The current challenges regarding the situation of education in Kenya calls for an urgent development of a comprehensive training of trainers programme to empower lecturers, teacher trainers and their students to deliver the changes that have been made in the existing basic school curricula, Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF), towards student-centered inquiry-based approaches (KICD 2017; Kenya Vision 2030; World Bank report 2018). The introduction of Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) in Kenyan schools calls for a comprehensive change in the instructional approach in terms of teaching, learning and assessment. This requires improvement in teacher education and training programmes in order to equip teachers (both pre-service and in-service) with the competencies that will enable them to handle effectively the challenges associated with CBC implementation in schools. There is thus a strong need to support the Kenyan universities’ teacher education and teacher training colleges in embracing the CBC while in basic education institutions that is already being rolled out.
The target of the TOTEMK project is to strengthen the capacity of teacher education and institutional management in Kenya and get more teachers for the labour market who are competent to deliver Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) in the Kenyan schools. The TOTEMK project strongly contributes to well functioning, relevant and accessible higher education to the students by modernizing partner country’s HEIs’ teacher education, responding to the learning crisis by teaching crisis (Reinikka et al., 2018), and developing students’ learning to correspond to current education needs. This will be done with the help of new pedagogical tools, application of modern pedagogical technology and with empowering lecturers and their students on socio-cultural issues to respond effectively to Kenyan CBC under The Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF). In the short term, the project contributes to improving institutional management and teaching capacity in partner country HEIs. The learning/teaching crisis (Reinikka et al., 2018) will be jointly addressed among Kenyan and Finnish partners in socially and culturally sensitive ways.