The time has finally arrived, giving the Anguilla Community College its long-held desire to train teachers at home to obtain a well-recognised Associate Degree in Education, while carrying on their normal lives. The college now has the first batch of students in its classrooms studying Early Childhood Education under the tutorship of a number of local lecturers.
The teaching programme is under the aegis of the Eastern Caribbean Joint Board of Teacher Education, an arm of the School of Education of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies in Barbados.
The course involves several units of study. One such unit was started on Monday this week by Professor Delroy Louden, President of the Community College. “We are talking today about child development in the Caribbean – and we are looking at various matters such as environment, patterns of parenting and some of the good practices that would give children a better opportunity in life,” he told The Anguillian. That particular unit of the course will last for 15 or 16 weeks and will be followed by other units over the next two years.
“Some of the units in the course cover Child Development from birth to eight years of age; Communications, Language Acquisition, Children Literacy and Teaching of Mathematics for Young Children,” Professor Louden continued.
“The course is being held in the afternoons for three hours at a time. It has been approved and examined by the Joint Board of Teacher Education. It is a programme which is well credentialed in terms of the academic qualifications. We have a mixture of young people in the classroom, some of whom are from the private sector and others from the public sector. We are teaching the programme in an applied fashion as the students are working – and we are using the experience which they bring not just as parents, but as teachers in the classroom. This enables us to illustrate what are some of the best practices we should try.”
Asked why so much emphasis was being placed on Early Childhood Education, he replied: “The early years are very important. We have just been talking about age 8 being too late – that if you don’t get some of those early childhood practices and experiences in by age 8, the developmental milestones are too far gone for us to begin to remedy the situation for many young children. Age 8 is too late is the bench mark of this programme at the college. You have to get it right in the early years. We place emphasis on the early years—nurturing, caring, praising, encouraging and rewarding children. These are some of the essential features which are really very important for good child development.”
How does Professor Louden see the Early Childhood Education Programme developing at the college? “I think there are great opportunities because from the point of the qualification, Cave Hill, Barbados, is a recognised institution in every part of the world,” he replied. “The qualification is going to be very significant and we see it helping the teachers in the schools to deal with, understand and diagnose early warning signs in children; when to intervene, and if the developmental milestones are delayed they would know what to look forward to.
“We are going to examine some very important things in this class. We are going to examine parents who smoke; alcohol consumption and the effects on the early developmental years of children. We are therefore taking some of the practices from the community, and feed them back to the students with some particular examples of the consequences which will affect young children.”
The President of the Community College pointed out that, in addition to Early Childhood Education, other educational programmes were being offered by the institution. “We are also offering the Postgraduate Diploma in Education for those teachers who already hold Bachelor degrees, but want to become licensed teachers,” he said. “So we are offering more than one course in education to meet the human resource needs of the island of Anguilla for trained professional men and women in education.”
