Curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher training: Considering culture

1. Curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher training: Considering culture Bame Nsamenang University of Yaoundé 1 & HDRC Technical Workshop of the Africa ECCD Initiative Cape Town, South Africa, 26-28 July 2010 Panel: Planning and Implementing Strategies for Expanding ECCD Quality and Access in Diverse Contexts

2. Africa’s triple-strand eccd heritages

3. Research reveals a hybrid childhood context (Nsamenang, 1995) • Contemporary Africa is neither entirely traditional not entirely modern; it is hybrid. • African parents expect their children’s performance of “traditional” as well as “modern” tasks. They readily take action to correct perceived deviations. • School progress; not an indigenous task but high on parental expectations! • Parents scaffold the various responsibilities they assign to children according to maturity and capability.

4. ECCD efforts: More of science than pedagogy • No existing theory effectively captures the complexity of Africa’s triple-strand eccd heritages. • The science: Brain development, Literacy, Nutrition, Investment in early development, etc. Breastfeeding; African traditions, displaced by formula feeds as evidence-based; then breastfeeding now as “the science!” • Legitimate apprehension: What “of us” is in these efforts? Despair and learned helplessness from “nothing good in us …” • Where is the “how to” module for eccd efforts?

5. HDRC Initiative to fill the cultural and pedagogic gaps of Africa’s curricula • HDRC Initiative on Teacher Education Textbooks and Tools • First product: African educational theories and practices: a generative teacher education handbook • Second proposed product: The pedagogy of ecd science • A positioning for Africa‘s way forward • Children are the foundation of humanity / nationhood ... Invest in them! • Education, a means for personal, societal and national/continental progress / development ...

6. Africa’s most urgent needs • Transformational education, beginning with eccd programs and services. • Contribute substantively to the reality that “all cultures can contribute knowledge of universal value” (UNESCO, 1999), beginning with Africa‘s worldview and procreation ideas and ecd theories and practices. • Create a tangible hub for the elusive rhethoric to transform Africa’s education expressed by the OAU (now AU) in 1961. • That hub is teachers and teacher education in general and ecd teachers and teacher education in particular.

7. ECCD curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher training: Incorporating culture • Basic principles: Active participatory learning; Better together • Nsamenang (2008): Children’s natural curiosity to be active and participative becomes noticeable from an early age (in all cultures). • Children and adults learn best through hands-on experiences with people, materials, events, ideas, and so on.

8. ECCD curriculum • Curricular emphasis not only on adult-child interaction but more so child-to-child socialization/interactions and peer mentoring and teaching. • Carefully design culture-sensitive learning environments and a plan > do > review process that builds children up, strengthens their initiatives and self-reliance with the mission that they will improve the circumstances they inherited. • Teach children to notice, initiate, discover, cooperate, and learn about ideas, events, people, visions, etc. • It should be about children creating, experimenting, problem-solving, resolving conflicts, and understanding and respecting diversity as they learn and develop.

9. Organizational framework for ECCD curriculum: Parenting (ethno)theories • The developmental niche framework (Super & Harkness, 1986) that considers social-anthropological and psychological factors: • Physical and social settings of childhoods: • Development takes place in a specific physical/social setting • Cultures interpret and organize settings according to cultural meaning systems … not a universal curriculum or civilization • Cultures impute own cultural agendas on to the biology of human development: development is a cultural construction. • Childrearing traditions • Africans children’s routines and caregiving activities • Psychology of caretakers • Other perspectives: practitioners, researchers, etc. • Sibling & peer perspectives: Children as primary stakeholders in ECCD, who are “active agents” in their own self-care, self-education and development.

10. Two parenting ideologies/belief systems • Nsamenang (2008): Reigning Western developmental theories position the care of infants and children as a specialized task of adulthood, hence the primacy of parental ethnotheories (Harkness & Super, 1996). • Weisner (1997): African theories separate the learning of childhood skills from the life stage of parenthood and position sibling and peer caregiving as children’s “shared management, caretaking, and socially distributed support” of the family, hence the significance of child-to-child socialization.

