Background:

1. Since its inception in 2002, Research Initiatives Bangladesh (RIB) has focused upon education as a key sector of its research support programme on poverty alleviation. One of the first research projects it funded was on education of children belonging to the most economically depressed sections of society, particularly in hard to reach rural areas of the country. Somehow these children have remained "missing" from the country's free primary education system, despite many years' of efforts by government and non-government agencies. The basic objective of the research is to devise an approach to bring them in.

Specific Objectives:

2. The research project was undertaken by a group of young college teachers in a village in southwestern Bangladesh named Kajoli, in the Sripur Upozila of Magura District. The main goal of the project, which emerged from discussions between the researchers, members of RIB's Board of Directors and experts in the field, was to develop a model for community-run Early Childhood Education Center (ECEC) that would make the above-mentioned "missing children" education-minded and pave the way for their entry into mainstream education. As the researchers were young and inexperienced, it was also decided that RIB would provide them with guidance, whenever necessary. The project was formally launched on 1 January 2003. The specific objectives of the research were jointly set to be as follows:

• The research work will follow the Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology and would have two distinct but interlinked aspects of equal importance. One focusing upon social aspects of setting up and sustaining ECECs in the village and the other on methodological and curriculum-related aspects of imparting knowledge.
  
• The social aspects should consider replication and sustainability as key elements. The model must be implementable through community support alone. In other words, it should be able to operate without outside support, whether from the government or elsewhere.
  
• To ensure sustainability, specific focus must be given on participation by all sections of the village community in the affairs of the ECEC, including parents, local primary school teachers, and the village population at large.
  
• The model should be specifically focused upon children from families with no tradition of education, where parents are illiterate and the children are otherwise unlikely to go to school.
  
• Children between 4 and 5 years of age should be the focus of the approach so that after a year's stay at the Center they would emerge with a desire to continue education at normal schools. The ECECs should be designed to serve as a bridge to government primary school where the age of entry is fixed at 6.
  
• The curriculum of activities at the Center should be based on the principle of learning as a "fun and game" affair and not a difficult, boring and tiresome exercise, as is often the perception of many parents and children.
  
• Particular attention should be given to minimize the cost of setting up and maintaining an ECEC on a "no cost or low cost" basis. This is of primary importance for sustainability. Thus the use of books, exercise books, writing papers, pens, pencils, costly learning instruments and the like should be eliminated.
  
• The focus should be on comprehensive education of the child and not simply on cognitive knowledge aimed primarily at the "3Rs", i.e., reading, writing and arithmetic skills, as is often the case in the normal schooling system. In other words, the curriculum at the Center would cater to the whole gamut of cognitive, social, emotional and physical development of the child. The goal is that at the end of the stay of the child at the Center, strong foundations would have been laid for balanced mental, physical, social, sensory and personality growth of the child. She/he will emerge with self-confidence, social awareness, social values, a spirit of tolerance and respect for others, sensitivity to others' needs, sense of cleanliness and hygiene etc. All these should be achieved through active, hands-on learning, conceptual learning, interactive teaching and cooperative learning, value-based learning and learning through social interaction.
  
• The curriculum at the Center should be such that a village woman, without any formal training but with some basic education (e.g., with a High School degree) and the right personality, would be able to handle with ease. The requirement of experienced/trained teacher is likely to make replication of this community-run model extremely difficult because of the salary expectations of such a person. However, a teachers' guide/manual containing information in easily comprehensible language on child psychology, the learning process of children, methodology for handling the curriculum and time management in class etc. should be developed.

