43
Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA) - Myth or Reality! Vinayagum Chinapah (Sweden and Mauritius) is Professor, Chair Holder and Head of the Institute of International Education (IIE), Department of Education, Stockholm University, Sweden since 2009. He joined IIE in 1976 and served in different professional and research capacities from a lecturer up to the present position as Professor and Director. He had a Master Degree in Pedagogy with Honors at Charles University, Prague (1977) and a PhD in International and Comparative Education at Stockholm University (1983). He served as Deputy-Director of IIE for the period 1983-1992. By Professor Chinapah took leave from IIE in 1992 to be at UNESCO Professor Vinayagum Chinapah Headquarters in Paris as Director of the Joint UNESCO-UNICEF International Program on Monitoring the Quality of Education and Stockholm University Learning Achievement which covered some 80 countries worldSWEDEN wide during the period (1992-2006). He also served for one year as UNESCO Regional Educational Adviser for the Arab States, UNESCO Regional Office, Beirut, Lebanon (2007-2008) before returning back to lead IIE in January 2009. Professor Chinapah is member of various research associations and research councils and author and co-author of some 70 books, chapters in books, scientific journal articles as well as some 160 reports, conference papers, training manuals and prototypes for capacity building workshops world-wide. He has done research, training, and consultancies for several UN agencies (UNESCO, UNICEF. UNDP, FAO); International agencies (The World Bank, OECD); bilateral agencies (SIDA, Finnish CIMO, CIDA, Commonwealth Secretariat) and several national governments and institutions in some 140 countries world-wide over the past 40 years. He has supervised and co-supervised more than 60 PhD students and some 450 MA students who successfully completed under his leadership their thesis and graduated during the period 1981-2020.
Introduction There is a bourgeoning literature with an open discourse over the question whether an Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA) remains a myth or is it still a reality! There is a national discourse in Mauritius right now on the actual implementation of a policy for EQFA in view of the results shown for the 2019 students’ cohorts of the School Certificate (SC) and the Higher School Certificate (HSC) examination/performance, respectively. The author has written extensively on this “problematics” after several years of international and comparative research in this field of scientific inquiry. This policy paper is based on the sole premise that “(F)ailing or passing learners do neither represent nor justify what is learnt and what is not learnt”. There is therefore a need, more than ever, to understand the dynamics in teaching and learning within the framework of an education of quality for ALL (EQFA) based upon a learner-centered pedagogy so as to establish what must be taught and how each learner must be better prepared to optimize her/his learning potentials and attributes (Chinapah, TRAINING & employment magazine
www.tnemag.mu
