How might we achieve equity in Early Child Education — A case of Urban Nepal.
By: Prabina Shrestha
Tags: Equity, Innovation In Education, Urban Education, Diversity And Inclusion, Early Childhood Education

Written By:

Aditi Adhikari : Aditi is an Education Policy researcher and Consultant. She has experiences of working closely with non-profits, government agencies, and donor organizations in the education space. Aditi also holds a Masters in Education Policy from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Prabina Shrestha: Prabina is an architect and an urban designer currently associated with Utopia KTM. She is also the lead for Utopia’s in-house venture Early EducationX.

Image source : http://www.geniusworld.edu.np/

Horace Mann, American politician and advocate of public education called education “the great equalizer”. A good education system enables children to access opportunities regardless of the backgrounds to which they are born. In an ideal world, education should be a catalyst for economic mobility.

In Nepal, inequities run deep. The fabric of our society is filled with hierarchies; caste, ethnicity, gender, and class differences have a direct effect on a person’s access to opportunities, along with birthplace and parents’ education. These inequities also stand true for Urban Nepal where some people have access to education and exposure to the world beyond, but where many people have no way to access these opportunities. The divide seems to be running deep because two fairly divergent worlds exist so close together.

In their preschool years (age 3–6), children learn skills that will help them do better in school and eventually, in life. Conversation and articulation, vocabulary, gross and fine motor skills, and confidence, basic literacy (letters, understanding and telling stories, reading sight words, recognizing rhymes), math (numbers, connect shapes and patterns, concepts of size and quantity such as small/ big), as well as social, emotional, linguistic, and critical thinking skills allow children to work well with other people.

Young children learn most of these concepts through exploration, play, and asking questions. Parents can easily facilitate these processes if they have access to children's learning resources. The story is different, however, for families where both parents work (and cannot afford to take time away), or where they do not have access to knowledge about how children learn. This is why early childhood is the best time to level the playing field.

According to the OECD, early childhood education promotes intergenerational mobility and “is associated with a lower influence of parental background on students’ achievement in secondary education.” Early childhood education [access/levels/accomplishments, etc.] can thus be strongly linked to equity.

How would the next iteration of early pedagogy look?

Of course, equity is not just about access. In fact, one can argue that the education system can exacerbate inequalities if it does not cater to every child; and especially if it values the knowledge, experiences, or learning abilities of some more than others, as ours often does. To educate every child to be equipped to meet future demands in their professional and personal lives, early childhood education needs to employ a rights-based approach and innovative pedagogy, which will ensure that learning will meet children where they are, respecting their cultures and backgrounds, and building knowledge from that base.

It’s worthwhile to dive into pedagogy more broadly. Generally, pedagogy is understood as the delivery of curriculum. Through pedagogy, the teachers seek to impart in the learners skills, knowledge, tools that will enable them to create a better future for themselves and, by extension, their society. The immediate environment is also an important part of this learning process and often quoted as the second teacher as it has the power to enable or hinder learning.

Innovative pedagogy would enable learners to learn and the teachers to teach in variable contexts. An ‘innovative’ pedagogy in any particular context can be defined in terms of its effectiveness in challenging, or at least adapting, dominant approaches in order to produce experiences that empower, equip and support them within a particular set of everyday lived experiences. Innovation doesn’t necessarily relate to expensive and/or sophisticated tools and technology but is measured in its effectiveness within the context for which it is developed.

Three major elements can be considered vital in achieving innovation in pedagogy.

I. Teachers/facilitators

Teachers and facilitators are vital elements of pedagogy, they guide the learners in the process of knowledge acquisition and exploration. Hence for achieving equitable education through innovative pedagogy teachers/trainers/facilitators play a crucial role in conceptualization, planning, implementation, documentation, evaluation and iterations of these innovations.

“Pedagogy as I have defined it is a responsive interactivity, which calls for teachers’ informed interpretations of and responses to the complex demands of teaching. It calls for responsible, informed and deliberative agency.” To truly achieve equity, early childhood education teachers/facilitators should be supported in developing the necessary skills to respond to the multifaceted demands of ECD through an all inclusive, empathic lens that consciously deviates from the traditional conformist education of biased nature.

II. Acknowledging and embracing diversity

The measure of innovation is its effectiveness within the context and the people for which it is adopted. “Practitioners, communities, early childhood organisations and policy makers across the Asia Pacific region have been working with a very different set of challenges; seeking to increase access, protect social, cultural, spiritual and indigenous traditions, and to build broader community capacity through implementation of holistic early childhood programmes” [source].

