It's a week and a half since exam results day and a lot has been going on. Politically everything seems to have calmed down and Blantyre appears much the same as usual to me. Dave and Fiona have had a few days away visiting Satemwa, a romantic lodge on a tea plantation with four poster beds, meals at tables set about the garden with flowers scattered across white cloths and flowers and birds everywhere, croquet on the lawn and a library full of fascinating old books about Malawi. They also went to Mulange and climbed up to the waterfall and drove all the way around the mountain and across Fort Lister pass, just as Malcolm and I did a few months ago. Meantime I stayed at Chilomoni and worked. I am taking a week off starting tomorrow, but can't afford the holiday to take any more time. I have to save a week for when Annie (sister) and Linda (friend) come in September. I am so lucky in my family. All three of my children have been to see me and now both brother and sister; Dave and 'Ona's children are in the process of bussing down from Tanzania to meet us next week by the Lake, so that's all my closest relations. The most difficult thing about being here has been being so far away from friends and family. It takes a fair degree of commitment and quite a bit of cash to come all the way to Africa, so I am very grateful to them all. You are all very special!
David and I have been working very hard to complete our annotation of the Malawian Early Childhood Development Curriculum so that we can provide a copy in each room at the Children's Centre for the students to use as a reference document to support their work with the children, reminding them of the milestones that the government expect children to meet and giving them ideas of activities to help the children to reach them through play, having fun, encouraging creativity and a problem-solving approach. We have to do the job pretty quickly and therefore I am considering it as a work in progress rather than as producing a definitive document. The Malawian Curriculum seems to be largely designed with the needs of rural ECD centres in mind, as of course it should be as this is where most Malawian children live. The needs of Care Givers in the Children's Centre will of course be similar in many ways, but different in others. The resources available in the rural communities are very limited, and our students will be lucky in that the stream of Krizevac containers from the UK will supply them with all sorts of things, some of which they will never have seen before. Compared with the average Children's Centre in the UK they will still have to be pretty creative about making their own toys, paints etc. Anyway, they will not all stay at the Children's Centre for ever, so they must learn to be adaptable in their approach and suit their practice to the situations in which they find themselves.
David has heroically tackled the Mental and Cognitive Domain, which is by far the largest, and I have looked at Social and Emotional, Moral and Spiritual and Physical. Unexpectedly I have found the Physical Domain more difficult to manage. Perhaps it is because my heart lies more in the Moral, Spiritual, Social and Emotional Domains. I continue to be puzzled as to where the dividing line falls between these two Domains, but I guess it does not matter in some ways, so long as we take all the milestones equally seriously. David has separated the Mental and Cognitive curriculum into Communication, Problem-solving and Mathematical, and Knowledge and Understanding of the World, in order to reduce the size of the document and to allow the students to see how development progresses in each area. This makes the whole thing more manageable. We have also divided the Physical Domain milestones into Fine and Gross Motor skills. We have not made any changes to the text of the Malawian Curriculum (except grammatical ones, I cannot help myself!), but simply added a couple of boxes to each section of the vast table suggesting more activities to give children opportunities to practice the skills needed to reach the particular milestone, and providing a bit more in the way of explanation of the theory behind the choice of milestones. When we have completed all this we shall have to tackle the problem of what milestones to use to measure the development of creativity and problem-solving. These two areas are integral to the brief we were given as to how our training had to be different from most ECD practice in Malawi.
David has been off for a long weekend in Mzuzu, leaving me with the task of beginning to think about how we should approach the problem of devising an NVQ-style practical assessment programme that will be ready for the students by the time the Children's Centre opens. Unfortunately we now know this will not be the 1 September as we had hoped. This is the first time that I have seen any positives in the delay to the opening of the Children's Centre! It will be tough enough to get a decent set of assessment tasks together in a couple of months, never mind before that. We began by looking at how much we can possibly assess in the time we have available. This is a bit of a back-handed approach I know, but we must be practical. Originally when we signed up for 18months the plan was that the Children's Centre would open in July. We were to devise a practical assessment regime that would run for 6 months, i.e. to the end of January, which would allow us a few weeks at the end to encourage the slower students to complete, and to organise a graduation ceremony etc. before returning to the UK at the end of March. With the best will in the world we cannot reduce the time to complete and assess the students to less than five months without either David and me disappearing in a puff of smoke, or a serious compromise in the quality of the training. So our plan is to keep to the six months programme, spending the first month after opening leading practice in the Children's Centre and mentoring the students as they begin their practical experience. Then over the next five months we hope that we shall be able to assess 60 odd students in 20 practical tasks each so that most of them will have achieved their Diploma by next April. Whether David and I will stay for an extra month or two, or whether Krizevac will decide to recruit replacement trainers to finish the job I have no idea. I would be very sad to miss the end of the course after all this time, energy and effort. There is some discussion going on also about whether a second cohort of students will be trained from early next year, as well. I do hope that this will be possible. I think if it happens it will add greatly to the chance of the Children's Centre being able to sustain its aspirations to give children in Chilomoni an early years education based upon a creative, problem-solving approach designed to support their success in positive outcomes in later life.
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