Practitioners’ Perspectives On The Challenges Encountered In Maintaining Mobile Early Childhood Care And Education Centres
- Title
- Practitioners’ Perspectives On The Challenges Encountered In Maintaining Mobile Early Childhood Care And Education Centres
- Author(s)
- Christian S. Ugwuanyi, Charity C. Okeke and Chinedu C. Okeke See all items with this value
- Date
- 2023 See all items with this value
- Description
-
In the South African context, there are early childhood development centres designated as mobile centres. These centres have been in operation for several years with the intention of bringing early learning to a teaming population of South African children. The Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme is set to ensure a solid foundation for the education of children from birth to 9 years. This program is targeted at ensuring that children transit positively from early childhood care or preprimary level to the primary level of education. The experiences children have in the early years of life
are considered very paramount for their well-being and lifelong learning. However, literature is scarce on the educational activities of mobile ECCE centres. Based on this, the researchers explored the challenges encountered by the practitioners in maintaining mobile ECCE centres. The researchers adopted a qualitative research approach to guide the research. A sample of 10 practitioners in one
organisation providing mobile ECCE in the Free State Province participated in this research. Necessary data for this research were collected using a semi-structured interview guide. The trustworthiness of the qualitative research instrument was adequately ensured. The analysis of qualitative data was analysed using ATLAS.ti software. The results among others showed that one of the most challenges faced by the practitioners in operating a mobile ECCE programme is the language barrier as most children speak Sotho as their home language, while other children speak Tswana and Xhosa as well. Besides, it was found that practitioners deal with many psychosocial challenges, especially alcohol abuse by parents and poverty, which have grave effects on children’s social and educational development. Other
challenges found are rain, wind, cold and dust. Thus, these findings have strong policy implications for the fact that there is a need to have an ECCE policy framework that allows in-service training of practitioners in the different home languages of the children. This will help to equip them with the knowledge of the different home languages of the children in the mobile ECCE centres to mitigate the
challenge of a language barrier. - Publisher
- EDULEARN23 Conference See all items with this value
- Keywords
- Challenges, Maintaining, Mobile Early Childhood Care and Education Centre, Practitioners See all items with this value
- pages
- 0142-0146
- Item sets
- Journal Articles
- Media
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