Revisiting Piaget, his contribution to South African early childhood education

ABSTRACT

The importance of a Piagetian approach is recognized in South African early childhood educational practices and teacher training, but the reality of the implementation of teaching and learning in the domain of early years opposes his philosophy in many ways. Our Early Childhood Education policies strongly advocate a Piagetian approach such as the emphasis on cognitive development, play-based learning, placing the child at the centre of learning and recognizing the holistic child. However, South African schools are contextually challenged with a disconnect between teacher training, policy and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Assimilation
• accommodation
• equilibration
• indigenous knowledge
• curriculum
• policy and practice
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An ECD practitioner is a teacher support or class teacher who has limited education usually an NQF Level 4 or 5 diploma or less than a matric.

2 PIRLS is a study that has been running for 20 years and is administered every 5 years to act as a benchmark regarding literacy development both nationally and internationally.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ina Joubert

Professor Ina Joubert has more than 35 years of experience in education. She has acted as school principal of an Early Childhood Education centre, senior lecturer in distance education and head of an academic department at the University of Pretoria. She was recently appointed as the Executive Academic Director of SANTS, Private Higher Education Institution. She has published numerous books, book chapters and accredited articles in leading academic journals. Many postgraduate students have completed their studies under her supervision. She was awarded a special achievement award for the promotion of Afrikaans in Early Childhood Education by the Academy for Science and Art, South Africa in 2018. Professor Joubert’s work in literacy in early childhood education and citizenship education for young children has brought several accolades to herself.

Giulietta Domenica Harrison

Giulietta Harrison, who is the current President of the South African Research Association for Early Childhood Education (SARAECE), has come from a background of many years of teaching in early childhood classrooms across a variety of contexts. She has been a school Principal, an H.O.D. and a lecturer in the Foundation Phase. She is presently the Director for Africa A+ Schools and H.O.D. for B.Ed. F.P. at SANTS, Higher Education Institute. She has a passion for helping teachers to provide positive spaces for learning which she expresses through her work in Emotional Intelligence. She did her Masters research looking at how to promote this in a Grade R classroom and her Ph.D. on understanding how children learning, using Grade 1 Literacy as her vehicle for analysis. She has written a variety of training programmes as ‘open-source’ documents for the NPO sector including parent and teacher programmes. As the Director of an NPO, she works closely with and conducts research with educators in the poorest communities in South Africa. She has published extensively in books and journals together with supervising Masters and Ph.D. students when working at Rhodes University.