Using Indigenous Learning Resources to Support Children’s Learning - Experiences from PAL Network’s Every Language Teaches Us (ELTU) Project

• In Event: Diverse needs for diverse students - an exploration of health and wellbeing

Proposal

UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates that 617 million children and adolescents worldwide have not achieved minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics, despite multiple years of schooling (UIS, 2017). With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the globe and forcing school closures, the resultant "learning poverty” (World Bank, 2019) is expected to deepen significantly. Distancing from formal education during the pandemic disproportionately affected children who were already disadvantaged. To tackle these challenges, governments across the Global South supported distance education, incorporating blended learning approaches. However, due to the gap between learning content and children’s local contexts, most education systems in developing economies were not able to adequately support children’s learning in hard-to-reach areas during the pandemic. Without teachers to help them navigate through teaching-learning content, the learning gains may have been limited for young learners.
This paper describes the efforts made by the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network in promoting community and indigenous knowledge to support foundational literacy and numeracy in children as part of the Every Language Teaches Us (ELTU) project. ELTU is working towards building a repository of indigenous learning resources - songs, stories, riddles, proverbs, tongue twisters - to strengthen children’s foundational literacy and numeracy and make children’s learning aligned to their socio-cultural environments.
The ELTU project was carried out in eight PAL Network countries (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Mexico). PAL Network’s experiences in collecting, collating and adapting indigenous learning resources are presented in detail. Materials collected through the project were adapted for level-based teaching and learning in ongoing learning intervention programs. The process of including materials from local communities to enhance children’s access to contextualized teaching-learning resources and the insights gained during the process are discussed.
The paper aims to showcase how incorporating indigenous learning materials can enhance learning interventions.

Author

• Winny C Ngeno, PAL Network