Preliminary Findings:

3. As is evident from above, the research was circumscribed by a number of specific goal-oriented objectives. The researchers had to try them out, making necessary adjustments, as required. However after a year of research at Kajoli with very encouraging results, both in relation to the participatory and curriculum-related aspects, RIB decided to spread the experiment to other parts of the country for further testing. On basis of the combined experience gathered at these places over a period of about two years, the following findings may be said to have emerged:

• Community Participation: In view of the specific objectives set for the Kajoli project, the ECE approach that has emerged is quite distinct from normal Pre-Schools. The Kajoli approach goes much beyond the traditional pre-school concept. A particularly distinctive aspect is its emphasis on community participation as a basis for sustainability. Unless the sustainability and curriculum-related aspects are put together, the system would not work.
• Socio-economic Background of the Children: A key element in the Kajoli approach is the socio-economic background of the children. It is not meant for children whose parents can afford to send their children to government or privately run schools. It focuses specifically on children who have little or no chance of entering the mainstream schools of the country. This has worked very well in all the places where the model is being experimented. It is essential that this focus be maintained for the system to succeed.
• The Role of the "Champions": It has been seen that a foremost requirement in setting up an ECEC is the role of dedicated individual(s) in the village who serve as coordinator(s). They are called "champion(s)" because they champion the cause of education of these children; take the initiative and co-ordinate all the activities that link the Center with the community. Once a Center has been set up, it is of course possible for others to take up this responsibility through, for example, setting up of a parent/community body, like School Management Committees. This latter point is important to safeguard management continuity against the "champion" leaving/dying/getting sick/facing personal or family crisis/getting very busy with own work etc. But the initial role of the "champion(s)" has been found to be indispensable for the system to work.
• · The role of parents/guardians of the children has proven to be equally crucial. As they do not have the necessary exposure to education and need to be motivated about the importance of their children's education, it is essential to incorporate them as stakeholders/co-owners of the system In fact they are perhaps the most important stakeholders. Their involvement is a basic pre-requisite for the success of the system. It has been seen that they enjoy being involved in most decision making relating to the Center, from setting the class-hours to seating arrangement of the children in the class (often the children seat on the floor, upon mats made by parents from palm fronds), teacher selection, teacher's leave arrangement, monthly teacher/parent meetings and children's welfare generally. The mothers are particularly most involved in these activities. There is need for further research on why the fathers appear to participate less in the affairs of the Center compared to the mothers even though they seem to be equally pleased with the progress of their children at the Centers.
• Provision of Mid-day Meals: But the most important role of the parents that have emerged from the Kajoli experiment relates to the provision of mid-day meals for the children. In this regard a very innovative arrangement has evolved in which each parent takes the responsibility of providing a meal to all the children of the Center once a month. It normally consists of a rice-and-lentil gruel with some vegetables thrown in. [From time to time villages folks chip in some additional items]. Thus by turn the parents collectively feed the children on all class-days a month. Based on this practice, it has also been established that the ideal class size for a Center is 26 children, since on an average there are 26 class days a month, thus making it easy for the parents to maintain a once-a -month feeding schedule. It is the parents of the Kajoli Center, who through discussions among themselves have devised the arrangement. Their decision was based on the calculation that if their children ate at home they would have consumed as much food in 26 days as they would require to feed 26 children once a month. The provision of the mid-day meal not only helps in the regular intake of food by the children but also instills a sense of pride in them. On the day a child's mother cooks, the child plays the role of the host, ensuring that all the children have been properly served and fed. He/she does so with great pride and enjoyment. It also reinforces a sense of service and hospitality among the children. The children also learn to express appreciation, since at the end of each feeding they collectively thank the mother who cooked for them. As for the parents, by providing the food and partaking in other activities of the Center, they develop a sense of ownership of the Center, which is essential for its welfare as well as for the welfare of their children.
• The role of the village community has also proven to be equally important. The idea is to bring together as many members of the community as possible to support the Center, at least morally and if possible by financial and other means. Their role has varied from place to place. Normally it included help in identifying/providing space for the Center where the children may meet four hours a day for six days a week. Experience has shown that wherever a village community has come together in this regard, finding a locale for the center is not a very big problem. If the community can put themselves together to build a Center, which normally consists of one room, it generates a great sense of ownership. This has already happened in a number of Centers. In some places someone provided the land space, others provided the bamboos and the CI sheets, and the rest provided the labour. This collective effort is the best recipe for success of the ECEC. It has been found that situating the Center near the village primary school is most convenient for two reasons. It orients the children to the school to which they are expected to go after a year's stay at the Center, but more importantly it helps to link the teachers of the primary school to the activities of the Center. This later factor has played an important role in the enrolment of the first year batch of the Kajoli ECEC in the local primary school. The children have also unexpectedly benefited from the scholarship provision instituted by the government to help parents/children belonging to the most depressed section of society. In fact almost all the children belonging to the first batch who passed out of the Kajoli Center benefited from TK. 100 scholarship a month. This has given an added encouragement to the parents to send their children to the ECEC.
• Fund Raising: The village community can also help to raise the fund necessary to operate such a center. It has been seen that it takes a one-time cost of around TK1000 (one thousand Takas) to provide for the basic educational tools of the system. These include blackboards and a pocket board. [The use of these two tools will be discussed in paragraph 4 below]. The recurring costs include salary for one teacher (between Tk.800 to Tk.1000 a month) and the cost of chalks for writing on the blackboards (about Tk.20 a month). Thus altogether it would cost around Tk.13000 annually to run a Center after the initial one-time cost of Tk.1000 for the blackboards and pocket board. Normally people from the village are able to raise the fund by various means.
• The role of the teacher: It may be recalled that one of the specific objectives of the research was to assess the efficacy/advisability of employing a girl/woman from the village itself, with some basic education and no formal teacher's training, to be a teacher at the ECEC. The reason for this was the cost and sustainability factor. The argument was that a trained teacher would be more expensive and less likely to remain at a Center much long. The experience at the Centers has shown that such a woman/girl can indeed do the job without much difficulty. Being a person from the village she is known to the children, either directly or indirectly, which is a big plus factor. As for education background of the teacher, it has been found that a person with high school education would suffice. If some one with higher education is found who fulfills the other requirements as mentioned in this note, so much the better. What has emerged to be particularly important is the requirement that the teacher must possess a loving personality, a willingness to spend four hours a day with 26 children for 6 days a week and to learn the art of teaching through on-the-job training, In choosing a teacher it is important to remember that "teaching" in an ECEC is a multidimensional activity which requires a teacher to be a researcher all the time. The teacher will have to constantly ask the question: "what do I wish to accomplish on a given day and how do I achieve this?"
• Teacher's Guide/Manual: The need for a teacher's guide was also generally recognized. It has been felt that since the ECEC approach is new and innovative, the teacher must be provided with basic reading materials on how children develop and learn in order to meet their cognitive, social, emotional and physical needs; on the philosophy of early childhood education, on curriculum to be followed and on methodology of conducting the activities of the Center. RIB hopes to prepare a teacher's guide/manual based on the experience so far. Provisions will also have to be made for visits by new teachers to an existing ECEC to observe and learn from the teaching methods being used.

