Nagaland begins training for ‘Early Childhood Care and Education’

Kohima, February 29 (MExN): A five-day long training programme for master trainers on Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) got underway at Mount Tabor Retreat Centre, Kohima on February 27.

The training is organised by Samagra Shiksha Nagaland in collaboration with State Council of Educational Research and Training, Nagaland.

Addressing the inaugural function, Wonthungo Tsopoe, Director of School Education, said it is a red letter day especially for the Department of school education in collaboration with SCERT and Samagra Shiksha for bringing out the curriculum. He reminded the participants that learning is a continuous process for everyone and urged the master trainers to clear all their doubts during the training period and to keep updating themselves so that proper transactions can take place in the classroom.

He lamented that in today’s Nagas context children are not able to raise questions freely. He therefore urged upon the trainers to inculcate proper knowledge and learning in all seriousness by giving enough space to let children openly communicate with teachers and elders with their thoughts. “We should not restrict them from speaking in front of elders, parents. Let them express their thoughts freely and openly,” he added.

Delivering a keynote address, Veketulu Veyie, Senior lecturer & head of ECCE Cell SCERT highlighted the socio-cultural context of Nagaland. She said, “Nagas have a strong community life, beliefs and cultural values held by the community influence the child rearing practices and Christian missionaries played a major role in early formal education like the reading, writing and counting.”

Pre-Primary education existed in all the primary schools even before the inception of Statehood. Over the years pre primary education evolved and curriculum and syllabus and books developed by SCERT have and are being used in our schools. Yet there was a felt need to make the curriculum and learning experiences more contextualized and meaningful for the children, as well as support the teachers and facilitators in understanding the principles of early year’s education and empower them with exemplar learning experiences, pedagogical techniques and rich learning resources. 

Hence, to ensure pedagogical functionality and to ensure that the curriculum is context driven, the development of the curriculum took place through a highly collaborative process between subject experts, teachers – preschool teachers, primary teachers, from government as well as private schools of both rural and urban areas, teacher-educators and Azim Premji University, Bangalore. 

She questioned, “What are the things we envisioned to incorporate in the framework? How to think of children as learners? How to plan experiences, How to facilitate the learning process? How to create inclusive and stimulating environments? How to work with families and communities, bringing in the contexts that children come from?”

She explained that ECCE Curriculum includes the learning experiences of children are woven around their context. The pedagogic underpinnings move away from imparting and communicating knowledge to enabling, guiding, facilitating and doing.

The Curriculum was piloted in 45 schools in 2023-24 to assess its workability in different Nagaland contexts with mostly positive feedback. There were a lot of ground reality dynamics that hamper the smooth functioning of the curriculum too. These hurdles can be overcome with collaborative efforts of all the stakeholders.

She said the training will have Interactive and brainstorming sessions on introduction to the concept and importance of Early Years, the new ECCE Curriculum framework, objectives and the approaches, derive relationships between illustrations/learning experiences and the principles of the curriculum, practice the use of the learning experiences, reflect on the learning outcomes and align it with assessment, contextualizing the activities and teaching learning materials, explore the various aspects for parental/community involvement as well as school support, understanding Foundational literacy and numeracy and interventions, and need-based planning and developing strategies for the way forward.

She said this workshop is not an end in itself, but rather a turning point: “to ignite a movement for the transformation of education at a foundational stage that goes beyond the usual training and monitoring, beyond doing things a little better, and beyond merely discharging our duties.”

“The shift towards tomorrow’s education of course requires a change in mindset; in the thought process; an open mind which accepts the diverse approaches to achieve a competency based education. But we need to go further to develop this mindset,” she stated.

“We must aim higher. We must reimagine and transform education and empower our teachers into a passionate and rigorous process of individual and collective self-discovery and self-development, so that every child can flourish and grow under the care of these teachers,” she added. 

The Deputy Mission Director of Samagra Shiksha Nagaland Kelhikha Kenye, who also chaired the introductory session, gave a brief background on the training programme.