Early childhood pedagogy in a Ghanaian socio-cultural medley: A case study of two Kindergarten classrooms

Abstract

In a quest for quality-driven early childhood education settings, it is important to explore subtleties that define socio-culturally-relevant pedagogy that is often ignored in scholarly literature. To address this gap in literature, a qualitative multi-case study approach was used to explore four Kindergarten teachers views regarding early childhood pedagogy over a six-month in Kindergarten classrooms in Tata School and at Kariba School. This study sought to establish "Why does children's socio-cultural contexts influence choice of pedagogy in kindergarten classrooms". The study was framed by Bronfenbrenner's framework, ecological theory. The sources of data comprised semi-structured individual interviews, pair-interviews and field notes of classrooms observations. Both within and across case interpretative analysis was used. The study established that, participants in the two cases perceived that a socio-cultural context-based pedagogy such as learning materials, storytelling, traditional songs and traditional rhymes supported children's development in terms of their understanding of concepts, language development, cognitive and moral development, respectively.