La didactique de l’école primaire au Cameroun : une étude évaluative de l’impact de l’APC sur la qualité de l’éducation dans les écoles primaires publiques à partir des points de vue des enseignants de l’arrondissement de Kyé-Ossi.

Abstract

For several years now, Cameroon's political authorities have been placing education at the heart of their public policies. As a result, a number of curricular reforms have been introduced, including subject content reform, the objectives-based approach and the competency-based approach (CBA). With the latter, the aim of the public authorities was to train a new type of citizen capable of participating in the country's development thanks to the skills he or she would have acquired at school. The choice of this approach stems from the fact that APC seems to offer an adequate response to the problems of school failure experienced by some education systems. This research focuses on its impact on the quality of education in Cameroonian public elementary school. It explores the points of view of teachers, key players in any educational reform, with a view to contextualizing the process of teaching-learning and assessment of French at primary level. The aim is to examine teachers' understanding of the competency-based approach, quality in education and the aims pursued by education policy, and to assess the impact of this approach on the quality of education at the end of the process. The methodology used in this study is qualitative and exploratory, relying on the semi-directed interview as a data collection instrument. It focused on analyzing the discourse of 12 teachers on their perception of the quality of education in public elementary school in Kyé-Ossi, the target rural area. After analyzing the content of the respondents' verbatim, the results show that in Cameroon, CBA is not intended to improve the quality of French-language education at primary level, as it is not adapted to the real-life realities of learners. As proof, investigations show that while it's true that literature is included in the new 2018 curricula, reading is not, and you can't teach literature to pupils who can't read. What's more, the problem of effectively implementing CBA in Cameroon's primary schools is linked to a number of pitfalls, such as the facilities available, the textbooks and teaching and learning materials, the lack of consideration for the pupils themselves, its unsuitability for the Cameroonian school context, and the lack of parental involvement in supporting pupils in their studies. As things stand, it would therefore be utopian to claim that CBA will help make Cameroonian learners autonomous in a context where young people don't read, and the question of teacher training and teaching practice is mortgaged by training curricula that don't take account of the realities on the ground.