Abstract
The importance of education should not be taken for granted even for remote and almost inaccessible areas, far from urbanity. There are many benefits of implementing an early childhood education program for children as well as their parents; however, doing so in a remotely aboriginal community area can be an entirely different thing. This can involve significantly highest construction costs brought about by highest transportation costs; and also slower construction project turnaround time due to the mere distance between the suppliers and the construction location, etc. The objective of this paper is to evaluate on the implementation of an early childhood education infrastructure and program in the remotely aboriginal community of Punmu. The researchers are planning to evaluate such by closely supervising the children of the community and their parents for a period of 10 weeks, and by closely supervising the construction team who would be in charge of constructing a multi-purpose hall for the purpose of an ECEP and other possible educational agendas that may be proposed for in the community in the future, focusing on their reactions, both positive and negative, as well as the construction team’s overall project expenditure and total time before the building turnover. Results of the evaluation suggest that implementing an ECEP and infrastructure in a remote community such as the community of Punmu can be economically impractical but since there is no other possible way to expose these indigenous people to early childhood education, it shall remain to be in this list of choices in doing an educational outreach programs.
Introduction
Maintaining a high quality of education in an urban community can be different from doing so in a rural community; and even more different can be doing so in a remote aboriginal setting. Some experts suggest that education is and should be a life-long process. That is, education should not simply be put to a stop after reaching or finishing college. Following the principle of human growth and development, it can be assumed that education too can be divided into certain levels or aspects. The most common form of division is the one that divides an individual’s overall educational requirements into three: primary, secondary, and then tertiary education—with primary education being a prerequisite to secondary education, and secondary education being so to tertiary education. Primary education basically refers to the elementary levels of education, that is from grades 1 to 6 or 7, depending on the model of education system being used in the state; secondary education refers to high school education, that is from first to fourth or fifth year high school, depending on the model of education system currently enforced in the state; lastly, tertiary education refers to college education and any other forms of creditable education beyond that such as gaining a Master’s or even a doctorate degree in a particular field. There is often one level or stage of education that is usually forgotten simply because it easily gets stumped by these three—early childhood education. Early childhood education, early education, early childhood learning, or even pre-school learning if you will, is one of the important phases of education. Being one of the most important stages of education because it prepares or pre-sets the individual for the advanced educational challenges he would face in elementary, high school and college levels of education, it is quite ironic that it is also the one that is commonly taken for granted. In the most basic sense, early childhood education can be defined as the process of educating young children, from an established range of zero to five years old, by people aside from the family members (usually by teachers and other educational professionals) in an outside from home setting (usually in a day care center, school, or any other established educational institution). There has been some conflict as to the idea of up to what age early childhood education can really fall. Generally, in the United States, early childhood education starts from zero and ends by the time the child reaches five years old. However, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, early childhood education may exist up until the individual reaches eight years old . The objective of this paper is to evaluate on the implementation of an early childhood education infrastructure and program in a remote aboriginal community, particularly the Punmu community, a medium-sized remote aboriginal community located in the Western Desert within the shire of East Pilbara approximately 640 kilometers southeast of Port Hedland. The research group would attempt to evaluate on the implementation of an early childhood education infrastructures and programs in the Punmu community focusing on the following key areas: logistics of construction in remote aboriginal communities; financial issues associated with complicated transportation systems to and fro the area; the impact of sociocultural factors such as lore, funerals, and other cultural events taking place in these communities; governance structures in place and their capacity to run programs and maintain the infrastructure; and finally, the educational professionals’ attraction, retention, and turnover rates in this remote aboriginal community.
