Curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher
training: Considering culture
A. Bame Nsamenang
University of Yaoundé 1 & HDRC
Technical Workshop of the Africa ECCD Initiative
Cape Town, South Africa, 26-28 July 2010
Panel: Planning and Implementing Strategies for Expanding
ECCD Quality and Access in Diverse Contexts
Africa’s triple-strand eccd heritages
Research reveals a hybrid childhood context
(Nsamenang, 1995)
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Service
Piety
Chores
School
African
Islam
Christian
• Contemporary Africa is neither
entirely traditional not entirely
modern; it is hybrid.
• African parents expect their
children’s performance of
“traditional” as well as
“modern” tasks. They readily
take action to correct
perceived deviations.
• School progress; not an
indigenous task but high on
parental expectations!
• Parents scaffold the various
responsibilities they assign to
children according to maturity
and capability.
ECCD efforts: More of science than pedagogy
• No existing theory effectively captures the
complexity of Africa’s triple-strand eccd
heritages.
• The science: Brain development, Literacy,
Nutrition, Investment in early development, etc.
Breastfeeding; African traditions, displaced by
formula feeds as evidence-based; then
breastfeeding now as “the science!”
• Legitimate apprehension: What “of us” is in
these efforts? Despair and learned helplessness
from “nothing good in us …”
• Where is the “how to” module for eccd efforts?
HDRC Initiative to fill the cultural and
pedagogic gaps of Africa’s curricula
• HDRC Initiative on Teacher Education Textbooks
and Tools
– First product: African educational theories and
practices: a generative teacher education handbook
– Second proposed product: The pedagogy of ecd
science
• A positioning for Africa‘s way forward
– Children are the foundation of humanity / nationhood
... Invest in them!
– Education, a means for personal, societal and
national/continental progress / development ...
Africa’s most urgent needs
• Transformational education, beginning with
eccd programs and services.
• Contribute substantively to the reality that “all
cultures can contribute knowledge of universal
value” (UNESCO, 1999), beginning with Africa‘s
worldview and procreation ideas and ecd
theories and practices.
• Create a tangible hub for the elusive rhethoric
to transform Africa’s education expressed by
the OAU (now AU) in 1961.
– That hub is teachers and teacher education in
general and ecd teachers and teacher education in
particular.
ECCD curriculum, pedagogy, and
teacher training: Incorporating culture
• Basic principles: Active participatory
learning; Better together
– Nsamenang (2008): Children’s natural
curiosity to be active and participative
becomes noticeable from an early age (in
all cultures).
– Children and adults learn best through
hands-on experiences with people,
materials, events, ideas, and so on.
ECCD curriculum
• Curricular emphasis not only on adult-child interaction
but more so child-to-child socialization/interactions and
peer mentoring and teaching.
• Carefully design culture-sensitive learning environments
and a plan > do > review process that builds children up,
strengthens their initiatives and self-reliance with the
mission that they will improve the circumstances they
inherited.
• Teach children to notice, initiate, discover, cooperate,
and learn about ideas, events, people, visions, etc.
• It should be about children creating, experimenting,
problem-solving, resolving conflicts, and understanding
and respecting diversity as they learn and develop.
Organizational framework for ECCD
curriculum: Parenting (ethno)theories
• The developmental niche framework (Super &
Harkness, 1986) that considers socialanthropological and psychological factors:
– Physical and social settings of childhoods:
• Development takes place in a specific physical/social setting
• Cultures interpret and organize settings according to cultural
meaning systems … not a universal curriculum or civilization
• Cultures impute own cultural agendas on to the biology of
human development: development is a cultural construction.
– Childrearing traditions
• Africans children’s routines and caregiving activities
– Psychology of caretakers
• Other perspectives: practitioners, researchers, etc.
• Sibling & peer perspectives: Children as primary stakeholders
in ECCD, who are “active agents” in their own self-care, selfeducation and development.
Two parenting ideologies/belief systems
• Nsamenang (2008): Reigning Western
developmental theories position the care of
infants and children as a specialized task of
adulthood, hence the primacy of parental
ethnotheories (Harkness & Super, 1996).