Curriculum of Activities at the ECEC:

4. As stated earlier, since a basic objective of the ECEC is to pave the way for a comprehensive education of the child, the curriculum to be followed at the Centers must reflect this objective. The curriculum includes indoor and outdoor games, including PT, which helps physical fitness of the children and keeps them happily preoccupied for at least an hour of a four-hour day. The remaining time is divided between using the blackboards and the pocket board, learning nursery rhymes and children's poems, counting and basic arithmetic, story telling, clay modeling, gardening, sweeping the floors to keep it clean, eating and resting etc. A local potter who volunteered his services made the clay-modeling course possible in Kajoli. A description here on how some of these activities are performed will be pertinent.

• The games include playing outside whenever weather permits, and as many indoors games (like zig-saw puzzles, blocks made of wood or paper, Lego blocks and the like) as may be obtained. The idea of providing instruments normally used by kindergartens/play centers was abandoned because of the high cost involved. Instead indigenous varieties are innovated. It is not difficult however to collect games from members of the local community. At Kajoli, a local donor has provided the facilities for the outdoors games (slide, swing, sea-saw etc.) and others have provided enough indoors games to keep the children happily preoccupied during game time. As mentioned earlier, at Kajoli a local potter also provided clay pottery lessons once a week. The PT is done both indoors and outdoors as weather permits. Everyday the child whose mother cooks for the day plays the role of the PT master. This system has worked very well and has generated confidence and leadership among the children.
  
