TEACHING AND LEARNING SWIMMING WITHOUT WATER: A CASE OF NIGERIAN NEW CURRICULUM REFORM

Abstract

The recent overhaul of Nigeria's national curriculum for basic and senior secondary education implemented in the 2025/2026 academic year aims to modernize education by streamlining subjects and mandating practical, high-demand skills such as Solar PV Installation and Digital Technologies. This paper, written from the perspective of Instructional Technology argues that the ambition of the reform is fundamentally undermined by a catastrophic misalignment between design and capacity, conceptualized as Teaching and Learning Swimming without Water. Utilizing the ADDIE model, the analysis identifies a critical failure in the Analysis phase, which ignored severe, quantifiable systemic deficits: an inadequate national teacher-pupil ratio of more than (1:35) and a pervasive lack of specialized infrastructure and equipment. This capacity gap forces instructional delivery to default to theoretical learning, negating the practical skill objectives. To bridge this divide, the paper proposes strategic remediation through Instructional Technology, including the deployment of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and simulation software to substitute for absent physical laboratories, and the use of technology-aided structured pedagogy for scalable teacher professional development. Ultimate success hinges on adopting a phased, data-driven implementation model that respects real-world capacity constraints.