Chapter 5: Transforming pedagogical practices in early childhood care and education

This chapter intends to explore how pedagogies can be innovated in early childhood care and education (ECCE) to respond to children’s early development. The focus of the chapter will be children between the ages of 0 and 4 years, as these are the children who are often neglected as they do not fall within the bracket of those who are in formal schools, for example, those children in Grade R classes. These children are being neglected even though neuroscientists perceive this age group as important in enhancing children’s holistic development. Furthermore, it is during these years that, as children develop, certain skills, concepts and attitudes that contribute to laying a solid foundation for them beyond their childhood years are acquired. Therefore, at an early age, children need to be introduced to caring and nurturing environments to identify their developmental delays timeously to provide support where necessary. This is because the first 1,000 days of every child’s life are crucial to ascertain their development. One element of children’s development is physical development; therefore, the environments provided to young children at an early age should be conducive to promoting a playful environment that fosters young children’s optimal development. Hence, play is considered one of the important aspects of every developing child. Even with ECCE provisioning, play-based learning has been viewed as one of the innovative methods that can be adopted, as young children can easily learn to comprehend an instruction given using a play-based learning approach. This is because play-based learning is child-centred in nature, and it creates an opportunity for children to become inquisitive, experimental, diligent and independent. As play-based learning may give children more meaningful and equitable learning experiences as per the standardised ECCE curriculum, children may feel connected to their learning environment as they gain confidence in what they do, and this may also enhance personality development. Despite the envisaged transformational agenda of the ECCE sector, there seem to be problems experienced with innovative pedagogical practices in ECCE provisioning.