Early childhood pedagogy in a Ghanaian socio-cultural medley: A case study of two Kindergarten classrooms

Abstract

In a quest for quality-driven early childhood education settings, it is important to explore subtleties that define socio-culturally-relevant pedagogy that is often ignored in scholarly literature. To address this gap in literature, a qualitative multi-case study approach was used to explore four Kindergarten teachers views regarding early childhood pedagogy over a six-month in Kindergarten classrooms in Tata School and at Kariba School. This study sought to establish "Why does children's socio-cultural contexts influence choice of pedagogy in kindergarten classrooms". The study was framed by Bronfenbrenner's framework, ecological theory. The sources of data comprised semi-structured individual interviews, pair-interviews and field notes of classrooms observations. Both within and across case interpretative analysis was used. The study established that, participants in the two cases perceived that a socio-cultural context-based pedagogy such as learning materials, storytelling, traditional songs and traditional rhymes supported children's development in terms of their understanding of concepts, language development, cognitive and moral development, respectively.

Early childhood education in Ghana: teachers’ understanding and enactment of inclusion.

“…According to Ackah (2016) and Morrison (2001), children's care originated formally before the missionary era in the mid-eighteenth century, when Basel missionaries in Ghana were the first to implement day-care schooling alongside their primary schools to introduce formal education to Ghanaian children while assimilating them into the principles of Christianity (Djarbeng, 2019;Münch, 2020Münch, , 2019. The 2008 Schools Act 778 aimed to integrate ECE into the formal education system, allowing all children to benefit from the Government's policy of having an equitable right of entry to high-quality ECE (Armah, 2017;Mumuni, 2019).…”