The New School Texts-Innovation or Challenge?
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to take a critical look at the new school texts developed based on the new competence-based curriculum applied as an innovation in the elementary 9-year and pre-University education. These texts play quite an important role in the social development of the students, whose knowledge of literature (narration, description, argumentation, and information) and language are intertwined to build their communication skills. Being newly introduced, its review requires special care and attention to see how the new teaching programs are translated into texts, i.e. the students' learning tools. The article looks into how topics and are treated in the new texts of the Albanian language and literature in terms of efficiency and usefulness for the students. The texts were reviewed on the basis of certain indicators, such as: level of adaptation to the students' needs, interests, and skills, relevance of the texts to the program content and objectives, clarity of presentation on the computer pages, number of pictures, graphs, maps, external characteristics of texts, clarity of objectives, elaboration of the chapters, the methods used, the explanatory language and its relevance to the students' needs, etc. The study focused on the school books of the Albanian Language used from the 10th to the 12th grade in 2018-2019 in one of the most well-known high schools of the capital, “Petro Nini Luarasi”. Taking into account the young age of these texts and the challenges that they will have to overcome with time, it is deemed reasonable to have this study contributing to ensuring perfect development in the future. The texts of Albanian Language and Literature are the only texts compiled by national authors, and based on modern models and on their authors' views, didactic choices, preferred conceptual treatments, and their subjectivity translated into a physical object, i.e. a text produced by the printing house. It is, however, still early to talk about consolidated texts, given that they were only introduced with the competence-based curriculum in 2016-2017 only, for the subject of Albanian Language for the 10th grade. Some of the issues related with this text could be addressed by including specialized teachers in evaluating such texts, collecting feedback from teachers and reflecting their comments and suggestions in the improved editions, and establishing an observation mechanism for school texts, i.e. a good practice applied in developed countries. The quality of the curriculum is key to ensuring successful education, cultivating students’ skills and values, and it therefore requires continued research and constructive attention.
Keywords: innovation, new school texts, the competence-based curriculum, language and literature.
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