Literature Review
As mentioned in the introduction, spearheading an early education or any form of education program regardless of the level or stage in an urban setting can be different in a lot of aspects from doing so in a rural or a remote aboriginal community setting . Some of the issues encountered by groups of educational professionals who held educational missions in such remote areas include—increased cost of transportation, logistics, and supply chain management (both in program implementation and infrastructure construction), poor lodging and even sanitary conditions, absence of advantages brought about technology, sociocultural barriers, political issues in the community , and perhaps the most common of all, high educational staff turnover rates, mainly due to the below average living conditions and meager wages . True enough, these are conditions that outreach and community workers who would be sent to educational and other types of missions on aboriginal communities would have to prepare for.
Pros and Cons of an Early Childhood Education Program
Unlike any other phases of education, early childhood education programs typically focus on the power of play, as suggested by major classical proponents of play therapy like Jean Piaget. The idea behind the incorporation of the power of play in the learning environment is the belief that children can learn more effectively and efficiently, gaining more knowledge along the process, by having them engage in active play-based activities such as social and interactive games, and even dramatic and artistic plays . This method of education pacifies the children’s strong tendency or need to make believe, and their nature of being curious enough to make them absorb educational lessons. In an early childhood education program, educational experts suggest that the parents play an integral role in the education process hence the reason why they are being referred to as the children’s first and best teacher . Naturally, a child coupled with a pair of educationally unsupportive parents would tend to be outperformed by one coupled a pair of supportive parents in terms of early childhood educational progress.
Early childhood education program is important because the first two years in a child’s life are spent in the development of his “sense of self” or the ability to differentiate oneself from others. By having them interact with other kids at this early a stage, they would be able to determine, at an early age—which is always an advantage, how they should function in relation to other kids, and people. This theory is also the reason why most early childhood programs emphasize values, home language and culture, and concepts of family, all incorporating play activities in their curriculum .
Aboriginal Community Logistics
The level of development in remote aboriginal communities would turn out to be evidently lower compared to that of an urban community. This is because the budget allocation for local rural governments are usually considerably lower compared to that of cities and other well-developed and more populous areas. In the rural provinces of China for example, “after 30 years of reform, the development is still in a lower level and the reason behind is the logistics system supporting rural development is still far from being set up” . The rural aboriginal community of Punmu likely suffers from the same logistical dilemma. Basically, logistics is an area of supply chain management that is concerned with the process of the collection or pooling of raw materials, producing output materials from such raw materials based on a specified volume of demand, down to the delivery of the final products to the consumers. Logistics principles are commonly used in the manufacturing industry although they can also be applied at some point in the construction industry considering that these two industries are similar in a lot of aspects—it also involves raw material pooling processes except for the final product creation processes. The general budget rule for government budget management is that cities, municipalities, and communities with the largest population and with the largest tax contribution to the government would end up receiving the largest cuts of the budget. In that case, remote aboriginal areas would end up to the bottom in the list of highest budgeted cities mainly because of their population and the revenue that the local government generates from the business operations and trade in the area which appears to be very little to nothing. The accessibility of transportation routes and the added costs and time associated with transportation (normal in distant remote areas) can all be classified as major logistical challenges in establishing educational infrastructures in the area.
Sociocultural Factors
Family approaches to education can either serve as a support tool or a hindrance to the educational outreach team’s efforts in promoting early childhood education in an aboriginal community. Some parents in these remote communities may tend to feel anxiety and even resistance to the idea of having their children be educated at an early age. In a study conducted by Connell, Sanders, and Dadds (2012) about the self-directedness behavioral family intervention for parents of oppositional children in rural and remote areas, “24 parents of oppositional preschoolers were randomly assigned to ether a self-directed behavioral family intervention condition or to a waitlist control group” and observed for 10 weeks in a series of interviews and telephone consultations. According to the results of their 10 week close findings, “parents in the SD group reported increased levels of parenting competence and lower levels of dysfunctional parenting practices as compared to parents in the WLD condition; mothers also reported lower levels of anxiety, depression, and stress as compared to mothers in the WL condition at post-treatment, and of gains in child behavior and parenting practices achieved at post-treatment and maintained after a four month follow up” . This only proves how reluctant parents and even the children themselves could be in a remote aboriginal community early childhood educational setting. This sociocultural-related finding in remote aboriginal communities’ attitude towards educate goes in contrast with the approval and willingness of the parents living in an urban setting to send their children to school, despite at an early age; and the cooperation of the children themselves .
