Muki Moeng ’99
“Curriculum development is my passion,” said Muki Moeng ’99 during a spring semester presentation on student success at St. Cloud State. “The status quo needs to be disrupted.”
Referring to her work as institutional director of teaching and learning at North-West University, Potchesfstroom, South Africa, Moeng noted “curriculum transformation needs to be prioritized and resourced” to serve diverse student populations.
Moeng earned a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from St. Cloud State as one of the first three exchange students from the University of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where she later returned as a lecturer. She earned a doctorate in curriculum there during a period of momentous social change in her country.
As a doctoral student, Moeng experienced an educational system in flux. At times she was the only black student in class and sometimes felt excluded when her instructor and other classmates shared a set of cultural references outside of her experience. Today Moeng helps new and experienced lecturers transform curriculum to reflect demographically changed classrooms.
Moeng said a curriculum that goes unchallenged for a long period can “become like a cemetery — a sacred place, a repository of precious traditions.” When it reaches this status, resistance to change can be great. A transformed curriculum can be challenged, refined and modified. Moeng is committed to an ongoing process of challenging the status quo, as opposed to the “big bang approach.”
“The curriculum should not just make students employable,” Moeng said. “What kind of humans are we developing? As educators, we must consider the roles in citizenship students must assume.”
