A Competence Based Curriculum in Teaching Financial Education-What Happens in Classrooms?

Abstract

This paper looks at the transformative pedagogy-changing from Knowledge Based Curriculum (KBC) to Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) in lower secondary schools of Rwanda, which was adapted in 2016 by Rwanda Education Board (REB) through the Ministry of Education. The emphasis of this paper takes bias on financial education that the new competence based curriculum made it compulsory to lower secondary students, which is from senior one to senior three. The government of Rwanda made a significant effort to change the way the curriculum is taught into teaching and learning that equips learners with competent skills, values and attitudes suitable for this 21^st century. Financial education involves imparting values, skills and attitudes through teaching and learning that enables the learner to easily visualise viable entrepreneurial decisions in daily life, allocating resources reasonably, making career trajectory quite easy, save for the future, manage available resources in our daily life, and many other areas such as having the culture of paying taxes, preparing business plans that are quite viable and feasible. In this paper, we will explore how the transition is, it is still demanding and little have changed from what ought to be, explore challenges that involves competence based pedagogy.

This paper provides a critical review of the pedagogical practice of financial education, with an emphasis on the link between the theoretical practice and the ideal way of teaching and learning financial education. It being theoretical analysis, secondary data were used to analyse the challenges and possible strategies of transforming from theory to practice in the Rwandan schools.