• The blackboards are normally prepared, wherever possible, by colouring the cement plastering on the walls of three sides of the classroom with black paint. If cemented walls are not available they may be made from hard boards, painted black and attached to the walls, whatever they may be made of. There should be enough space on the blackboards so that each child is allotted her/his own space on them. In the beginning they draw on them freely without any guidance. This is fun for them. When they become used to handling the chalk, they learn to make forms and even to write, as and when they are ready. It is amazing how quickly they become adept in using the blackboard.
  
• The pocket boards provide a very innovative alternative to books. They are made of a 4 ft by 3ft piece of long-cloth stitched in such a way that a number of pockets are created, 4in by 4in, in several rows. These pockets are then filled with cards made of Manila paper with alphabets, letters, pictures, numbers etc. drawn on them. Normally the children begin to use the pocket board from day one. In the beginning, the pockets contain some ten cards with ten two-letter words inscribed on them with pictures representing the words. For example, aam (mango), boi (book), moi (ladder), ghor (room/house), bol (ball) etc. The children are asked, for example, to bring the card with aam, which they recognize easily because of the picture of aam inscribed on it. This becomes an easy and interesting game for the children to play. They jostle with each other to find the right card. By day two or three they are able to recognize the word aam without the picture of mango. And so on and so forth. It's amazing how quickly they learn the characters without knowing their names. They are even able to form the word aam, for example, by picking up the right alphabets from the pocket board. Their vocabulary grows with the increase in the number of words they are able to learn in this manner. Once they have seen almost all the alphabets used in different words, the process of learning the names of the alphabets begin, usually through a nursery rhyme. The same applies to learning the numbers. As they learn to read them, they also begin to write them on the blackboard. Thus during the year they learn to read, write and count almost all that is required of children of class one of the government primary school.
  
• The nursery rhymes (chharas) are chosen carefully so that they may be sung as well, at least most of them. There are many cassettes available in the market containing these songs. The teacher has to learn them first as well as possible, which she does very happily since it endears her to the children enormously. Alternatively, a cassette player may do the job. But there will a cost for this, unless someone presents it to the Center. The poems too are chosen very carefully to ensure that they contain images and descriptions of village life to which the children can relate easily. It is fascinating to see these small children quoting from Tagore when they see something described by him in his poems, such as a river scene or ducks frolicking in a village pond. At the end of the calendar year, most of the children are able to sing or recite over fifty chharas or poems, including all those contained in the first year reader of the primary school. Those who have seen the children in the beginning of the year are amazed at how those who couldn't even speak properly in the beginning are able to recite or sing with so much of confidence.
  
• The story telling by the children is always a hilarious affair. It has been noted among the children at most of the Centers that they enjoy listening to and telling stories, particularly of the type they can relate to very easily. It helps them to articulate, stretch their imagination and is a source of great enjoyment for their parents. A common refrain of all the parents is how much they enjoy the prating of their children after they return home from the Center, their story telling, singsongs, recitations etc.
  
• Apart from the above activities, the children at the ECECs are also engaged in various other activities varying from place to place, such as singing, sweeping the floors before class and after the meals, gardening and watering plants, keeping the premises clean etc. Visits by village magicians, teachers from other schools, education experts and others to the Centers also add to children's learning process and exposure to the outside world. They learn to exchange both Hindu and Muslim greetings with the visitors thus exposing them to communal variety. Most of the Centers have both Hindu and Muslim students. Some also have Buddhists and Christians, such as those in the Hill Tracts.

Some Additional Points:

5. There are a number of other issues that emerged in the process of research at the various places. Some of these are mentioned below:

• The question of uniform/attire arose at all the places. It was felt in this regard that because of the economic background of the parents and the unlikelihood of raising enough fund from the local community to buy uniforms, it is better to let the children come to the Center wearing whatever their families may afford. In some of the Centers the children come bare bodied, with only their shorts on. In some places, however, the village community has provided winter clothing.
  