• Weisner (1997): African theories separate the
learning of childhood skills from the life
stage of parenthood and position sibling and
peer caregiving as children’s “shared
management, caretaking, and socially
distributed support” of the family, hence the
significance of child-to-child socialization.
Language of instruction:
A critical curricular issue
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Most African children face a language challenge as they leave their homes and
start school. While most African children speak their mother tongues, most
African pre-school and primary education programmes promote an inherited
European language or Arabic as the main language of literacy and the main
written medium of instruction.
In such a context, the preschool has the implicit role of preparing pre-school
children for the foreign language pre-primary and primary education
curriculum.
On the basis evidence from several sources, there appears a lack of coherence
and continuity between three language levels:
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the home language
the preschool curriculum and
the primary school curriculum
The home inadequately prepares children for the preschool, which equally
inadequately prepares children for the language challenges of the primary
school programme.
How, then, can we design the preschool curriculum to bridge the language gap
between the home and the school in multilingual African countries? The key
issues are language development, mother tongue and foreign language
acquisition, language policy on language of instruction, teacher training, preschool pedagogy, etc. >> cultural identity issue of foreign language learning!
A holistic curriculum
• An African curriculum does not divide knowledge into
discrete fields, the so-called disciplines or domains of
personality.
• Social, emotional, cognitive, language, moral, and
physical lessons are not learned separately by infants
and children, even adults.
• Infants and toddlers experience life more holistically
than any other age group.
• Adults who are most helpful to young children
interact in ways that understand that the child is
learning from the whole experience, not just that part
of the experience to which the adult gives attention.
A curriculum sequenced on
developmental milestones
• The curriculum should borrow from the African school
of life (Moumouni, 1968): Build preschool curriculum
on and into the early learning from the daily routines
and activities of the family and community, as most
African children begin learning a cultural curriculum,
including the mother tongue, from an early age.
• Teach children to learn from noticing and acting and
connecting with both local and global ideas, events,
people and the ways of the world.
• Teachers, peer mentors & children are active partners
in shaping educational experiences.
A comprehensive, flexible curriculum
• Should be developmentally appropriate to promote
children's social-emotional development and learning (in
the core areas of literacy, language, mathematics,
science, and social studies).
• Curricular content and practices should be flexible by
design, easily adapted to individual needs and societal
and institutional requirements.
• Should reveal a comprehensive system of
– a training model that integrates with high-quality assessment,
professional development, and family connection resources to
create a well-rounded program that addresses the needs of early
childhood education professionals, children, and their families.
– Culturally-appropriate defined curriculum content areas for each
topic and age group (age-set),
– teaching practices,
– assessment tools, and
Build on children’s agency
• If we could see children as competent participants in
cultural communities (Rogoff, 2003), we would see the
need to organise child development services and
research to reach children in their cultural contexts so
that they and their communities could fully participate
(Lanyasunya &Lesolayia (2001).
• A creative curriculum should combine the latest
research and the freshest ideas into a forward-thinking
approach to learning--one that honors children’s
resourcefulness and innovation in cultural context and
respects the role that teachers, including siblings and
peer mentors, play in making learning exciting and
relevant for every child in their classrooms.
Aim of the programme & Target groups
• Curricular purpose is to produce teachers who can:
– Understand the early stages of a human development and how to
stimulate/promote healthy child development.
– Teach in the Early Childhood Development Sector
– Facilitate active learning in Early Childhood Development
– Manage the learning programmes in Early Childhood
Development
– Facilitate healthy development in ECCD programmes
• Target groups
– Educators/Practitioners working in the ECCD field with only
practical experience or with inadequate training.
– Teachers planning a career change or who have an interest in
ECD.
– Students who are interested to start a career in ECD.
– Persons who are running or interested in starting a Daycare
Centre.
Thank you, but let’s reflect on
and connect the following to the
ubiquity of child-to-child
socialization across Africa
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Advocate: Do you want to live with your
mother?
Child: No
Advocate: Why?
Child: She beats me.
Advocate: Okay, so you want to live with
dad?
Child: No
Advocate: Why not?
Child: He beats me too; he has no time.
Advocate: So, who do you want to live
with?
Child: My siblings and peer group
Advocate: Why?
Child: They are always with me and
have time. They play with me and never
beat anyone so hard!