A Letter from Ghana (7): Where My Journey Begins – by Christian Agyei
Dear readers,
I am Christian Agyei, a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) (Ghana), where I am pursuing an MPhil in Accounting Education. I am also one of the three Ghanaian participants in this year’s ASA Academia project #1104. It is a cooperation project between the University of Education Karlsruhe and the UCC about “Shaping Educational Transformation: Recognising and Breaking Colonial Patterns in Teacher Training Curricula“.
The first time I stood in front of a classroom as a teacher, I believed I was helping my pupils learn. But over time, I began to realize that something was missing, not in their effort, but in what we were teaching them and how we were teaching it.
Before this ASA journey begins, I would like to share where I come from and the experiences that have shaped my interest in education.
I come from Wamfie, a town in the Bono Region of Ghana. Growing up there, education was seen as an important pathway to opportunity, but also as something that often felt distant from our everyday realities. Education felt distant because much of what learners study in school is often presented through examples, languages, and experiences that do not always reflect their immediate environment. A child in a farming, fishing, trading, or informal-work community may learn from textbooks that use urban examples, foreign names, unfamiliar settings, or abstract situations that are not connected to what they see at home, in the market, on the farm, by the roadside, or in their local community.
After completing my secondary school education, I had the opportunity to teach at House of Hope International School in Dormaa Ahenkro. That experience would later shape how I see education today.
At House of Hope, one of the teaching methods we used was showing cartoons and animated movies to pupils. The idea was simple: to help the students to become better at speaking, reading, writing, and understanding English especially pronunciation, since most of the content was foreign. It also helped to keep the children engaged, because they naturally love visuals and storytelling.
However, during my three years there, I noticed something that stayed with me. Whenever the cartoons were playing, the classroom became completely quiet. At first, I thought the children were deeply enjoying the videos. But over time, I realized something different was happening. The silence was not always about understanding or enjoyment. Instead, the pupils were often confused.
They would later ask questions about what they had seen: objects, environments, and situations that were unfamiliar to them. Many of the things in the videos did not exist in their daily lives, so they struggled to relate to them. The same applied to the books and posters in the classroom, which showed places, names, lifestyles, objects, seasons, foods, houses, families, and experiences that were not common in the children’s Ghanaian environment.
For example, a classroom poster may show snow, winter coats, fireplaces, apples from temperate countries, nuclear family homes, trains, European-style streets, or children called Jack, Mary, Peter, and Susan. These are not wrong, but they may not immediately reflect the world of a child growing up in a Ghanaian community where daily life may include plantain, cassava, kenkey, cocoa farms, fishing, trotro stations, extended family homes, local markets, Harmattan, rainy seasons, and Ghanaian names such as Ama, Kofi, Esi, Kwame, or Adjoa.
This experience made me begin to question the kind of education we were delivering. Who was it really designed for? And how much of it reflected the realities of the learners? After three years at House of Hope, I gained admission to the University of Cape Coast to study Accounting Education. Even while studying, I returned to the school during vacations to continue teaching. I also observed how strongly parents desired their children to speak English with a foreign accent. Parents expressed this in different ways. Some openly said they wanted their children to “speak like people from abroad” or “speak like a white person”. Others praised children who used a British or American-sounding accent and corrected those who spoke English with a strong local Ghanaian accent, even when the English was clear and correct. This desire was also reflected in the schools they preferred, especially schools that promised “good English”, “Phonics“, “international standards”, or a British-style curriculum. This expectation influenced how schools structured their teaching, sometimes moving further away from local contexts.
This raised important questions for me, especially considering that Ghana’s education policy encourages the use of local languages at the basic level. There seems to be a gap between policy and practice, a topic I hope to explore further, including in comparison with the German education system.
Although I am studying Accounting Education, my experiences drew me strongly toward language and communication. After completing my first degree, I served at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Cape Coast. I later continued as a volunteer teaching assistant and eventually became a demonstrator (demonstrators assist lecturers by providing hands-on instruction to students) for the “Communicative Skills” course, which is taken by all first-year students. Teaching this course, which focuses on basic English grammar, allowed me to engage with students from diverse backgrounds and better understand the challenges they face with language.
At the same time, I worked as a research assistant on a project titled “Co-developing an Afrocentric Pedagogical Leadership Toolkit for Ghanaian Educators“. This was a Ghanaian-led initiative, but it was connected to the Open University in the United Kingdom through academic collaboration and project support. This action research involved teachers, headteachers, and education officers. Listening to their experiences, combined with my own journey in the classroom, deepened my understanding of how colonial patterns continue to shape education in Ghana.
For example, many educators reflected on how English remains the dominant language of schooling, even though many children first understand the world through their local languages. This means that learners may be judged as weak not because they lack ideas, but because they struggle to express those ideas in English.
The discussions also showed how school knowledge is often valued more when it appears formal, Western, or textbook-based, while local knowledge from families, communities, farms, markets, storytelling, and indigenous practices is rarely treated as equally important in the classroom.
These experiences are a major reason why the ASA project between KUE and UCC resonates strongly with me. The need to rethink curricula, make education more inclusive, and connect learning to local realities is not just theoretical for me; it is something I have seen and experiehttps://www.ph-karlsruhe.de/en/nced firsthand.
As I prepare for my first trip outside Ghana, I carry these experiences with me. I am excited to learn, to share, and to engage with new perspectives in Germany. At the same time, I remain rooted in the journey that began in Wamfie, continued in Dormaa Ahenkro, and is still unfolding.
This is where my story begins and I look forward to sharing with blog readers what comes next.
Text by Christian Agyei
Photos by Kingsley Kwamena Dav
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