Examination of Tanzania Secondary School Mathematics Teacher Education Program Alignment with Knowledge, Skills, and Competencies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Beyond

This chapter examines Tanzanian secondary mathematics teacher education programs in alignment with Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) knowledge, skills, and competencies. With increased advancement in automation, and technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics, many workers will be replaced, and new, valuable knowledge workers who adapt to their occupations will evolve alongside capable machines. The adaptive worker will need high-level cognitive capabilities, socio-emotional skills, creativity, complex communication, and the ability to unlearn, learn, and relearn. To address the goal of this chapter, a systematic literature review was conducted to synthesize the relevant literature concerning the relationship between mathematics and 4IR. The literature review showed that mathematics plays a special role in all aspects of 4IR. Hence, teachers should be prepared to teach in ways that cause students to develop a deep conceptual understanding of domain-specific knowledge and twenty-first-century competencies in the cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal domains. Data for this chapter were drawn from documents and guidelines used to prepare mathematics teachers at the secondary and high school levels. The findings of this research indicate that, while mathematics teacher education programs do a good job of teaching and reinforcing knowledge skills, they do not emphasize developing or testing teachers’ interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and competencies. This suggests the need for curriculum reforms that involve the utilization of cutting-edge technology, the implementation of deeper learning pedagogical approaches, and a concerted effort to consciously teach and emphasize interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, knowledge, and competencies.