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 definition
According 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 situation
It 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 case
From 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 environment
In 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 characteristics
Learner 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 characteristics
Borrowing 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 forward
The 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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment