Environmental Scanning in Teacher Education: The Practice in Higher Education in Kenya

Abstract

Strategic teacher education is a crucial factor of development today that needs diverse initiatives to sustain it. This owes to the fact that education serves a dynamic society, hence the need to keep up with the changing realities to meet the changing needs of society. Educational institutions therefore need to respond appropriately to changes in their environment if they are to remain relevant, viable and valuable entities. This underscores the need for environmental scanning, a process through which educational institutions identify the needs, changes, and challenges characteristic of the environment in which the graduate teacher will work and understand how the impact of these affects an institution’s teacher preparation strategies.  This enables an institution to develop contingency plans and actions which reduce the response time needed to address an environmental opportunity or threat. However, a study carried out in selected Kenyan universities engaged in teacher education points at failure by these institutions to carry out clear process of environmental scanning.

This paper presents the findings of a study investigating the practice of environmental scanning as an element of responsiveness in teacher education in higher education.  The objectives of the study were to: determine the pattern of flow of information from selected stakeholders to teacher education universities; determine the extent of flow of information from selected stakeholders to teacher education universities; establish the factors influencing the flow of information from selected stakeholders to teacher education universities; establish the key elements teacher education universities focus on while carrying out environmental scanning, and identify the challenges teacher education universities face in carrying out environmental scanning.

Upon presenting the findings which point at lack of clear policy in environmental scanning by Kenyan universities, this paper makes recommendations both at research-specific action and future research orientation.  This is done with a view to making teacher education more effective by establishing synergy among stakeholders at local, regional, and global levels.

Key words:  teacher education, responsiveness, feedback, feed forward and environmental scanning