Enseignement de la chimie au Cameroun : analyse des programmes de 1960 à 2013. Impact sur les pratiques enseignantes

Abstract

The present study analyzes the content of high school chemistry programs as well as their validity in a learning environment based on an integral formative development pedagogy (Borne, 1998); a pedagogy in which the place assigned to the acquisition of knowledge and know-how are designed to foster general individual skills and the general education of the student. This thesis specifically looks at the impact of external constraints to teachers and more specifically the structure of secondary school chemistry programs during their development in secondary education in Cameroon during the period from 1960 to 2013 – on the teaching practices of the teachers of this discipline. The main strategy of analysis being content analysis, data collection techniques are therefore those of qualitative analysis namely the study of documents and interviews. The numerical results issued from the analysis of the programs have undergone statistical processing which permitting to bring out for principal objectives and tree predominant structuring of knowledge from chemistry syllabus. It appears that secondary school chemistry programs, during their evolution, were reformed in accordance with the "evolutionary dissociated" method (Braybrooke and Lindblom, 1963). Indeed, these reforms took into account only some aspects such as the introduction of the number of hours by chapter, the transfer of certain chapters from a level of education to another ... and not only did not take into account the evolution of the subject content, but also the contextualization of these contents as they are apprehended by the teachers of this discipline. This type of reform is causing a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, because it allows teachers to rely on routines and practices advocated by the old programs. From this study we were able to show that the predominant structures of chemistry programs such as structuring content by topics, the number of chapters by level of study and even hourly quota allocated to the teaching of chemistry do not favor the accomplishment of teaching tasks according to a knowledge building strategy that meets the current educational requirements, but rather according to a strategy of knowledge transfer. The teaching of chemistry as prescribed by official programs, thereby reduces the learning of chemistry to a mere acquisition of theoretical knowledge.