Following stakeholder consultative meetings and workshops in 1997, a project proposal was developed by a team of two consultants working with a representative of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), who later acted as a coordinator of LEESP activities at the curriculum centre. One of the consultants was a Danish expert, who according to the coordinator, assisted mainly in matters of project management to ensure that the proposal was aligned with the funding requirements of the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). The other consultant was a Lesotho expert in curriculum development and environmental education.
I held in-depth interviews with the Lesotho consultant, as the other consultant had already left the country at the time of this research. The purpose was to get information on his role in the development of the project proposal, and also on the social process of developing the document. The respondent said he was called upon at a time when he was busy with his PhD, and saw this as an opportunity to bring his environmental education-related expertise into the whole process of LEESP conceptualisation. The respondent said that his input concerned environmental education theory and its conceptualisation in the context of the Lesotho curriculum. According to him, the process of developing the document started with situational analysis, using the views of key people from stakeholder institutions and government
…. there was this reconnaissancephase where there had to be assessment of the situation in the country regarding EE. … There was avery conscious approach to ensure that ideas and possibilities of the direction that might be taken were guided by the stakeholders. I seem to remember very well that we interviewed stakeholders at NULand various ministries. Their orientation was to be guided in terms of the project framework as to what should be done. There was a kind of unanimous view that NCDC was an appropriate anchor institution. And really generally the consultants sort of framed and developed the proposal based on the input of relevant departments and stages of debriefing, where after having developed draft proposal we would then go back to stakeholders to brief them again and reconsider their ideas. (MRT 1)
The respondent said that the stakeholders consulted include key officials in government ministries, institutions involved in teacher education, the NCDC, a teachers‘ association, and teachers in selected schools. I had access to the minutes of some of the meetings held with the stakeholders. From the list of institutions and government departments consulted, it does not seem that ECOL was involved in the situational analysis conducted by the Danish Cooperation for Environment and Development (DANCED) mission. The former registrar of ECOL was not quite sure whether she had been personally consulted as head of ECOL, and she could not remember the details of the consultation. She said,
They might have consulted but I don‟t remember the details of the consultation process. The chances are they consulted with the council but not with me in particular. (ECOL staff 1)
It also transpired from the minutes of a consultation meeting with NES that a concern was raised that consultation with NCDC professional staff appeared to occur rather too late in the schedule. This was noted despite the fact that, as mentioned earlier in this section, the NCDC was represented by one subject specialist in the team that conducted the consultation process and developed the project proposal. I contend that the NCDC as an implementing agent of LEESP would have benefited from early deliberations on the environmental education reforms, prior to consultation with and dissemination to other stakeholders. It is recognised in the literature that the early involvement of key implementers of curriculum change is a crucial step towards ensuring the successful implementation of the intended curriculum reform (Carl, 2002).
An analysis of a summary report of a two day consultative workshop (12 and 13 August, 1997) for principal participating institutions and participants from a range of other interested and relevant stakeholder groups reveals some important findings on how the key content areas of LEESP were identified, as well as issues of participation. The workshop is reported to have followed a Logical Framework Approach (LFA), with the consultants acting as facilitators. The LFA is a goal-oriented approach to project implementation, which is based on the positivist assumption that following logical steps in conceptualising the project will lead to the successful implementation of the project (Aune, 2000) – as though curriculum implementation were a simple technical process. As is the case with many bilateral projects worldwide, LEESP was designed on the LFA.
According to the report of the consultative workshop, the process of LFA began with a brainstorming exercise in which the participants examined international themes and concerns in environmental education and then considered national trends and developments in Lesotho. Following this, the participants examined environmental problems in Lesotho through small group discussions. From this exercise, the report states, environmental degradation was identified as a core problem in Lesotho, which could be addressed through environmental education. The report further shows that after reflecting on the education system of Lesotho, the participants felt that capacity building in stakeholder institutions and materials development should be among the pillars of LEESP activities.
As indicated in Chapter 6, environmental degradation is described in the Reference
Note as the most serious problem. The possibility of the workshop facilitators
channelling the direction of the workshop outcomes notwithstanding, the intertextuality between the Reference Note and stakeholders‘ views on the core environmental problem could be interpreted as suggesting that LEESP was designed using local input, particularly with respect to environmental issues to be addressed. While the consultative meetings and workshops that informed the development of the project proposal may have created an opportunity for a ―contextualised social process‖ (Cornbleth, 1990, p. 12) in conceptualising environmental education, I
consultation process. The approach has an interest in the outcome of the process, which unfortunately might exclude the views of stakeholders whose contribution could be critical to the successful implementation of curriculum change. For example, in the stakeholder consultative workshop referred to above, ECOL representatives do not appear on the list of participants. Perhaps this explains why there was a lack of effective cooperation between NCDC and ECOL on LEESP activities (See Project
Completion Report, p.13). The Project Completion Report describes the involvement
of ECOL in LEESP activities as peripheral.
The stakeholder consultation report further indicates that NCDC, which was regarded as a partner institution, was represented only by subject specialists of carrier subjects. The exclusion of other subject specialists at this early phase of EE conceptualisation could have been detrimental to the successful implementation of environmental education, which required a broadly cross-curricular approach.
The consultation report also shows that teachers were represented only by the president of the Lesotho Association of Teachers (LAT). At the time of stakeholder consultations there were two teachers‘ organisations at the broader national level, namely LAT and the Lesotho Teachers Trade Union (LTTU). The LTTU does not seem to have been involved in this consultative process. This raises a concern as to whether there was a deliberate exclusion of other interest groups. The government of Lesotho at the time distrusted this organisation, for (among other reasons) it had been associated with the 1995 nation-wide teachers‘ strike over salaries. Thus while it may appear that teachers were represented at this important workshop, in my view this representation was not authentic. Subject panels, which act as NCDC curriculum development support structures (see Section 2.5) were not involved at this early stage of conceptualising environmental education. Van den Akker (2003) makes the point that many top-down curriculum reforms fail because they are characterised by the absence of timely and authentic involvement on the part of stakeholders; in this case teachers, through their subject panels or subject associations.
It also emerged from interviews with the Lesotho consultant who developed the project proposal, and the recorded minutes of initial consultation workshops, that the process of consultation did not take into account parents‘ views and learners‘ own
aspirations. While I acknowledge that involving parents and learners would have been an expensive and time-consuming task, it is necessary to recognise them as important stakeholder groups in curriculum reform processes (Marsh & Willis, 2007).