Volume 4 Issue 3 (October 2012) - Ozean Publications

More documents

Recommendations

Info

European Journal of Educational Studies 4(3), <strong>2012</strong> training programs for preparing teachers for teaching science in ECE. Each session typically lasted one hour. The data was recorded using tape recorders and transcribed as per themes and objectives, and were then presented descriptively. Verbatim were used wherever necessary. In addition, an Observation Schedule was used to get first hand information of the existing practices regarding science teaching in pre-schools and the PCK and SMK of the preschool teachers in science teaching. The schedule included items related to teaching of Science, activities they engage children in, kind of materials they use, the place of teaching science (outside/inside) the concepts that are taught, the strategies they use etc. The researcher spent 2/3 hours in each school and observed whatever was done during the school session and recorded with the help of a video recorder. Permission was sought from the schools prior to the data collection. The recorded sessions were then transcribed and analysed as per the objectives. Finally, a desk review of the classroom records and documents were also done to get a view of the time table, scheme of work, topics, the methodology and the curriculum that they were following. The researcher noted down all possible items that were pertaining to the science teaching and analysed later in line with the other source of data collected. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS Background Information: The settings of the sampled pre-schools are illustrated in Table I as follows: Table 1: Background Information of Preschools S.No. Type of Preschools No. of Children Age of Children Teachers Teaching Assistants 1 Private 60 2½-6 yrs 6 3 10 2 Private 68 2½-6 yrs 8 4 6 3 Private 80 2½-6 yrs 3 3 4 4 Church Based Day-Care Centre 60 2½-6 yrs 3 4 3 Class Rooms The findings show that three (3) quarter of ECE centres were private and only one was a church based school. It reflects the typical scenario of Botswana where none of the ECE centres are run by the government; and 50% of the available ones are private; and the other fifty comprises of NGO based, Community based, Faith Based centres along with Pre-Primary, Village Development Council, Union/Council, Orphan Care and Institutional ones (Bose, 2008). The teacher/child ratio, however, is satisfactory and does not raise any issues in this study. The findings show that the children who attended the centres had different cultural backgrounds and mainly spoke English and Setswana, the two (2) official languages in these centres. In the current study, all the teachers were females; mostly (65%) ranged between twenty six (26) to forty five (45) years, and very few (10%) were either older than 45 years or younger than (25%) twenty five years of age. 414
European Journal of Educational Studies 4(3), <strong>2012</strong> Figure 1: Background Information of Preschool Teachers This shows that fresh, young as well as experienced, mature teachers were available to take care of the young ones (Figure1). This means teachers’ age has not been much of an issue in these preschools. Both young and mature teachers go for this profession, strictly females though! The study also found that ten (10) out of 20 teachers, i.e. 50%, had a certificate qualification in ECE and most of them belonged to ECE Centre 1 and 2, which were private. Another 20% (4) had a Diploma in Primary Education with science as the teaching subject (Fig1). The remaining 30% (6) had formal qualifications, but neither in Early Childhood nor in Primary Education. It also is note worthy that some of these preschool teachers were trained way back in 2000 or even earlier than that. This is raises a concern, as it could be well derived that preschool teaching is done by personnel, who are not even trained to do so! Existing Practices in ECE Centres In order to understand the existing practices in science teaching in pre-schools, it was necessary to find out what science teaching for preschools teachers is and what approach they adopted to teach scientific concepts in their centres. The teachers viewed science teaching in ECE as an important task as some of them said that: 415
Page 1 and 2:
European Journal Educational of Stu
Page 3 and 4:
European Journal of Educational Sci
Page 5 and 6:
European Journal of Educational Stu
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31 and 32:
Page 33 and 34:
Page 35 and 36:
Page 37 and 38:
Page 39 and 40:
Page 41 and 42:
Page 43 and 44:
Page 45 and 46: European Journal of Educational Stu
Page 95: European Journal of Educational Stu
Page 133: European Journal of Educational Stu
show all

Volume 4 Issue 3 (October 2012) - Ozean Publications

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?