Essential curricular resources to enable community-led preschool materials development

• In Event: Cultural relevance in early education: practical strategies for community engagement and innovation

Proposal

Overview. The Dengbe Bide program engages indigenous Baka communities in Cameroon to create preschool programs that honor their language and culture. Building on ASTRADHE director Brigitte Anziom’s presentation of the findings of a qualitative study on lessons learned to date, Mrs Strader will present elements of a toolkit designed to scale the program through adaptation by community-based organizations in new ethnolinguistic contexts.

Background and context. Dengbe Bide is implemented collaboratively by Cameroonian nonprofit ASTRADHE and US nonprofit Two Rabbits, who work closely with Baka communities through repeated cycles of design, implementation, assessment, and iteration. The program seeks to enable Baka children to pursue both formal schooling and traditional forest education. To do this, Dengbe Bide provides preschool programming that builds literacy, numeracy, language, executive functioning, and socioemotional skills as well as pride in Baka culture. There are three pillars to the Dengbe Bide model. First, the program creates interactive audio curriculum featuring songs, stories, and games in the Baka language and rooted in the forest environment. Second, Dengbe Bide engages youth nominated by the community to serve as teachers. The recordings and accompanying materials support teachers to deliver quality educational experiences despite their own low literacy levels. Third, the program trains and supports caregivers to manage the preschool center through school management committees.

Research Questions. To scale Denbge Bide to new contexts, ASTRADHE and Two Rabbits are partnering with FHI 360 and Durham University to develop a toolkit that will enable organizations of a similar profile to ASTRADHE to develop culturally relevant preschool programs with new communities. The toolkit will include two key components:
- Component 1: Curricular resources. Component 1 will provide a suite of pedagogical resources for early childhood interactive audio instruction that can be adapted to new contexts. This includes examples, templates, and guidelines for teacher guides, lesson scripts, children’s stories, and teacher training modules.
- Component 2: Guidelines and principles for cultural relevance. Component 2 will consist of guidelines designed to encourage communities to assess their needs, set priorities and adapt materials to their language, context, and values.

To develop the toolkit components, Two Rabbits and ASTRADHE asked the following questions:
- What resources can support small community-based organizations in indigenous and minority-group communities to develop their own preschool curriculum?
- What are the processes and guiding principles that these organizations can use to partner with communities to create preschool programs that honor their values and priorities?

In this presentation, Mrs Strader will present the methodology for developing the components of the toolkit, and the findings from the toolkit development process, including elements of the toolkit itself which will be piloted in new ethnolinguistic communities in Cameroon.

Author

• Sarah Strader, Two Rabbits