1. Introduction
Early Childhood Education (ECE) is very important in our endeavour to
meet the targets for Education For All (EFA) which are: Quality early
childhood education and care, Free and compulsory primary Education,
Life skill and training for youth, Adult literacy, Girls education and
relevant basic education. As reflected here, Early Childhood Development
is a foundation on which our education for all and especially basic
education should be founded.
2. Early childhood education: a definitionAccording
to a supervisor (1) of Early Childhood Education within Kisumu
municipality, this level comprises education that cares for the child
from the foetal stage to age five.
This expert came up with the following sub divisions of the level.
(i) 0-1 years-Womb and Home training.
(ii) 1-3 years - Baby/ Kindergarten class.
(iii) 4 years- Middle class.
(iv) 5 years-Pre unit.
Thus,
at the age of six years, the child should be joining grade/ standard
one. Learning at this level should be holistic. The expert told me that,
ideally, the child should grow in stature, wisdom and socially. The
learning environment should be conducive and should include play,
acquisition of new knowledge and self and other discovery.
Our
paper deals with quality. The quality of something is a judgement on the
degree of overall excellence. Since it is a judgement; a person often
uses his/ her own criteria to make the judgement. This is not much use
if we wish to discuss "quality of learning environment" sensibly.
Everyone needs to agree on the criteria. After such an agreement, then
all are able to use the accepted criteria to evaluate learning
situations. They are also able to identify weaknesses in terms of the
criteria. This should help decide on steps to remedy any weaknesses.
What the expert gave me, I believe is the agreed yardstick for the early
childhood education in Kenya. An in-depth look at what the inspector
told me to identifies three major areas namely: pupil characteristics,
content characteristics and to some extent, the teacher characteristics.
These are the ideals. However, numerous questions arise. For instance,
how many Early Childhood centres meet this criterion? Secondly, are
people who run such institutions even aware of such requirements?
Because
of the obvious answers to these questions among others the state of
these institutions is worrying. For one, owners and promoters of Early
Childhood Education create the institutions as pathways for mothers to
enter the job market. Indeed, not in one gender workshop have I heard
advocates of gender equality fighting for the promotion of the same
through investment in Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres so that
mothers can be free to grow in the development arena. Increasingly also,
early childhood schooling is perceived as an easy profit making
business for entrepreneurs who are short of skills, space and capital.
After all, all that you need is a room and parents who are desperate for
a child minder or whose children have reached kindergarten age and the
parents cannot afford to take them into the prestigious pre-schools. Due
to this, the situation on the ground is often times worrying as
demonstrated here-below.
3. The real situationIt
is difficult to describe in brief the most common situations, or
scenarios of Early childhood Learning environment. However, the case
study below demonstrates main characteristic of the same:
The
classroom is one half of a timber building with corrugated iron roof and
no ceiling. The design betrays the fact that it was originally meant to
be a shop. It is July. Kenya's most wet month. When the heavy rains
fall, it is extremely difficult to hear a person speaking.
There
are spaces between the timber and the child flows in unabated. There is a
small table which the teacher uses for her cane and books. It is thus a
storage.
There are no shelves or flat working surfaces. There is one round table and unmatching small chairs crowded around it.
There
are about thirty scantly dressed children, ranging from three years to
five. One of them is loudly reading the alphabetical charts as the rest
follow. It sounds like a Call-Response pattern of a folk song. There are
a few other illustration charts with poorly done drawings. Some
illustrates the numerals, others, names of animals and a few, names of
people.
There is no children's work on display.
The
teacher is a young woman who recently completed her four-year secondary
school course. She hopes to join the private sponsored Early Childhood
Teacher training through her church that runs this centre. Her pay is
roughly Kshs. 800 per month. But all this depends on how fast the
parents pay fees for the children. The fee is Kshs. 100 per child per
month but it is rarely paid.
She lives in one room behind her
classroom. As she sits at her table, she knits a sweater for her
forthcoming baby. She wears a stern face and seems oblivious of what her
pupils are doing.
4. Discussion on the caseFrom
this case study, we derive the variables that have a relationship with
the quality of a learning environment. These variables include; the
physical learning environment, the learner characteristics and the
teacher characteristics.
4.1 Physical learning environmentIn
this area, the most important aspects are the infrastructure and the
availability and accessibility to learning materials. Apart from those
sponsored by Non-governmental Organisations, most
Early childhood Education centres lack adequate furniture. While some centres have no
furniture at all, many more do not have enough for the number of
enrolled pupils. Often times, the furniture does not match the physical
size and stature of children.
This furniture that is ill- adapted
to the physical size of children is uncomfortable and can cause
postural discomfort and pain. Some centres have benches that are fixed
too far from the table the children use. This strains the child's arm
when writing. Typically, children bend over the writing table and this
undesirable practice is due to a combination of poor seeing conditions
and furniture misfits.
Another important and often overlooked
aspect is relevance of the materials used and subsequently, the content
learnt. The work of researchers indicates that the availability of good
quality instructional material is an important factor on pupil
achievement. Thus, well-produced and easily available reference material
is an important asset. But, the contents that are irrelevant to the
experiences of students, denigrate their culture or ignore their
language, and are unlikely to stimulate interest or assist achievement.
4.2. Learner characteristicsLearner
characteristics are the attributes that the pupils bring with them to
school from their home and social environments. These are wide ranging.
They affect how well the child responds to the learning environment.
Important influences on the child's readiness for learning include:
Nutrition; Level of physical and mental stimulation; Attitude of parents
to school; Degree of parent caring in the home; The individual's
personality.
