Enhancing the Teaching of Family and Consumer Sciences: The Role of Graphic Organisers

In a world of constant and rapid change there are greater demands placed on learners to not only gain content knowledge, but also to develop learning skills and to adopt new strategies that will enable them to produce better and faster learning outcomes. Especially in internationally advancing nations like Kuwait this will be a major challenge of the future. This literature review examines theoretical frameworks that enhance Kuwaiti teachers’ knowledge and skill to adopt culturally relevant reform practices across a number of disciplines and provide guidance in an exploration and use of newer pedagogical tools like graphic organisers. It analyses the effects of graphic organisers on higher order learning and evaluates how they can effect professional development and pedagogical change in Kuwait. Globalisation and Internationalisation has diminished the time and space that once existed between nations. While Internationalisation has led to a tremendous increase in the importance of international trade, interaction, international relations, treaties, alliances, and interactions between sovereign nations, globalisation has moved many formerly national economies to the status of one global economy through global economic integration (Daly, 1999). Today, cultural interaction and communication is an international necessity. People who were once culturally and linguistically isolated from others are now doing business and living life together with their counterparts around the world. In this new world, not only are there ever-increasing demands for new knowledge there is also the necessity to develop new paradigms for finding, applying and sharing knowledge. At a national level, demands are also being made for substantial changes in education (Christou, 2010) which will equip the next generation of producers, business persons and civic leaders to move their countries away from resource dependent economies to ones that foster creativity and innovation in all aspects of professional, commercial and private life. Faced with these challenges, many educational researchers have realised the need for a reformation of educational systems in ways that will more efficiently and effectively empower students to expand their existing capacities for learning, increase their abilities to acquire new competencies and enable them to become active participants and contributors to global knowledge (Spring, 2008; International Bureau of Education (IBE), 2010) and to be able to confront the challenges that the next generation will face. Before this reformation can occur, teachers need to be willing to leave their traditional approaches to teaching and implement current evidence-based strategies and teaching tools (Lawless & Pellegrino, 2007; Al-Ajmi & Reys, 2010) that will promote greater flexibility in teaching approaches, foster deeper cognitive learning (Davidowitz, Rollnick, & Fakudze, 2005; Hargreaves, 2003) and support higher order thinking, as well as develop a greater focus on problem solving and engage students with more authentic learning experiences (Caskey, 2002). Although these changes in approaches to teaching need to be globally enacted, they also need to affect national education policies and curriculum in a way that respects the cultural context of the different countries (Reid, Gill, & Sears, 2010) so that all students will be able to apply higher order learning skills to functioning effectively in their relevant