Project IRIS - Introducing Reverse Innovation to HEI in Tanzania - Active Pedagogy Linking Communities
By James Kazoka and Ritva Hyttinen.
The current Tanzania National Development Policy and strategies to alleviate poverty and the ambition to become a middle industrialized country will not be fulfilled if universities do not address community needs. Innovation pedagogy, which facilitates university industrial linkage to solve community needs and working life demands, can be a solution. By adopting the FinTan innovation pedagogy model, will not only be the pioneers of change and early adopters but will also be a unique university which produces unique graduates who are competent, knowledgeable, full of practical skills and capable of competing in the labour market and creating new employments to others. HEIs management, teaching staff and students need to embrace the change and be flexible enough to influence the changes.
The theory of social identity highlights the meaning of group membership and relations between individuals and variety of groups in the society (Tajfel 1982). According to Mor Barak (2017), memberships of social groups are significant and people tend to categorize themselves and others rather through their group connections than paying attention to individual characteristics. Members of a group establish an ingroup whereas others form outgroups and during social identification phase, people evaluate the significance of groups and they compare their own attitudes and norms with the values of in-group. Others are “they” who form out-group whereas “we” are in-group members who share similar awareness and perceptions among the group. According to social identity theory, members of a group have tendency to favour their own group members over the others. Social identity theory maintains that people wish to be part of teams that enjoy positive and distinguishing identity. (Tajfel 1982; Tajfel & Turner 1979; Tajfel & Turner 1986.) One intention of IRIS has been melting boarders around separate groups in the society so that people could rather communicate, work together and co-create to benefit the community than isolate to own groups.
Tanzanian Tumaini University Dar es Salaam College (TUDARCo) and Finnish Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) have collaborated from 2012 onwards and from 2017 onwards co-operation has focused on the project IRIS. IRIS objectives was to increase active role of TUDARCo in the society so that university is able to cultivate ideas arising from local communities, to support communication, concrete collaboration and information sharing which promote participation and equality in the society. These ambitious objectives were reached through three development steps: Firstly, new innovative pedagogy and accredited curricula, secondly new concrete collaboration with micro-entrepreneurs and thirdly new developed information services to encourage communities to use libraries.
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