EnglishKenyaPAL Network
Hello, and welcome to our blog 😊
We represent everything from the cold North to the soothing South and everything in between. But who are we?
Maryam is a senior lecturer from the School of Education of the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) and an experienced educator with over 30 years in the education field. She holds a PhD in Education specialising in Second Language Teaching from Monash University, Australia, where she lived for several years. She previously served as the Dean of the School of Education from 2014 to 2020. While working as dean, she established several academic programmes at SUZA, including the Diploma of Early Childhood Education (DECE), Diploma in Inclusive and Special Needs Education (DISNE) and Diploma in Physical education and Sports Science (PESS). Her experiences and expertise in cross-cultural communication and language and literacy teaching became the building block to the research collaboration that we now present.
Gunhild is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Teacher Education and Languages at Østfold University College. Her main fields of interest are Pedagogical drama, expressive arts and aesthetic learning processes. She has 12 years of experience in teacher education and serves as the international coordinator in her faculty. Within this position, she has developed. She did her fieldwork in Tanzania on contemporary African dance and worked in Tanzania and Zanzibar for several years. Maryam’s interest in children’s play, aesthetic learning processes and artistic expressions combine well with her focus on early learners. When Zanzibar launched the needs assessment and policy brief relating to the country’s revised curriculum for pre-schools, which called for play-based approaches, we found there was a synergy between what we do.
Our collaboration on teacher education started with a genuine desire to learn from each other. Through online meetings, we managed to put together an application for funding. In 2019, we were granted a project dubbed Norway and Zanzibar (NOZA), a student and staff exchange as well as a joint research initiative. We started planning the project, aiming to prioritise the creation of a joint course for student teachers from Norway and Zanzibar. We had many ideas, and our colleagues got involved in the project. When the plans started to formalise, with our first face-to-face meeting planned and booked for March 2020, the world suddenly shut down, and we put all our initial plans on ice. Since then, we have been discussing how we can initiate joint research projects to keep our communications going. Luckily, it was possible to brainstorm the research for our plan on the curriculum revision without the need to meet face-to-face.
So, what triggered our passion for indigenous pedagogies?
Our research project was triggered by the initial preparation for the implementation of a revised curriculum in Zanzibari pre-schools. Pre-schools in Zanzibar have continued to receive increasing attention because of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training through the government’s revolutionary commitment to quality education in pre-schools. The proposed curriculum under the Zanzibar Institute of Education (ZIE) has ten main themes (Myself, My family, My home, My country, Animals, Water, Trees and Plants, Weather, Food and Nutrition, and My Environment). The themes focus on five learning areas (language and literacy, numeracy, creative arts and sports, environmental studies, and moral and religious studies).
The curriculum focuses on competencies such as problem-solving, critical thinking and life-long learning (Hamad et al., 2020). The revision intends to secure a tailored entrance for pre-school children, achieving sufficient literacy, numeracy, writing and creative skills, in addition to other competencies needed for further learning (Ame et al., 2020). The revision recommends children’s play as an approach to learning these competencies, highlighting the positive impacts of exploration and adaptation (Hamad et al., 2020). Drawing on experiences of similar curriculum implementation in Ghana, Dzamesi and van Heerden (2020) emphasised the challenges related to the contextualisation of pedagogy. The findings suggest that play-based approaches in Africa are often informed by programmes based on Western contexts, lacking the competence linked to indigenous play-based pedagogy. Hamad et al call for additional research into indigenous African teaching and learning strategies.
As the Zanzibari culture is a melting pot of diverse artistic and aesthetic expressions, it provides countless possibilities for children’s play and learning, through for example, traditional storytelling (hadithi), poetic recitations (ngonjera/mashairi/utenzi), local board games (such as bao, dama, mdako), carving, pottery, children’ songs and games (foliti, alfola), local dance (ngoma) and local dance, beats or music (taraab/kidumbak). In our study, we will examine the potentials and implications of indigenous play-based pedagogies for children as strategies for implementing the revised curriculum in Zanzibar. Through qualitative interviews (Cresswell & Poth, 2018), observations of pre-schools and reflection notes from student teachers specialising in early childhood education, we aim to uncover the power of indigenous play-based pedagogies.
Over time, the results will assist the restructuring of pre-school teacher training and personal and professional development to ensure that the skills and competencies referred to in the revised curriculum are implemented through contextualised indigenous play-based pedagogies. Although we live in different worlds, we both believe that indigenous pedagogies, games and resources are valuable.
