To maintain academic credibility and relevance, many Sub-Saharan African universities emphasis content coverage over skills development. This produces graduates with subject knowledge without sufficient transferable skills for personal survival, employment and personal growth, leaving them unprepared for contemporary world demands. Despite official curriculum reforms incorporating 21st century competencies and established content-focused teaching continue to persist. It is against this backdrop that this study adopted the qualitative constructivist case study design to examine how Social Studies education bridges the overt and covert curricula in cultivating survival skills among pre-service students at the University of Education, Winneba. Through maximum variation purposive sampling, fourteen (14) Social Studies lecturers were sampled to provide information capable of constructing knowledge on how Social Studies education bridges the nexus between overt and covert Social Studies curriculum to develop university-based competencies among students. It emerged that, with the integrated nature of the Social Studies curriculum at the University of Education, Winneba, which focuses on problem-solving, and citizenship education, there is a unique bridge between the overt and the covert curricula leading to the development of seven key survival skills as such development of metacognitive awareness, problem-solving skills, communication skills, self-regulation skills, collaboration skills, perseverance and adaptability tendencies. This bridging function represents a powerful application of both transformative education and utility-value of Social Studies thereby creating a learning experience that simultaneously challenges students’ existing frameworks of understanding while demonstrating immediate relevance to their academic and civic lives.
Yalley et al. (Wed,) studied this question.