As strategic hubs for knowledge generation and skill development, the AU fisheries and aquaculture CoEs play a critical role in addressing the continent’s food security, environmental sustainability, and economic objectives. Education prepares individuals for life and work by developing their minds and perspectives, while training prepares individuals for specific tasks or roles through skill acquisition. In practice, both are essential, especially in fields like aquaculture and fisheries where professionals need both deep understanding (education) and hands-on competencies (training).
Centres of Excellence require highly skilled human resources to cultivate adaptability and lifelong learning through education and, job readiness and task performance through training. For the CoEs to be fully fit for purpose to deliver the required human capacity for Africa to transform its fish production output to sustainably meet its food security requirements and develop its ‘blue economy’, their courses and capacities must be enabled by (i) visionary education leadership that can focus on the recontextualization and reproduction of scientific knowledge to drive the AU aquaculture and fisheries development mandate; (ii) financial resources for on-going professional development of the researchers’ curriculum design and teaching competencies for education as well as for training.
This presentation applies Basil Bernstein’s concepts of knowledge production, recontextualisation, and reproduction to the analysis of curriculum development processes within emerging Centres of Excellence (CoEs) at African universities, focused on building sustainable human resource capacities in aquaculture and fisheries. Bernstein’s Pedagogic Device offers a valuable framework for examining how disciplinary knowledge is produced by experts, recontextualised by policy actors and institutional stakeholders, and ultimately transmitted through pedagogic practices to students at the university and adult learners in non-university learning contexts. This presentation explores why and how it is necessary to explicitly structure the knowledge transfer process so that it is appropriate to the needs of AU and member state policies and institutions.