School Administrator Seeks Curriculum Revamp for 21st Century Skills Acquisition

By Peace Obi

The need to revamp Nigerian schools’ curriculum in order to redirect it towards certain skills needed beyond the 21st century has been emphasised.

Speaking ahead of the virtual Global Robotics Competition for Students, the Administrator, Vivian Fowler Memorial College for Girls, Lagos, Mrs. Olufunke Fowler-Amba, regretted that the curriculum is based on the past glory.

“It is based on skills that have become extinct. It is based on skills that will not prepare children to be entrepreneurs in the way they think,” she said.

Stressing that the future is technology, Fowler-Amba added: “We need to redirect our curriculum because there are certain skills that are needed beyond the 21st Century and they involve collaboration and team work.

The administrator of the only Nigerian team and the only girls’ team in the competition, which held virtually at 11pm Nigerian time on Thursday, advised the federal government to inculcate robotics in the curriculum.

While noting that robotics education will improve human capital in Nigeria, Fowler-Amba said, “we need to look at a place like Ghana. It has incorporated robotics into its curriculum and that is what the federal government should look into because by doing that, we are going to improve human capital. Human capital is very poor right now.

“The government should look at other developed countries and even the emerging economies, see that one of the things they have done is that they have injected technology into all aspects of whatever they do.”

Noting that the method of teaching students has changed a lot more, Fowler-Amba said, “in the past years, we were into assimilation of book knowledge, but we realised that education has to be a lot more holistic, we had to inject into education soft skills that will allow them to prepare for the next stage of education.

“So that is why we are stressing robotics and it is not just as extra-curricular, but we are looking at long-term that we want robotics to be part of our curriculum.”

Speaking on the students’ readiness for the competition, Fowler-Amba said: “We have built a culture, we have let them know that we are capable. It’s not about being a Nigerian, it’s about using your ability and travelling on the road of being a life-learner, the sky is the limit.”

On the school’s vision in the next five years, she noted: “It is to become a STEM school, a technology school, one that is changing the face of women in the workforce. One of the things that we emphasise as a school is that there is a balance. Our vision is to go beyond the curriculum to emphasise team work and collaboration.

“To prepare the students towards the 21st century, we knew that we needed to embark on this vision along with technology. What we did was to adopt robotics into our curriculum in 2017 and other extra-curricular activities.”

She said robotics will help students to discover talents that they never knew they had. “Some people are academically sound, but we found that through robotics, we are able to engage children and these children we are dealing with, which are the Alpha generation, need to engage.”

The robotics builders, Harriet Ariyo and Laila Eneche, and SS2 students, Ayoyimika Adebayo and Sarah Olomoji, expressed readiness for the global competition, assuring the school, the nation and Africa of their victory in the context.