Teacher Education-Community Involvement Curriculum: Analysis of Practices and Perspectives Towards Enhancing Graduates’ Employability
Keywords:
Curriculum, teacher education-community involvement, graduates' employability, self-employability skills, job creationAbstract
Higher education-community involvement research agendas explore educational alignment with the labour market needs to address the graduates’ employability crisis. This mixed-methods study, underpinned by the triple helix model, explored teacher education and community involvement through the integration of local community content and students’ experiential learning of the world of work. The study selected 821 students, 104 academic staff from six higher learning institutions, and 314 community participants from two regions in Tanzania. Survey questionnaires and key informant interviews were used. The results showed a poor integration of key self-employability skills, particularly in financial management, the informal market economy, and project-based business startup. There is also a poor teacher education-community involvement, such that the selected programmes, the pure science (7.4%), and arts (9.5%) had lower ratings compared to the education and community development (26.7%), and business studies with schooling (36.2%) on enhancing students’ interaction with the labour industries through course activities. Additionally, the use of labour market interactive methods, such as inviting guest speakers (4.8%) and sharing self-employment experiences (7.7%), received the lowest ratings among the academic staff. Furthermore, only 62 (19.7%) of the community respondents participated in the teacher education curriculum development and review process, while the majority, 252 (80.3%), did not. The study concluded that a weak interrelationship among teacher education institutions, government systems of labour market administration, and public communities is a cause of the prevailing graduates' employability crisis. Transforming the teacher education community requires linkage policies, institutional strategies, and further research on graduates’ self-employment data.
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