• Another question that often arises when new Centers are being set up relates to seating arrangement for the children. Experience shows that this is best left alone to the Centers. If children-size chairs/ tables/benches are available free of cost or are made available by someone, the Centers will have to decide whether to accept them But keeping the cost factor in mind, most Centers have opted for seating on the floor. A good practice here is to ask the parents to weave the mats from coconut/date-palm/Palmyra fronds. This enhances the sense of ownership of the parents about the Center. A more important reason for floor-seating arrangement, however, is the fact that by doing this the whole floor space remains available for other needs, like children playing indoors, doing their PT indoors, eating and resting/lying on the floor etc. It is also easier for the children to clean the room before/after class hours.
  
• The gender issue is equally important. Equal representation of boys and girls in the class appears to be the best approach.
  
• It has also been recognized that arrangements must be made to take the children for outings within the village to get acquainted with the village itself, particularly its trees, flowers and fauna. This will be attended to in the future.
  
• To promote communal understanding/harmony/tolerance, efforts must be made to bring in children from all the communities in the village together in the Center, wherever possible. This has proven to be extremely useful in Kajoli, where efforts towards ensuring proportionate representation of Hindu and Muslim children in the class have contributed to children learning quickly about each other's mode of salutation (salam/nomoskar), religious festivities etc. It may be said to have sown the seeds of communal understanding and tolerance.
  
• There is a need at the end of a year's stay at the Center to ensure that the children are admitted to the local primary school. The local "champion" or others may help in this regard. This follow up is essential. In the Kajoli experiment this has been ensured with some difficulty because some of the children from the first year course appeared to be under age for entry into class one of the primary school where the age of entry is fixed at 6. In the end, all the children were accommodated except two, one of whom was indeed too small and taken back to the Center for another year's stay and the other was admitted to the local Madrasah (religious school), as wished by the parent. It has also been ensured that all the children who were eligible were provided with the government scholarship of Tk.100 each per month. These children are clearly proving to be the best in the class since they had almost completed the requirements of their class during their stay at the Center. It is interesting to note however that they are ever eager to come back to the Center whenever they get an opportunity. There is a need to follow up the development of these children over the years. RIB expects to make it a part of its follow-up research on this subject.

Future Plans:

6. RIB has supported the research on the ECEC project with a view to developing a replicable model in this regard. The research work is continuing at 14 places presently including in Kajoli. The other places are Piruli village in Narail District, Kamarpukur and Boropukur villages in Nilphamari, Ramu and Naikonchori in Chittagong Hill Tracts, Chitolmari in Bagerhat, Moheswarchanda in Jhinedah, Geragonj in Magura and five villages in Chapainowabgonj. In many of these places RIB has provided the start up money with the expectation that eventually they would be on their own. Some of this has already happened. In other places RIB has had no involvement at all. They are running on their own, which is very encouraging. RIB has the following ideas in mind for the future:

• RIB will review the situation at the end of the second year of research, which will be the end of December 2004.
  
• RIB will continue to provide technical support to new Centers that may emerge in the future with people's initiative. This will include knowledge sharing, curriculum support, teacher's manual and teachers training by arranging visits of prospective "champions" and teachers to existing Centers.
  
• RIB plans to hold periodic workshops, mutual visits of teachers, "champions"/would be "champions" of such schools for exchange of experiences and mutual stimulation.
  
• RIB plans to maintain a dedicated staff at its secretariat to help the propagation of ECECs in the country.
  
• If there are individuals who wish to support ECECs in their respective villages, RIB secretariat will offer advice/support as mentioned above.
  
• Once RIB considers that the model has been sufficiently tested and that its findings may be shared with all concerned with education, arrangements will be made for its proper dissemination.
  
• RIB looks forward to comments and suggestions from all concerned for further improvement and propagation of the model.
  
• RIB welcomes expression of interest from the public to watch its video programme of the ECEC project and to arrange for visit to an existing ECEC.