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Introduction: The Quality of Children’s Experience in ECE
84 | Quality Early Learning
and development, social and emotional development, preliteracy and prenumeracy understandings and abilities, ways of understanding the world, and self-expression through the creative arts. The chapter suggests a threestep approach for putting policies into practice, moving from diagnosing the challenges to planning and then to continuous improvement of pedagogy and the curriculum.
Preschool and the early grades of primary school can promote the development of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will enable children to thrive in their schooling and in life.
At the present time, much ECE across the world does not do this well, and many children fail to thrive, do not reach their full academic potential, or drop out of schooling altogether. A major cause of this situation is the transition to overly formal modes of ECE and primary education provision before children are developmentally able to benefit from these approaches (Bingham and Whitebread 2018).
This chapter reviews evidence regarding the most beneficial “process” aspects of ECE provision (that is, the child’s direct experience in the setting or classroom) and how they might be most effectively developed within resource-constrained environments in low- and middle-income countries. Process variables most directly affect the quality of children’s ECE experience, and fall under two broad headings: (1) pedagogy (how the educator organizes and facilitates the educational experience for the children), and (2) curriculum (what key aspects of the children’s development and learning are focused upon).
The main principles set out in this chapter, which underpin the provision of high-quality ECE, are as follows: • The real strength of high-quality ECE is more commonly not the formal curriculum but the nature and quality of the relationships between the educators and the children in the setting or classroom (Jenkins et al. 2019). This relationship needs to be a key element in initial and continuing educator training. • Three key elements in ECE pedagogy are associated with children’s longterm academic achievement and emotional well-being: practices that support children’s communication skills, practices that support children’s ability to self-regulate their cognitive and emotional mental processes, and practices that provide opportunities to the children for active learning through play (Whitebread et al. 2019).
Pedagogy and Curricula Content | 85
• To ensure all children make a secure start to their school trajectories it is important that a whole-child, evidence-based curriculum be provided.
This curriculum should include an extensive range of emergent literacy and early mathematics (Anders et al. 2012), alongside elements supporting the children’s physical development, social and emotional development, their ways of understanding the world, and their selfexpression through the creative arts (Bertram and Pascal 2002).
This chapter reviews research evidence that has identified the key elements of ECE pedagogy and curriculum that predict short- and long-term beneficial outcomes for individual children and for society as a whole. Although this evidence has been largely gathered in high-income countries, much of it has been shown to be relevant across international contexts. However, significant cultural differences exist relating to the qualities that are valued in children and adults and how children and adults relate. If high-quality ECE is to be relevant to children’s lives and provide benefit as they grow and become members of their communities, it must also “reflect local values and perspectives on young children’s development as well as scientifically established predictors of their cognitive, language, and socio-emotional development” (UNESCO 2015, 55).
In recent years, interventions in low- and middle-income contexts that focus on improving the quality of preprimary teaching and learning have increased. Many of these studies have focused on the learning gains achieved by students, with little mention of the pedagogy involved, making it difficult to know which types of pedagogy have worked in low- and middle-income contexts, under what conditions (for example, scale, cost, government or nongovernment), and how approaches could be replicated. There are, however, some notable exceptions, including studies in Bangladesh and Kenya, and a three-country study in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Uganda, exploring the role of playful activity in enhancing the quality of children’s learning in preschool. The Kenyan study, for example, introduced playful, active learning into math lessons, which normally consisted of listening to the teacher or watching the teacher demonstrate a new concept. By contrast, the intervention involved the children in playing with manipulatives to make meaning of numbers, shapes, and other concepts. Results from a randomized controlled trial involving 2,957 children in treatment and control schools at three time points showed that intervention children’s math outcomes were significantly higher as compared with the children in the control schools (Piper, Sitabkhan, and Nderu 2018). The Bangladesh and three-country-study projects are described in the case studies section at the end of this chapter. Although many more such studies in low- and middle-income countries of this type are needed, the evidence so far suggests that the basic principles set out in this chapter hold true with young children everywhere.
