Early childhood curriculum development is challenged by the vast contextual variability of sites in South Africa. In this article, the author reports on the implementation of an early childhood development programme at an informal rural settlement community by an external societal agent. The article looks at the complex dynamics at play within such an early education development situation and examines the main themes that emerged from the process. Referring to the tensions that emanated from the implementation of this programme as a positive driver for change, it concludes that the employment of participatory methodologies could be utilised as a curriculum development tool and calls for the employment of a less formulaic and more holistic view of early childhood development.
Early childhood development and education programmes, as means to help close the performance gaps between children from different social and economic backgrounds in developing countries, have been increasingly on the forefront of South African education agenda in recent years (Biersteker & Dawes
In South Africa, more than 13 million children live in poverty (Children’s Institute
The need for the development of quality ECD programmes and for increased access to such programmes is well recognised by the relevant departments of Social Development, Health and Education. ECD was also included in the Human Resources Development Report for the first time in 2008. According to Biersteker and Dawes (
Several models of early childhood development approaches have emerged during the past two centuries and are still being followed across the world (Anderson
I propose that the idea of a curriculum that would serve all the children of South Africa equally – especially those children who are at risk of performing poorly in their school careers – is challenged by the question of how to create a curriculum plan that would be applicable to all contexts within which children in South Africa grow up. For example, the social, physical and political dynamics that operate within larger, more urban groups of people vary substantially from those that hold sway in smaller, rural settlement communities and indeed, in such smaller communities of people, the implementation of a generic ECD curriculum could very well amount to nothing more than a societal construct being superimposed upon a people who have no use for it in their everyday situation.
I want to argue, therefore, that an effective ECD curriculum does not depend so much on its content, but for it to truly help narrow the inequalities left by apartheid and the lack of focus, until recently, on ECD as the foundation of a child’s further career, it would have to be densely context bound to serve all the children in South Africa effectively. As I will show in this article, which will highlight the main themes that emerged from research on the process of developing an early childhood development programme within a rural informal settlement community, there might be powerful dynamics affecting the design and implementation of an ECD programme at such a site.
This article will investigate how perceptions of scarcity and lack of resources together with the perceived power held by certain individuals, groups and formal and informal power structures within a resource-poor rural community might hinder important role players from taking part in and from taking ownership of the early childhood education process in their community. Furthermore, it will have a look at how educational concepts such as ‘teaching’ ‘education’ and ‘school’ might be conceptualised differently by parents and educators in rural areas from how these terms are used elsewhere and in Western education literature (Van der Vyver
ECD curriculum development and implementation at informal rural sites is a complex and often challenging process made up of an interdependent matrix of circumstances, relationships and role players. This interplay between aspects of externally initiated early childhood education provisioning and the dynamics operant within the community frequently causes tensions. These tensions, if not managed effectively, could diminish the possible benefits of ECD delivery for the community (Van der Vyver
The purpose of this inquiry was to find practical solutions to a practical problem in the real world. This inquiry is about development practice and the development of a context-specific curriculum through the empowerment of lay teachers and semi-literate parents to eventually be capable of taking ownership of the preschool in their community. It was the very tension between the need for a better outcome to the problems they faced and finding better ways to bring about transformation that directed the design and methodology for this purpose-driven study.
This research took place within the ECD component of a larger community development programme in which the community development practitioners followed a collaborative approach to development which encourages dialogue that fosters a continuous learning orientation in order for the community to become more aware of its own needs, and to make decisions about those needs and thus be able to adapt to changing situations (Foster-Fishman
Cycles of planning, implementing and reflecting, the lessons learnt during the pre-design phase of this study, clearly lead the participants and the researcher towards PAR. It can be argued that the events which came about as a result of the larger community development project, and which preceded the formal research, predisposed PAR as research methodology for this study. Thus, the formal part of the research design was created, not in a void, but after several cycles of planning, action and reflection at the onset of the implementation of the ECD programme. The first formal planning cycle of this PAR study – the formulation of the research questions – therefore needs to be seen, not only as the starting point of the research but also as a subsequent cycle ‘flowing from’ the preceding cycles of planning, action and reflection. The point at which the research questions were formulated is therefore, in this case, at the same time the start of the formal part of the research and also already a redefining of the intervention.