Research Methodology
For best results, the evaluation would have to be divided into two: the first division would focus on the implementation of an early childhood education program while the second one would focus on the implementation of early childhood education infrastructures.
For the first part, the researchers would try to evaluate the implementation of an early childhood education program by creating a 10 week lesson plan for children in the aboriginal community of Punmu. The researchers, within the 10 week period, would then qualitative assess the performance and more importantly, the reaction of the children, as well as their parents to the implementation of the lesion plan. It would be important to note that the researchers would try to look for both positive and negative reactions to the program within the 10 week period by means of focus group discussions, personal and even telephone interviews, and observations.
The second half of the evaluation would focus on the construction of a multi-purpose hall which could be used by the aboriginal natives of Punmu as a large hall for their children whenever they have educational classes. Since it is given that the budget for Punmu community is very limited and that there are certain major logistics challenges that the construction team would have to deal with, the construction of a multi-purpose building would certain appear to be the most practical and cost-effective choice. The research team would qualitatively and quantitatively assess the process of the multi-purpose hall’s construction focusing on areas such as the overall completion time of the project, the overall amount of budget spent, and for the qualitative part, interviews and group discussions with the construction team regarding their experience in constructing an MPH in a remote area compared to their experience in constructing one in more accessible and most likely urban areas.
Outcomes
Being a more qualitative than quantitative study, the outcomes for this study would mostly rely on the reactions of the participants who would be the children of the Punmu community, their respective parents, and the construction team in charge of the Multi-purpose Hall construction. For the quantitative aspect on the other hand, the outcomes would be the overall time consumed to finish the construction project, and the overall expenditures of the project, including transportation costs, in relation to the estimated project expenditures and timeframe in a normal urban or sub-urban setting.
Evaluation
As expected, the some of the most common events in an early childhood education program happened in the ECEP in the remote aboriginal community of Punmu—increased employee turnover rates, children’s dislike of going to school, parents’ resistance to the idea of sending their children to school at an early age, and higher than usual overall time and expenditure to finish the multi-purpose hall construction project, all happened. The multi-purpose hall was put up with a total construction and initial operating cost of 1 million USD, including the transportation costs for the raw materials, etc., and a total construction time—including the delivery and disposal time of all raw materials, of 1 year and three months. According to the construction team, in a normal urban or sub-urban setting, the multi-purpose hall they constructed would have been finished within 8-10 months with a budget of 500 to 600 million USD. The focus group on the construction team also reported that they had to make more complicated procedures than usual in the entire construction process. Evidently, it is harder both for the construction and ECEP implementation team to do their respective jobs and responsibilities in a remote aboriginal community setting than in a normal urban or suburban setting. However, no matter how hard, it should be taken into consideration that there is no other way to reach such remote areas and educate them or their children but to create programs like this one, no matter how harder or more costly than usual they can be.
Recommendations
Based on the evaluation gathered, it is already evident that the implementation of early childhood educational programs and construction projects in a remote aboriginal area such as the Punmu community can be a significantly harder and more costly task than doing so in a normal urban or sub-urban community setting. Despite the clear logistical, economical, and human resource management-related disadvantages of such community educational outreach projects, we still recommend the implementation of such programs because there seems to be no other way to reach these populations aside from doing so. The researchers of this study understand the fact that 10 weeks or approximately 2 and ½ months may not be enough for the students and their parents to cope up with the idea of having an educational team working within their vicinity for an outreach program, which may be one of the reasons of their negative reactions to the evaluation. In about half a year or more or so, it is very likely that such negative reactions would be changed with positive ones and the increased costs brought about by logistical disadvantages of constructing infrastructures and operating in remote aboriginal areas may well be more worth it.
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