World picture – Two Streams
In particularly the 1980s and 90s, Church leaders in many growing world cities felt that Christian education and discipleship, public leadership, and social enterprise were captive to prevailing political ideologies and market systems. Consequently, various urban missions were raised up in various cities and denominations, to offer additional curriculum for Christian education, public leadership, and social enterprise - using the city and its urban landscape as a metaphor of a changing world and also as a reflector on the complexity of modern professional practice.In the 90s, the World Bank and its partners began recognising that knowledge was no longer the exclusive domain of technologically advanced societies. A search began envisioning a “knowledge bank” that recognized learning from practices of communities which would leverage the best in global and local knowledge systems. The envisioning included the kind of “knowledge bank” which would intermediate ideas and also financial resources. In 1998, the World Bank launched the “Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program to help learn from community based knowledge systems and development practices, and incorporate them into Bank-supported programs”.These open new chapters for the work of university colleges.
Country picture (Ghana)
Since 2000, there has been an increasingly successful entry of the private sector, including the Churches and individual practitioners, into the mainstream provision of tertiary education in Ghana. That has been a very significant milestone in bringing university education closer to the locations and vocations of Ghanaian workers, households and local residents. However, a second milestone has caught up. One key challenge in the second milestone is to bring university college operations to dissect, re-assemble, capacitate and professionalize the base occupations (primary and middle levels) of the working population – with the aim of equipping the workers to operate creatively and successfully in the increasingly competitive open market environments of the 21st century. While the various administrations, government departments and business associations have made important efforts to advance work skills at the base occupations, the strategic and development operations at district, regional and cross-country levels still rest on the shoulders of university institutions which have the required inter-sectoral commitments backed by generative programmes and on-going research. The College anticipates that these challenges would eventually translate into innovative designs in university college operations, where the institutions would be incorporating more and more of clinical education, participatory learning, critical thinking, objectivity and action, responsibility and accountability, co-operation and collaboration as central features of teaching and research.
Implications for the College
The College would ensure that significant numbers of its programmes engage relevant intersections of the two streams mentioned in the world picture. We welcome non-graduate adults, graduates and researchers who seek to study our courses/programmes to build themselves up and gain knowledge - and also engage both challenges and opportunities in local or global setting. We very much welcome professionals, practitioners, and scholars who sense that they have something to give back to society through teaching and research. The College emphasizes on continuing professional development for faculty and graduands, as we endeavour to make a contributive mark on higher education in Ghana and beyond. With all these efforts, the College is committed to ensure that higher education would not be a privilege accessed by only a few number of the adult population. We therefore apply various creative ways to support adults to rise above the deficit assessments which are often directly or indirectly applied by the education system to disqualify many in accessing higher education. We however challenge such prospective and admitted candidates that serious commitment to learning and quality work at courses cannot be compromised.
We pray that we faithfully make our contributions to ensure that local knowledge gains an appreciating value and effective locations in global and regional knowledge economies.