The unit of analysis in this study is the ECD practitioner-in-training in the context of concomitant ECD curriculum development. The construct of ‘teacher development’ was operationalised into real, observable phenomenon such as ‘teachers who talk about their work at the crèche; teachers who worry about aspects of their work; teachers who perceive their world in a certain way’, and so on. The construct of ‘curriculum development’ was examined through recording and observing of how the role players in the curriculum; the teachers, trainers, parents, leaders and other stakeholders experienced it, talked about it and how they perceived their own role in its development.
Sampling was by way of purposeful selection of the intact group that constitutes the case. Included in this are the key participants in the community: the ECD trainers, the ECD teachers-in-training, the community development practitioners, the community leader and community steering committee members. These groups were direct samples and each was chosen because it would provide data that would help to address the research questions. Using multiple data sources in a case study research design is in alignment with the principle that a situation be experienced and described from multiple perspectives.
Ten different data sources were analysed for this study, some of which, such as the minutes of meetings, the development practitioner’s notes, social worker’s reports and project documentation, already existed as documents which formed part of the community development project at the time. Upon analysing these and converting them to formal ‘sets’, they became part of the PAR inquiry as documents and were thus analysed in document analysis mode. To a certain extent, information was thus morphed from field knowledge sources in everyday discourse, to systematic social science knowledge.
Two collections of teachers’ awareness reports were designed at different points during the pre-research phase. These two sets of data, together with the teacher trainer’s diary, informed the design of a purposefully designed interview schedule which was administered to the teachers. To a certain extent, the minutes of the meetings informed the design of the interview with the parents and the community leader as a way to see how perceptions about the preschool had changed within the community. It is important to note that as researcher I decided to use field notes made as development practitioner sparingly and only to confirm other analysis outcomes, as I was wary of letting my voice as development practitioner dominate those of the more important role players, such as the teachers and the members of the community. Likewise, the project documentation and the informal discussions with the social worker were used only to confirm analysis outcomes of the other data sets.
A community member from Mogwase stated the following:
‘This is not just a crèche – it is a place of light where everyone comes to learn.’ (2012)
Mogwase is a small rural settlement, with a population of approximately 750 people, on the border between Gauteng and the North West province. Here, in 2010, the establishment of an externally funded ECD centre gave rise to the research from which emanated the themes that will be discussed in this article.
The idea for the establishment of a preschool as an extension of a larger community development project was suggested by the external corporate funding agent at a point in time when the community had not yet expressed any need for such an intervention. Although the social development agents, who, by then, had been involved in development work at the settlement for longer than a year had, up until then, been following a collaborative model of community development, which rests on the assumption that people should control their own lives by means of political equality and popular sovereignty (Summers
Despite the excitement of the community members at being the recipients of an envisaged means to the provision of more formal early childhood care and education to their children, their engagement in the process soon sparked tensions that, were it not for a commitment by all to participatory methodologies, could easily have ruined the process of establishing this facility in the community.
It was decided that instead of importing trained ECD practitioners from outside of the village to work at the centre, young mothers from the community would be trained to become ECD practitioners, thus enhancing the human resources and knowledge capital of the settlement. Furthermore, a strategy was conceived by which, instead of providing the volunteer teachers with formal training and scripted lesson plans, they would be left to find out for themselves what works best for them. This, it was envisaged, would happen through their applying their indigenous knowledge of early childhood care and education to the new education situation which they formed a part of. This plan of action, suggested by the development practitioners and agreed upon by the leadership structures within the community, started a process of actions and reactions that often became fraught with tension and that demanded increasing levels of equal engagement by all role players; development agents, volunteer teachers, parents and community leaders. After it became clear that the teachers were floundering in their efforts to establish a programme at the centre, and that their perception of ECD delivery did not satisfy the expectations of the parents, it was decided that an external ‘teacher trainer’ would be solicited to guide and train the teachers, more formally, in aspects of early childhood development and education and to help them develop a programme. A teacher trainer was appointed and thus began a process of curriculum development that would require the engagement of all stakeholders in the intervention.
Several factors impacted upon the development of the ECD programme at this site. Gazing back, in PAR mode, it becomes abundantly clear that it was only because issues were allowed to be talked over and their effects played out by everyone concerned, and often in a rather entropic way, that a working curriculum for Mogwase was forged, and is still being developed at present. In the next section, I will discuss the main themes that emanated from this research and then shortly explain the participatory methodology that was employed as curriculum development tool in the case.
