Curriculum Design in Contemporary Teacher Education: What Makes Job Analysis a Vital Preliminary Ingredient?

Abstract

Although subject matter knowledge and skills for teaching are widely acknowledged as a central component of what teachers need to master, the design of teacher education curriculum in colleges of education and universities seems to ignore the fact that prospective teachers need to master the relevant subject matter knowledge and skills in order for effective teaching to take place. This paper is based on a study which examined the products and curriculum of the English Language Teacher Education curriculum of a Zambian university whose curriculum was designed without consideration of the relevant knowledge and skills that are necessary for teaching in secondary school. The study endeavoured to find out what happens to the products of a professional curriculum such as that of teacher education when it is developed without conducting a job analysis to indentify the relevant knowledge and skills for inclusion in the curriculum. Using data from interviews of ten lecturers, questionnaires and tests that were administered to final year student teachers enrolled on a four year English Language Bachelor of Arts with Education programme, this paper explains why conducting a job analysis at the beginning of the curriculum design process is important for teacher education curriculum design. The main findings from this mixed method study indicated that student teachers were not being fully prepared for their future job of teaching English language because they had not acquired relevant knowledge and skills since the teacher education curriculum that they followed did not exposed them to the skills and knowledge found in the secondary school syllabus that they had to teach upon graduation.