SECONDARY SCHOOL CURRICULA REFORM IN BENIN: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND OTHER SUBJECTS

Abstract

Curriculum reform is complex machinery that involves many stakeholders both in its design and implementation. This paper is intended to investigate the 2001 curricula reform in secondary education in Benin from a historical and comparative perspective. More specifically, it explores the process that led to the reform, documents the change brought about and identifies the challenges in the implementation of the reform. The investigation showed that a lot of preparation work was done long before the launching of the reform, in terms of evaluation of previous curricula. Furthermore, the reform is a reshuffle of the curricula of all secondary school subjects and migration from teacher-centered to studentcentered instruction. However, the implementation was confronted with many difficulties. Teachers were poorly prepared and adequate documents were not provided either, which led teachers to take initiatives to develop their own documents as was the case during the implementation of reforms in Eastern European countries in the 1990s (Kallen, 1996).