INDIVIDUAL SUPPORT TO PUPILS FOR ENHANCING LEARNER AUTONOMY AND RESPONSIBILITY: CASE OF PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS IN BUKAVU DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

This paper deals with enhancing learner autonomy and responsibility in the teaching and learning process. The gap in learner autonomy and responsibility results in low quality of education, amongst many factors. For data collection, qualitative approach applying semi-structured interviews was used. In total, sixprimary school teachers were interviewed. Contentanalysis was used to analyze data. Through this study, it has been revealed that quality of teaching and learning is a must, and therefore targets to contribute to sustainability. Teachers who implement both the participatory and active pedagogy and the cognitive activation by tasks seemed to enhance their students autonomy and responsibility. The interviews with teachers revealed that learner autonomy and responsibility are still missing in the Congolese praxis. This paper has also explained why should teachers foster individual support to students to enhance learner autonomy and responsibility. Individual support helps in reducing students lack of competencies, dropouts and grade repetitions. By applying learner autonomy and responsibility, students gain experiences not only from peers while working in pairs and groups and this is very helpful in the learning process for students achievements while targeting outcomes. The experience students gain from others helps them improve their perception on things and the result is that students gain competencies. Learner autonomy helps learners to be more responsible for their lives, they are enabled to work and live autonomously and responsibly.