According to a volunteer teacher from Mogwase the:
The crèche is important – it is the place where the children are looked after. It helps keep the children safe, out of the wetland area. (
Although over 90% of children in the world live outside of the Euro-Western world, the vast majority of the body of literature on ECD still derives from a Western worldview and is by and large generated by authors from developed countries, especially the United States (Pence & Marfo
In a South African compilation titled ‘The black child in crisis’, published before early childhood development was formalised as a focus of education in South Africa, Atmore (
The physical well-being and safe keeping of young children was one of the main expectations of the function of the centre in the early days of the ECD programme at Mogwase. In contrast to the expectations of the external agents who viewed the ECD programme and its projected outcomes mainly in terms of education, the role of the centre and the teachers was seen by the community, at least initially, as that of taking care of the physical well-being of the children. In other words, the crèche was there, mainly, to keep the children safe and to feed them twice a day. Although physical safety is of course important at any early childhood development site, in a settlement situated far from medical help or healthcare, this aspect of childcare was foremost in the minds of the parents who sent their children to the crèche. Because the volunteer teachers were young women, some of whom did not, at the time, have their own children, the older mothers and grandmothers were very sceptical of the young teachers’ ability to properly take care of the children in their care. However, as acute as tensions were around this theme of safekeeping, they lessened considerably as, concurrently with the training of the teachers in aspects of early childhood development and education, ECD orientation sessions were presented to the parents.
A community member from Mogwase stated the following:
‘Life is hard in Mogwase, we live by making plans and sometimes even those plans dry up.’ (2011)
For people who live in poverty, with few resources, both material and otherwise, their experience of any situation is often one of scarcity. In Mogwase, interestingly, the discourse reflected each one of the three definitions of poverty as set out by Wagle (
This, according to Casper (
A teacher trainer from Mogwase stated the following:
‘On my new days (as teacher trainer) – it was not easy. Teachers were angry. It was like (they thought) I was coming to boss them of rule them or take their job.’ (2012)
The process of implementation of this early childhood intervention sparked considerable tension and conflict within the internal structure of the community and among the different groups who participated in the process of programme development at Mogwase. Firstly, the pressures to develop an ECD curriculum and teacher training programme as conceptualised differently, and indeed dichotomously, by the external development agents and the community, presented great challenges to all role players in the process.
Secondly, a parity of benefit, as conceptualised by Garvey and Newell (
Thirdly, this intervention challenged the status quo of perceived power within the community. Young women, some of whom had by then not had children of their own, had suddenly gained the status of ‘teachers’. Moreover, by doing ‘something that any mother or grandmother could do for a child’ (Van der Vyver
At the onset of the process, and indeed for a while to come, the various expectations of all parties concerned largely remained unmet as everyone grappled with the veritable tidal wave of change that was caused by the actions and reactions of the various role players within the system. It took time for the process to reach a point of relative equilibrium, and even then, often, these ‘points of balance’ were short lived as new issues created new dynamics within the situation, which had to be handled in ever new ways. But as time went on, the participants came to see that every perceived crisis that arose could be dealt with by a collaborative process of ‘teasing it out’ until a workable solution was found and implemented and eventually reviewed for whether or not it actually enhanced the working of the ECD centre.
Finally, the introduction of a new social institution, such as an early childhood education centre, might amplify already existing tensions within the community and evoke new ones. Existing positions of power might be challenged as some community members assume new roles as, for example, assistant teachers or board members of the centre, whilst longstanding leadership roles, such as for example, that of older men, might become all but redundant in the day-to-day decision-making processes of those participating in the early childhood programme.
I want to argue that although this intervention indeed caused tensions to mount, it were these very tensions which galvanised the different role players into entering the arena of ECD and speaking out on what they believed it meant for their children. It was only in the increased participation in this dialogue that a ‘co-constructed generative curriculum’ (Pence & Marfo
A parent a volunteer and community leader from Mogwase stated the following:
‘Children should go to crèche to be looked after and stay safe.’ (
‘Children should go to crèche to learn respect.’ (2011)
‘The crèche created jobs for young people in Mogwase, they are able to learn to become teachers at the crèche. That will take them forward in life.’ (2011)
External development agents often employ a unitary view of community when thinking about small rural settlement communities (Skogen & Krange
Also, what external societal development agents mean by terms such as ‘development’ or ‘participation’ might be inconsistent with what the community for which the ‘participatory development intervention’ is intended, understands it to be. As Cleaver (
Indeed, at Mogwase, the dissimilitude between the aims of the corporate donor funder; the educational development of the children and teachers as envisaged by the project manager and scholar of education (myself); and the various groups within the settlement, parents, volunteer teachers, leadership structures, was starkly evident from the beginning. These incongruities surfaced in how different individuals and groups talked about their expectations of the programme, how they viewed the roles of the different stakeholders and how they experienced the different relationships that came about as a result of the ECD centre in their midst. As Sergiovanni (
Still, despite these considerations of the community as consisting of various groups that might have variable views and perceptions of different aspects of society, in smaller rural communities, stronger centrifugal forces are at work, values are more homogenous and local power structures and taboos hold more sway than what is the case at, for example, urban centres where parents are more independent, simply drop their children off at the door and pick them up after the day. At rural settlements, the implementation of an early childhood development programme is not something that only happens to the children of the community. Instead, the various aspects of such a programme might be strongly interlinked and interrelated with other social processes, structures and values.
