Promoting citizenship within early childhood classrooms in Pakistan

• In Event: Building the foundations for global citizenship in the early years

Proposal

Pakistan is among those developing countries where social degeneration has eaten into the moral fibre of society. Crime, violence, ill-discipline, intolerance and lawlessness interwoven, have created a society that is devoid of conscience and hence collapsing in terms of social, ethical and moral values. The erosion of ethical and moral values can be attributed to multiple factors such as poverty, ill literacy, inaccessibility to quality education and so on.

A compromised education system in which teachers lack training and curriculum that lacks in promoting ethical and humanistic values results in creating a downtrodden society. In Pakistan, the education system is framed within a didactic approach to teaching and learning. This approach promotes teaching of literacy and numeracy skills but ignores development of social, ethical, cultural, intellectual and emotional skills. In this kind of education, students are taught not to question and do as instructed, which corresponds to an autocratic view of learning. Since children are used to an autocratic approach, as adults, they are unable to think thing through and critically analyze situations. In today’s complex and ever-changing world, the importance of teaching ethical and moral values to our children cannot be overstated. A solid education in the early years can catapult our children into productive citizens aware of the social, political and human issues.

In response to the issues we face in society, I developed a training program for early childhood education teachers on how to develop thinking skills in young children by raising relevant and developmentally appropriate social issues. The discussion and ensuing activities promote citizenship education aims to inculcate respect for others (people, animals, property and environment) and recognition of the equality of all human beings irrespective of race, colour, ethnicity gender and religion and fosters a spirit of tolerance and peace. Based on need, a 5-hour training for early childhood teachers (teaching children between the ages of 4-8 years) has been designed to help teachers promote citizenship in their classrooms. Furthermore, a repository of teaching-learning material is being developed to effectively integrate values of tolerance, peace, respect, acceptance and integrity into the classroom. In the next two months this training will be piloted in 2-3 schools with 10-15 teachers working with young children. Based on the feedback from these trainings, the program will be further refined. As I continue to follow-up with the teachers and schools I hope to collect case studies and stories from teachers to further enrich the teaching and learning materials. Beyond the pilot I hope to collect evidence of good practices to help generate a design to upscale this project model.
In my presentation, I will be sharing highlights of the training, sample lesson plans, and stories of teachers delivering the lesson plans in their classrooms. We hope that we will be able to share many stories that will indicate positive influences on children, who in turn will be better citizens in the future.

Author

• Noshin Khan, Teachers' Resource Centre