4. How to integrate peace education successfully in reading instructions

• In Event: Achieving reading skills in a contextualized, inclusive way to mitigate the risk for conflicts – what does evidence-aligned reading instruction tell us?

Proposal

School curriculum and peace are intertwined in that peace allows education to flourish, while the school curriculum is an excellent instrument for nurturing peaceful coexistence among communities.
There exist opportunities to incorporate reading instructions in foundational learning that include positive peace messaging. Available evidence suggests that many children receive instruction for years and develop foundational learning skills, but only for a short time, as learning poverty persists, and learning proficiency is lost; hence, they are at risk of reading failure and relapse (UNESCO, 2012; Kim et al., 2020). Despite the reasonable efforts to improve learning skills in Africa, the risk of relapse suggests that learners need sustained, effective instruction. Additionally, what we find lacking in the foundational learning discourse is guidance on how to integrate peace education into early-grade instruction. It is therefore important to understand how teachers acquire and sustain effective instructional practices. Research shows that, on average, a teacher makes about 1,500 decisions a day, highlighting the need to make effective and contextualized decisions sustainably (Better Purpose, 2022).
The research questions were guided by the Integrative Model of Behavioral Prediction (IMBP) as expounded by Kreijns et al. (2013). To understand how teachers change behavior and make instructional decisions, IMBP posits that individual beliefs are the driving force behind behavioral change.

We collected data and analyzed it to enhance our understanding of behavioral change in teaching, and the discussion of the results shows how peace education can be integrated in reading instructions. Our data is drawn from a survey of 200 primary grade 1 and 3 literacy teachers (which is a subset of a larger study), and enriched with 22 videos of literacy instructions.

The presenter will share the findings from this study, including: The findings reveal a teaching environment characterized by both supportive and inhibiting factors that influence reading instructions. For instance, class size ranged between 18 and 67 learners, with two or more learners sharing a recommended literacy textbook. Literacy classroom observations showed that the dominant focus for the teacher during instruction is the whole class (85%), followed by individual learners (10%), and small groups (4%). These emerging partners exhibit a stall in the shift to learner-centered teaching approaches. In particular, we find that while teaching experience was an enabler, class sizes of 40 or above and inadequate access to recommended literacy textbooks were impediments to practicing sustained learner-centered teaching approaches during instruction. However, such an impediment may not stop a teacher from blending instructions with peace messaging. The implications of our findings include integrating peace messaging into literacy instruction and unpacking recommended and current learner-centered teaching models to fit contexts with medium to large class sizes.

Key Reference
Kreijns, K., Vermeulen, M., Kirschner, P. A., Buuren, H. V., & Acker, F. V. (2013). Adopting the Integrative Model of Behaviour Prediction to explain teachers’ willingness to use ICT: a perspective for research on teachers’ ICT usage in pedagogical practices. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 22(1), 55-71.
(The full set of references will be available with the presentation).

Author

• Moses Ngware, African Population And Health Research Center