As the world marks International Mother’s Day, I choose to reflect on the role of parents and caregivers (mothers included) in the education of their children. But first, Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers and female caregivers who have devoted their lives to nurturing the next generation. This celebration coincides with a season of heavy flooding that has affected thousands of families in Kenya and the region. In Kenya, the floods have impacted over 380,000[1] people, resulted in the loss of over 250 lives and destroyed large tracks of crop, posing a threat to food security later in the year. Over 56,000 households have been displaced. As a result, there are 167 camps across 22 counties, hosting over 70,000 people.
Schools have not been spared either. Over 1,900 schools have been flooded, infrastructure damaged and access hampered due to damaged roads. Some of them are in use as holding camps for displaced families. As a result, school re-opening was delayed for two weeks. This is the first major setback to learning after the COVID-19 closures, which saw schools closed for over nine months, only to re-open in 2021 to a rather tight schedule of four school terms each year.
As the Ministry reopens schools, a lot of consideration is given into ensuring the safety of learners. The multisectoral agency set up to oversee this is required to step up the reconstruction efforts to ensure the availability of classrooms and restore the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) facilities to normalcy. The latter is critical to ensuring the continued participation of girls. With families out of their homes, and their property swept away, there is an urgent need to step up and cushion them against the indirect costs of schooling, such as through the purchase of school uniforms and books. The declaration by the Ministry on unconditional admission is welcome but may require adjustments to ensure that schools that admit extra learners are facilitated to provide for their material as well as socio-emotional needs.
This setback is but one example of the effects climate change could have on our education system and other sectors of our economy. Closures associated with climate change will result in a decline in educational outcomes, which subsequently affects future learning. This article gives a snippet view of the effects of climate-change related shocks on education. It projects that a 10-year-old today will experience 10 times more climate-related disruptions[2], including floods, drought, heatwaves, cyclones, and wildfires. Beyond learning outcomes, such shocks will affect their socio-emotional stability further aggravating the learning outcomes.
These realities only serve as a reminder that the conversation about the resilience of our education system is far from complete. The prolonged closures in 2020 triggered these conversations, with technology identified as a key enabler in ensuring learning continuity. This conversation holds a further promise – the role of the parent in promoting learning continuity at home. Investing in parents to increase their awareness of the curriculum[3], deepen their understanding of their role in supporting curriculum implementation, developing targeted capacities for promoting learning at home as well as creating an enabling home environment for learning and development of life skills and nurturing of values is paramount.
Speaking to parents in Kenya today, parents are still puzzled at what the Competence-based Curriculum entails and their role in it. They have questioned the extent of engagement in school-related projects, wondering where the role of the teacher stops and that of the parent starts. They are curious about the assessment methods, citing a lack of clarity on how to track their children’s performance given the new competence-based assessment approaches. They are also unclear about what the future holds for their children. How about transitions? How shall we determine how learners transition through the various pathways? These and many more continue to run through the minds of parents. Their concerns are a reminder that we have left them behind, even though the train left the station 8 years ago.
These sentiments are not peculiar to the Kenyan context but are characteristic of most education systems. A lot also goes into how the role of the parent is conceptualized. For optimal engagement, schools and educators must take into cognizance the realities of the parents, including their daily schedules and constraints, and design parental engagement programs that are well aligned. The input of parents in this process is vital in ensuring success.
In 2023 members of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI – Africa) finalized a Parental Empowerment and Engagement (PE&E) Framework that highlights four thematic pillars while seeking optimal engagement of parents:
- Communication that is two-way between home and school, embraces the use of varied, inclusive channels of communication, and holds parents’ voices in high regard, by ensuring a safe space, opportunities, and time for parents to express their opinions;
- Collaboration between parents and schools/educators that is governed by mutual trust, highlighting the need for educators to strike cordial and respectful working relationships with the parents and communities they serve;
- Capacity sharing, concerned with identifying the capacities educators and parents possess and leveraging these for partnerships, as well as identifying areas of capacity strengthening for both teachers and parents and investing time and resources to achieve this; and,
- Leveraging capacity resources and systems. This pillar acknowledges that PE&E does not happen in a vacuum and that there exist resources and systems (formal, and informal) that schools could capitalize on to promote learning beyond the four classroom walls and genuine partnerships with families.
PE&E should therefore be embraced as a critical piece of the learning process, which prepares them to effectively play their role at home during periods such as the recent prolonged school holidays. This engagement goes beyond homework support since it targets all parents, some of whom lack the basic literacy skills to adequately supervise academic concepts. Some emerging best practices at home by parents that have an impact on learning outcomes include:
- Holding conversations about learning with their children. When parents and children engage in positive dialogue about learning and school, children are more likely to develop positive attitudes toward school. It shows the child that what happens at school matters to their parents, thus strengthening the connection between home and school. Such positive dialogue also contributes to higher aspirations by the children. The conversations could aim at challenging the learner to apply concepts learnt at school in their daily life and those that promote problem-solving and creativity.
- Reading together at home. Fifteen minutes of reading every day boost literacy outcomes and enhances learner confidence in their reading abilities. Parents can purchase level-appropriate readers and create dedicated reading time with their children or with older siblings where literacy levels do not allow direct involvement of the parent. When this culture is nurtured at home, learners will extend it to school and are more likely to become curious readers.
- Creating a rich, safe, quiet learning space and time for learning while at home. Children learn to read by reading, learn how to speak by speaking, and so on. As such, parents who invest in a print-rich home environment, allowing children space and time to learn enhance their achievements. More so, providing support through adults or older siblings ensures the scaffolding of their abilities.
- Creating a positive environment for nurturing values and developing life skills. The home environment is rich in opportunities for the learning and development of children in all facets, including social-emotional aspects. It is also at home where values are nurtured and ample opportunities for developing life skills accessed. Parents who are deliberate about the quality of the home environment nurture children with high self-esteem and confidence, which positively impacts their learning trajectory and socialization habits.
- Tapping onto available platforms to promote learning. More than before, there are numerous opportunities for learning through technology. Parents can use their phones to sign up their children for online learning opportunities, be it platforms that offer levelled readers, or those that offer curriculum-related resources. This way, even when parents lack a deeper understanding of curriculum content, their children engage through customized platforms and experiences, ensuring continued learning.
These are but a few ways to ensure parents are part and parcel of the learning ecosystem. However, care must be exercised not to only call on parents during periods of crisis, while holding them at bay when schools are in session. Engagement should be an ongoing process. Developing the capacities parents need on curriculum, discipline management, child development, and digital literacy requires specially organized sessions by schools and agencies that have been set up to oversee PE&E at school.
Author:
Virginia Ngindiru
Director, Innovations and Practice,
Zizi Afrique Foundation
This is really great and incredible.