11. Language of instruction: A critical curricular issue • Most African children face a language challenge as they leave their homes and start school. While most African children speak their mother tongues, most African pre-school and primary education programmes promote an inherited European language or Arabic as the main language of literacy and the main written medium of instruction. • In such a context, the preschool has the implicit role of preparing pre-school children for the foreign language pre-primary and primary education curriculum. • On the basis evidence from several sources, there appears a lack of coherence and continuity between three language levels: • the home language • the preschool curriculum and • the primary school curriculum • The home inadequately prepares children for the preschool, which equally inadequately prepares children for the language challenges of the primary school programme. • How, then, can we design the preschool curriculum to bridge the language gap between the home and the school in multilingual African countries? The key issues are language development, mother tongue and foreign language acquisition, language policy on language of instruction, teacher training, pre-school pedagogy, etc. >> cultural identity issue of foreign language learning!

12. A holistic curriculum • An African curriculum does not divide knowledge into discrete fields, the so-called disciplines or domains of personality. • Social, emotional, cognitive, language, moral, and physical lessons are not learned separately by infants and children, even adults. • Infants and toddlers experience life more holistically than any other age group. • Adults who are most helpful to young children interact in ways that understand that the child is learning from the whole experience, not just that part of the experience to which the adult gives attention.

13. A curriculum sequenced on developmental milestones • The curriculum should borrow from the African school of life (Moumouni, 1968): Build preschool curriculum on and into the early learning from the daily routines and activities of the family and community, as most African children begin learning a cultural curriculum, including the mother tongue, from an early age. • Teach children to learn from noticing and acting and connecting with both local and global ideas, events, people and the ways of the world. • Teachers, peer mentors & children are active partners in shaping educational experiences.

14. A comprehensive, flexible curriculum • Should be developmentally appropriate to promote children's social-emotional development and learning (in the core areas of literacy, language, mathematics, science, and social studies). • Curricular content and practices should be flexible by design, easily adapted to individual needs and societal and institutional requirements. • Should reveal a comprehensive system of • a training model that integrates with high-quality assessment, professional development, and family connection resources to create a well-rounded program that addresses the needs of early childhood education professionals, children, and their families. • Culturally-appropriate defined curriculum content areas for each topic and age group (age-set), • teaching practices, • assessment tools, and

15. Build on children’s agency • If we could see children as competent participants in cultural communities (Rogoff, 2003), we would see the need to organise child development services and research to reach children in their cultural contexts so that they and their communities could fully participate (Lanyasunya &Lesolayia (2001). • A creative curriculum should combine the latest research and the freshest ideas into a forward-thinking approach to learning--one that honors children’s resourcefulness and innovation in cultural context and respects the role that teachers, including siblings and peer mentors, play in making learning exciting and relevant for every child in their classrooms.

16. Aim of the programme & Target groups • Curricular purpose is to produce teachers who can: • Understand the early stages of a human development and how to stimulate/promote healthy child development. • Teach in the Early Childhood Development Sector • Facilitate active learning in Early Childhood Development • Manage the learning programmes in Early Childhood Development • Facilitate healthy development in ECCD programmes • Target groups • Educators/Practitioners working in the ECCD field with only practical experience or with inadequate training. • Teachers planning a career change or who have an interest in ECD. • Students who are interested to start a career in ECD. • Persons who are running or interested in starting a Daycare Centre.

17. Advocate: Do you want to live with your mother? Child: No Advocate: Why? Child: She beats me. Advocate: Okay, so you want to live with dad? Child: No Advocate: Why not? Child: He beats me too; he has no time. Advocate: So, who do you want to live with? Child: My siblings and peer group Advocate: Why? Child: They are always with me and have time. They play with me and never beat anyone so hard! Thank you, but let’s reflect on and connect the following to the ubiquity of child-to-child socialization across Africa