As we live in an increasingly diverse cross-cultural world, true measure of equity in education, (especially in early education as it sets the foundation for future learning) should be how successful the pedagogy has been in embracing the different cultures, heritage, languages and lives the young learners come from and bring with them.

In Nepal’s context, the National Curriculum only promotes the Nepali language, and with the demands of globalization and capitalism, English has been integrated in a very haphazard way. The curriculum allows the structural freedom to teach other languages within its local curriculum allowance, but there are many challenges to this, including the fact that more urban centers have linguistically-diverse populations posing difficulty in developing a holistic curriculum. Embracing the diversity would also mean challenging parents’ ideas about what children need to learn in a globalized world.

The initial challenges of embracing diversity, however, can lead to major rewards that have lifelong impacts on young learners. “Adaptive teaching, according to Borich (2011:41), applies “different instructional strategies to different groups of learners so that natural diversity prevailing in the classroom does not prevent any learner from achieving success”.

In urban Nepal, extensive migration, inequalities in economic status, and range of parental education levels often means that children start school at different ages, with different advantages and disadvantages. If all our early childhood teachers and facilitators used adaptive teaching methodologies, they would be able to a teach a child starting school late (at 7 years or older) in an accelerated manner, and promote them to grade 1 in the middle of the year, making them feel more at-home with students who are close to their own age, and increasing their chances of staying in school longer.

By embracing diversity and acknowledging it, we don’t just remove hurdles for young learners but actually leverage differences for a mastery of early skill sets, a strengthened sense of self and community, an easier, better transitioning to formal higher education, and a lifelong habit of acceptance and tolerance — much needed in a continually dividing world.

III. Continued learning outside of school

Changes in approaches also call for changes in attitudes towards “formal” early learning (i.e, with guidance from trained teachers/facilitators) by parents, guardians and the communities. Since the innovative pedagogy approach aims to transcend the lives not just of young learners but also their communities, the approach should acknowledge the current attitudes and make deliberate strategies in making them more open if necessary.

The contextual appropriateness of the innovative pedagogical approach should also extend towards community/parental involvement, as learning and exploration is a process that continues outside designated learning spaces. It should also offer the space and tools to continually empower and engage parents and guardians across different cross sections of society and geographic area, to aid the process of children’s learning.

The role of authorities across different levels should also be acknowledged — their innovative mindsets would promote wider outreach and consistent, stronger messaging.

With these key elements, innovation in pedagogy is achievable in diverse settings with limited or extensive access to resources. The very idea of ECD is an embodiment of equity and thus, at the very foundational level, its parameters, enablers and these three pedagogical innovation elements should increasingly become an integrated and comprehensive part of our preferred educational future.

ECD in Urban Nepal

Urban communities are becoming increasingly diverse in their socio-cultural settings and economical stances. Specific to Nepal, access to education seems higher in urban areas then in rural areas as, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics (2012), “Literacy rates are substantially higher in urban areas (64%) than in rural areas (36%)”.

The primary providers for ECD are both the government and private sectors with the former sector providing services at a heavily subsidized cost, making it an affordable, and at times, the only, choice for families with limited paying capacity. The quality of education and services provided by the two sectors varies as the government provided services lack the necessary infrastructure, educational materials and trained person-power in most cases. The major language in focus for the government ECD centers is Nepali whereas English (most preferred by parents/guardians) is rigorously pushed and practiced in private ECD centers. Private ECD centers in most cases also boast of an attractive educational environment, materials and trained staff; the quality for this is directly proportional to the fee they charge.

Hence this creates a gap and enforces inequity from the ground level, in an already inequitable society. It is also worth mentioning here that the focus in a particular language in both the service providers also fails to recognize the diversity the learners bring to the table and limits their capability of understanding and adapting to their own increasingly diverse worlds.

Education in Nepal needs an altered and updated lens where diversity among learners is acknowledged and embraced, particularly in urban Nepal.

Backstory

On August 17, 2020, Utopia Kathmandu hosted a virtual event on the future of urban early education. This article picks up and furthers delves into discourses from the lively panel discussion and insights from the speakers and audience.

Utopia is surfacing insights and conversations that lead to the next version of early urban education that prioritizes inclusion, accessibility and quality for uptake by our in-house venture, Early EducationX (EduX). With EduX we aim to level the educational playing field and make quality early child education accessible to everyone in the city regardless of their financial status.

We are also actively seeking a co-founder for EduX to co-build the venture together with Utopia. If you are interested in collaborating with us or are curious about EduX, reach out to us at educationx@utopia.do.