interviews with a teacher-educator and students addressed what the course had to provide as possibilities for the acquisition of professional knowledge and skills that would enable students to teach effectively the secondary school History and Government (H&G) subject. Through a review of literature on curriculum coherence and theories on ethical pedagogic practice and communication combined with primary data collected in Kenya, I explain the nature of the challenges in the HTM course. The challenges, I argue, are primarily a result of overlooking the disciplinary requirements of History. The findings suggest that misconceptions about professional responsibilities of the teacher-educators are largely responsible for the descriptive approach that characterises the pedagogical practices they promoted. The absence of engagement with disciplinary requirements in lectures contributed to the nature of the devices that were used by students to teach. In order to clarify the nature of these pedagogic challenges, I adopted a generic qualitative approach to the research. The direct contact and discussion with a teacher-educator and students enabled me to explore their understanding of the requirements of teaching history at school level. Through observations of lectures I established how the teacher-educators considered these requirements as important to the teacher education they provided. Through observing students’ microteaching lessons I was able to establish their understanding of the nature of historical knowledge and how it ought to be approached when teaching. The study contributes to the general field of teacher education by having devised a conceptual orientation that can be drawn on to establish what is necessary to teach school history effectively, namely, the importance of normative critical thinking and contextual sensitivity. In this study, I indicate the pedagogic processes that need to be considered and constantly in place to teach history by drawing on relevant paradigms and conceptual orientations belonging to the discipline. I found that teacher-educators underplay the importance of these factors and view them as having to be considered by academic entities that are directly involved with history as a discipline. It is due to this oversight that the programme seemed to emphasise descriptive and procedural orientations in initial teacher education. I conclude by suggesting that a course that educates student teachers for, amongst other reasons, teaching H&G at secondary school in Kenya, has to consider firstly, what is essential to history teaching and learning as a discipline and secondly that effective history teaching has to be informed by reasoning that is not only relevant to History as a discipline but also its practicality to the objectives of school history