Preschool teachers’ views on early childhood development and early learning:

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Knowledge, training, and practice of early childhood teachers

Proposal

This study sets out to explore perspectives of Kenyan preschool teachers about children’s learning and participation in preschools in the rural area of Narok County in Kenya. As noted by Brofenbrenner (1979), children’s development is influenced by family, school and society (Brofenbrenner 1979, Bowes 2012). The importance of early childhood development and care has been widely recognised in developing countries as emotional, physical and social development have the significant impact on their daily lives and leading healthy and productive adult lives (World Bank 2016).
Historically, formal early childhood education begun in the 1940s in Kenya (Eshiwani, 1993; Mungai et al. 2017). It targeted the children of European settlers, and early childhood education was organised based on the British system, which taught basic academic skills with religious education (Eshiwani, 1993; Mungai et al. 2017). Currently, a number of preschools has been rapidly growing from 190 ECE centres in 1986 to 1153 in 2015 in Nairobi (KNBS 2015), for instance. While Kenya declared in the 2010 constitution that pre-primary is also compulsory and free for every child (World Bank 2016), 72 % of the preschool age children (4-5 years old) in Kenya are enrolled in preschool (World Bank 2016). Due to the minimum involvement of the government in Early Childhood Programmes, parents are expected to assist and manage preschools. This causes the issues of sustainable funding and programme consistency (Mungao et al. 2017). On one hand, traditionally, both boys and girls are expected to help with housework such as looking after cattle, fetching firewood, and yet girls play an additional role in taking care of younger siblings (Chege & Sifuna 2006). Plus, children are expected to obey senior siblings and adults’ instructions and orders. On the other hand, the role of a teacher was seen as the holder of knowledge and teaching methods were structured. Currently, some preschool teachers hired by their community are not professionally trained, hence some seem to face problems of handling small children in their classes and they tend to apply primary school based subjects such as writing and basic mathematics (Nakagawa & Utsumi 2010). Based on this background, to examine local teachers’ opinions on early childhood education through fieldworks are a significant contribution to the current discussions of early childhood education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Also very little study has been conducted to explore the notion of pre-primary education from local teachers’ perspectives in the context of Kenya, and to examine quality of pre-primary education implementation in the rural area of Kenya.
A qualitative research approach was employed for this study in order to investigate local teachers’ notion of preschool education, their opinions on teachers’ role, their needs and their experiences to enhance their preschool management capacity that will advance quality in preschool education in rural Kenya. The process of data collection is undertaken through semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and observation that look at teachers’ activities in managing preschools in their context.

According to the two week pilot study conducted in August 2018, responding to the government curriculum reform of pre-primary education in 2017 in Kenya, pre-primary has currently two grades of PP1 and PP2 for the ages of 4 and 5 children. The classes are held between 8:45 and 15:00 (depending on a school) everyday. Learning areas of early year education are mathematical, languages (English and Swahili), environmental, creative activities and religious education.

Three Pre-primary school teachers, one school head teacher, one ECD government officer, one university lecturer were interviewed during the pilot study in August 2018 in Kenya.
In line with ethnographical research epistemologies, I consider research participants as co-producers of knowledge about their lived realities, by centring their voices and experiences in my analyses. I also locate myself as a listener to and learner from local people for building my knowledge about their culture, tradition and their thoughts on early childhood development and education, rather than as an external researcher looking in.

An analysis of the interviews of the research participants demonstrated that: pre-primary education is important for small children to have a good foundation of learning; the role of a pre-primary teacher is to help small children be able to read Swahili, English, and gain basic knowledge in hygiene such as using a latrine; and pre-primary teachers should have good teaching skills. Furthermore, there is a clear gap in quality of pre-primary education implementation between the environment of pre-primary schools in the rural area and the proposed government pre-primary education policies that local pre-primary teachers make an effort in generating school finance, human resources, and teaching materials to manage pre-primary education. Also it was found that some schools collect school fees from parents of pre-primary students so that a school can employ teachers locally and purchase necessary teaching and learning materials.

Based on preliminary findings after the first phase of data collection to be conducted in February 2019, this study will identify some of the traditional, cultural and social factors that are perceived as a hindrance towards children’s rights and quality early childhood education. This study will make suggestions on improving quality in pre-school education in rural Kenya.

Author

• Taeko Takayanagi, Waseda University