In general, the health and nutritional status of
Kenya rural children is far from satisfactory. Growth retardation (as
indicated by rates of stunting) and malnutrition are common and often
relate in part to the high prevalence of infections and common illnesses
among children. Children with communicable diseases and infections who
come to school are likely to infect their classmates especially due to
overcrowding. Many common health problems can also be associated with
poor environmental health in and around the learning establishment. The
prevalence of under nutrition and grade retardation are widespread
especially in the rural areas and poor slum areas in the neighbourhood
of urban centres. Poor health causes chronic absenteeism, which impedes
performance. Hunger is also not rare. This is a stressful state that can
interfere with the learning process. Due to poverty in their homes,
many young children attend centres and go for long periods of time
without eating. Some go without breakfast and many miss lunch. Others
miss both lunch and breakfast. Hungry children are often less alert and
lethargic.
At the family level, delayed entry, stagnation and
also absenteeism coincides with the occupation of the parent. Among poor
families high rates of absenteeism are often recorded due to lack of
the small fee or health related problems. Most of the households depend
on subsistence farming for survival.
Household incomes, are
therefore, likely to fluctuate around the poverty line frequently enough
for the resultant nutritional shortfalls to lead to chronic
malnutrition. At the same time, low household incomes lead to neglect of
childhood illness, especially where households have to cost share in
the provision of medical services. All these factors negatively affect
the physical, emotional and cognitive development of the child.
4.3 Teacher characteristicsBorrowing
from the
ECD supervisor's analysis, the parent is a child's first
teacher. Child psychologists and educators argue that the beginning of
learning and good health is congenital. Parents therefore need to be
sensitised on the fact that the foetus needs to be handled with care
since its gestation period is a foundation to the future personality.
When
the children join the centres, we observe that there is significant
association between pupil quality of learning and the length and the
nature of the teachers' post secondary schooling and the length of
professional training the teacher have land.
A teacher's own
educational level, professional training experience and motivation,
acquisition of personnel needs, have an impact on how well her pupils
perform.
The nutritional and motivational needs of teachers
cannot be overlooked. In hardship areas, teachers may also be hungry and
in need of a meal or a snack during the school day. Community spirit
needs to be encouraged so as to promote sharing of food resources among
all who are hungry.
The foregoing suggests that the professional
training of the Early childhood teacher is of paramount importance.
However, most countries, Kenya included, demand much lower entrance
requirements for this level than others. Indeed, in Kenya, many early
childhood education teaching posts are filled with the untrained people.
Yet this is a crucial stage of cognitive and other significant modes of
personality development. Sustaining ECD teachers is quite another
matter. Firstly, there is a glaring discrepancy in that teachers at all
other levels (primary school, secondary school, middle level collages
and university) are in salaried government employment. On the other
hand, the ECD teacher, by Kenya government policy is not on the
government payroll. Most urban councils pay regular salaries to ECD
teachers similar to other teachers. This leaves out the ECD teachers in
the rural areas. In theory, the community should pay these. In practice,
their payment or non-payment vary from school to school and from season
to season.
5. Conclusion and way forwardThe
foregoing discussion, albeit brief, gives a number of tips on the
quality of the learning environment at the ECD level with particular
reference to the sector as a small enterprise concern in Kenya. We
define learning environment to include the degree to which the school
meets physical need of the learner, the learners' own characteristics
and the characteristics of the instructor. One area that has not been
catered for here is the instructional process. We observe that learning
is incomplete unless there is a conscious effort to make it holistic.
However, we note with concern that even at this very sensitive stage
there is a lot of rote learning with a central focus to the cognitive
development of the child. For instance, though the child might have
acquired other skills at the ECD level, entry to grade one is determined
by their achievements in the 3 Rs. Thus, achievement on such areas as
health, social and cultural aspects or even spiritual dimensions is
completely ignored. The pressure to acquaint the children with academic
skills deprives them of playtime. This guides our judgement of quality
of Kenya's ECD towards the negative scale.
Secondly, our analysis
of the hypothetical case study unveils a lot that needs to be done to
address a cross- section of challenges that deviate Kenya's ECD from the
right track. To intervene in this, the following suggestions are made
.Our government should:
- Endorse and disseminate learning comfort norms and learning environmental health standards for all ECD centres.
- Ensure
a focus on the holistic development of the child. The interventions by
NGOs are often entitled ECD Health and Nutrition. Due to this, it is
quite possible to focus on health related interventions and forget the
cognitive aspects of child development. On the other hand, government
driven interventions are geared towards cognitive achievements and may
easily overlook the health and nutrition aspects.
- Identify,
promote and disseminate the best package of health, nutrition and
education interventions from among practises known to improve the lives
of children, and which can be delivered at the ECD centres.
- Examine the possibility of instituting an ECD equipment scheme.
- Search for durable approaches for providing relevant instructional materials.
- Facilitate the raising of awareness of local communities about teachers' needs.
- Determine and review ECD teachers' salaries and conditions of services.
- Ensure provision of basic needs and services to ECD teachers in disadvantaged areas and communities.
In
summary, early childhood education has, for a long time, been at the
periphery of the education programming in Kenya. It was formerly
considered as social rather than an education activity. There are no
specific budget allocations for ECE, except for school inspection and
minimal amounts for teacher training. Parents and the community,
therefore, have to provide learning facilities and materials, somehow
take care of the teacher, and generally run the programme. All these
factors have serious implications for the cognitive development of the
child at this foundational level. The importance of building this
foundation should be reflected in adequate government allocation for ECD
teacher payment and training. If this happens, then Kenya would be
taking a giant step towards the right track in quality of learning
environment at its ECD level.
Further, as indicated in the EFA
Global Report of 2002, the extent of early childhood care and education
(ECCE) is still relatively an uncharted territory. Comparative data in
this area from diverse social, geographical and other significant areas
of the country and regions need to be collected. Thus, there is need for
serious research in this area.
Children should be supervised at all times.