Md Bayazid Khan :
Today’s primary school children and other children have to face multifarious crises or challenges with tremendous competition to survive in the twenty-first century’s world considering natural or man-made disasters and the reality of gradually changing technology or digital devices driven labour markets.
Therefore, students need to keep themselves in the lifelong learning process and also be prepared for facing as well as enabling adaptation of the forthcoming crises or challenges for survival.
Time has come to revisit the curriculum with a view to keeping the provision of achieving blended learning consisting of foundational learning and crisis resilient learningby learners at the primary tier of education.
The massive concern for educators and curriculum developers is to choose relevant and age appropriate areas for learning in primary education.
It will not be wise and realistic to think that primary school graduates have to attain mastery of learning in all learning areas such as literacy, numeracy, history, geography ICT, science, religion, arts etc. Rather considering learning poverty in functional literacy (reading comprehension) & numeracy, prevailing worldwide crises due to man-made and natural disasters, replacement of technology in traditional human jobs, deterioration of morality & social values and necessity of lifelong learning, the educators and policymakers need to consider augmentation of foundational and crisis resilient or adaptation learning for primary school children.
Foundational learning areas may include basic learning in literacy & numeracy; learning for digital literacy; learning for socio-emotional skills (behavior & morality learning) and learning of good health, nutrition and hygiene.
On the other hand, crisis resilient education may include climate or disasters adaptation learning (Climate Change Education) and learningfor maintaining peace & social harmony (Peace Education).
There is no need for imposing so many subjects or books on children to make learning uncomfortable and uninteresting to learners.
Rather to achieve reading skills of reading with understanding in Bangla & English by Students, supplementary reading materials (SRM) on Bangladesh’s history, culture, liberation war, science fiction, interesting history/story etc may be developed and supplied to schools. Regular reading of SRMs should become compulsory for students and it should be properly monitored.
During formative and summative assessment students reading performance in SRMs might be considered to make the practices of SRM reading more effective.
Moreover, to make foundational learning (FL) and crisis resilient or adaptation learning (CRL/CAL) inclusive and effective, there is the urgency of ensuring a learning friendly school environment, effective teaching-learning process and last but not the least parental involvement to support students in learning.
(The writer is working for
primary education [email protected])