At Mogwase, local perceptions of childcare and early education certainly influenced the development of the curriculum there. While the teachers, at least at first, perceived their own role to be that of safe keeper and child minder, parents felt that the teachers had to ‘teach the children to write their names’ and ‘prepare them for school’ in addition to keeping them safe and out of danger.
The implementation of an early childhood programme at settlements such as Mogwase cannot be viewed as a one-off event but is a process that happens over time. The role players in such a process need be change their opinions and their behaviour so that these become more closely aligned with an envisaged positive educational outcome for the children for whom the intervention is intended. Whereas at first, the employment of young mothers from the community as ECD workers challenged the position of relative power and wisdom with regard to early childcare of the older matriarchs, as all concerned were being encouraged to voice their views and as everyone came to participate in the ECD orientation sessions and in working towards workable solutions for the centre, these very same women, towards the end of the study, described the crèche in terms of the benefits it brought to the children with regard to school readiness and social skills gained. The young mothers, who initially felt pressurised and anxious at the prospect of entrusting other young women with the safety of their children, later on described the changes brought about in their own lives as a result of the intervention in terms of greater freedom to pursue household, leisure or income-generating activities during the day. And the development agents, who at first used their position of relative power as the representatives of the corporate donor funders, came to understand that better outcomes and greater strides were made towards effective delivery of early childhood education and care through participatory methods that encouraged all role players to find and use their voice in finding ‘the way that works for the children of Mogwase’ (Community leader, Mogwase, 2012).
A volunteer teacher from Mogwase stated the following:
‘It is difficult to work with other people’s children. When a child gets hurt … the parents just fight (with one), they do not ask nicely.’ (2011)
Living and working in rural contexts is challenging. Obstacles that might have to be surmounted by educators in rural areas in their quest for effective education delivery include poverty, reliance on subsistence livelihoods, a lack of infrastructure, low education and skills levels and a shortage of jobs (Ngobese
Teachers in this community, as in many others, conduct their activities from a strong sense of communality and experienced their involvement at the centre as a vocation: ‘ke pitso’ – ‘it is a calling’. This, they felt, especially towards the end of the study, had proved to have been a strong motivator for them to keep on track despite the tensions that they had to manage and process during their training (Van der Vyver
Teachers’ experience and their training should be closely aligned to curriculum development (Rinaldo
According to a community leader the:
There exists a fair body of criticism in development and education literature of development efforts by external agents with the aim of benefiting a recipient group of people (Hope & Timmel
According to a parent from Mogwase the:
‘Parents complain about the teachers, and then there is a crèche meeting. Then they talk about what bothers them. But at the crèche my child never had a problem.’ (2011)
Although this ECD intervention was initiated by outside forces, which caused considerable disequilibrium within the ranks of the role players in the situation, over time the communal will of all the participants united towards the common goal of finding practical solutions to a practical problem in the real world (Van der Vyver
There are several reasons why PAR has been such an effective instrument in the establishment of a preschool programme at Mogwase. Firstly, PAR constitutes action research in action because it helps the practitioner(s) – in this case the development practitioners, the teachers, the parents and the various power structures within the community – explore their situation and ask questions about their actions and what motivates them to act in a certain way (McNiff
It is possible to develop a context-specific early childhood curriculum, especially at rural sites like Mogwase, provided that the implementers of such a programme take into account the specific context of the site and the community the programme is intended for. In the words of Fischman and Tefara (
On this view, I argue that perceptions about curriculum development, especially for ECD, needs to come free of the formulaic and monotypic view that any single, pre-planned curriculum could possibly address the myriad, often paradoxical issues that interface life for the people in rural settlements in South Africa today. Furthermore, I contend that what is important in any curriculum is not so much its content but how and how effectively it is implemented in diverse and often challenging contexts in South Africa. Contexts are about people living real lives in specific situations. Early childhood education development should happen in ways that take these
The literal meaning of the word context is ‘that which is braided together’ (Kincheloe & Steinberg
The emerging ECD programme at Mogwase came about in an organic way – a process during which, what germinates in the virgin soil of this emerging programme will be nurtured, what grows will be tended with care, what does not work will be pruned off and discarded and in the end, hopefully, some useful seeds of knowledge could be harvested for future use in similar settings.
Firstly, curriculum implementers need to be aware and remain aware of the intricate interrelatedness of aspects of education delivery at rural sites; teachers, school, community and setting – that these are so closely knitted together that what impacts upon one, impacts upon the whole and in ways that might be hard to predict or prepare for. Moreover, that whatever course of action is decided upon will impact upon children whose educational journey could be either set on a stable course or derailed by interventions that are implemented in a careless way.
Secondly, that as unlikely as it may have appeared at the outset, the implementation of this society-initiated ECD intervention was made successful through a reflective process of participation and collaboration, which resulted, by and by, in the intervention being ultimately owned by the community for which it was intended. This was achieved because the tensions that were activated during the process, as uncomfortable as they felt to the various participants, were harnessed and used as catalyst for the change that took place in this community during this project.
Thirdly, as far as teaching practice is concerned, the context-specific findings of this study indicate that teacher education programmes at higher education institutions could perhaps do more to integrate the different realities within which ECD delivery often takes place into their teacher educator programmes. Teacher education students should perhaps be given the opportunity to visit diverse ECD delivery sites, such as those facilities operating from township shacks or rural villages, like the one in this study, in order to broaden their view of education delivery. It could add value to teacher education if information about early childhood and about the different contexts in which children grow up in South Africa is integrated into foundation phase teacher education programmes. This could do a lot to dispense some of the ‘one-size-fits-all’ education practice myths that often persist in training programmes that are developed from Western early childhood knowledge systems.
Finally, because historically, in South Africa, ECD implementation and training has been the domain of NGOs, the investigation of such an intervention usually requires, by the funding agent, the evaluation of tangible evidence of deliverables and the careful measuring of cost expenditure against outcomes. In my opinion, the outcomes or possible gains brought about by an intervention that has as its aim the early cognitive, socio-emotional and physical development of human beings cannot be measured according to the criteria of a production line. Furthermore, the unintended (by the funder) benefits of such an intervention in terms of human and community development would require a much broader view of evaluation than what can be achieved through the project evaluation approach. Indeed, I would argue that it would require an extensive and intensive longitudinal study to truly measure the impact of an early childhood education intervention in a resource-poor rural situation. Furthermore, if academic research were to become the norm as part of the planning of community ECD interventions, it seems unlikely that corporate donor funders would so readily expend resources on projects that, experience has shown, often fail because of a lack of rigorous in-depth research before implementation.
Conducting an inquiry within an ECD situation that is funded by external agents implies that there are certain restrictions within which actions and events take place. The fact that this intervention was funded by a corporate donor funder meant that, despite the fact that the development of the curriculum and the training of the teachers took place in PAR mode, the staff and other role players at this preschool had to adhere to certain strictures. Schedules, budgets and donor policy restrictions all play a role and could add to the potential tension between role players. The time afforded for this programme to be established was a factor in the success of the development of this ECD centre and one that is often not considered when the need for measuring outcomes against time is a priority on the social responsibility agenda of a corporate donor funder. Interventions such as training and curriculum development take time and furthermore, PAR implies the building of trusting relationships that can only be forged over time.
Bearing in mind the limitations of this type of study, and also that the inquiry focused on only one phase of a potentially more extensive PAR study, the process of the study and the findings have a message: participatory work can happen in interventions (both research and development) that has been initiated from outside, by societal forces, with the proviso that members’ voices are recognised and considered. I conclude the study with a call for a deeper understanding of the interplay between different structures of society and community in development work, specifically as it pertains to the teachers and the beginnings of an ECD curriculum within the emergent education structure in rural settlements.
In the second phase of the study that is reported in this article, I conducted a study towards an M.Ed degree, and I was a bursary holder in the DHET/EU Programme of Research at the University of Johannesburg. I thank Prof. Elizabeth Henning for her help in writing this article.
The author declares that she has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article.