Open Letter to NIM Management

12 November 2008

Dear NIM Management (Nan and Alfred),

An Open Letter : “Did I Really Learn This During My ECE Course?”

I felt compelled to write this open letter to you, as guardians of your institute, about the current course on Early Childhood Education that I am undertaking. I am just past halfway through my course, so this act of sending this letter to you may well be suicidal (to my grades), or at best, foolhardy. But I would prefer to think that the better judgment on the part of senior management would prevail.

Yesterday’s class broke the camel’s back for me. I had intended for this open letter to be sent after my course is over, but I believe this should not wait.

Why would your lecturers deliver such messages/materials/assignments to us :

1. referring to the ECE teaching community as “caregivers”?

Shouldn’t the lecturer be taking the effort to propagate a more positive term like “ECE educators” to us wide-eyed, eager trainee teachers? While the whole ECE sector, particularly AECES, is trying hard to move away from being perceived as merely caregivers in the eyes of parents here and thus, the negative connotations which come with it (low salary for ECE teachers being one), your lecturer had chosen to feed us this term. The argument for this choice of word was that the “textbook I am referring to uses it”. Are those Powerpoint slides that troublesome to change? Surely, the role of the lecturer ought to be one of taking the joint leadership to propagate the ECE field in the best light, be it in class in front of new trainees or elsewhere, shouldn’t it?

2. telling us at the start of a module that we will not be good teachers upon completion of our course because it is a crash course?

Now, why would a lecturer put such a caveat in front of the trainees? To motivate? Hardly. Coming from a person from the same teaching fraternity, this comment to young trainees seemed most odd.

3. assigning us the task of designing a childcare centre from scratch, or drawing up a snacks menu?

May I ask how would these tasks help me as an ECE teacher? Both assignments are clearly outside the bounds of a typical ECE teacher’s responsibilities when they are in-service, which therefore begs the question. “Why are we being given such an assignment in the first place?” Are there not more relevant tasks that could have been assigned to us that would help us be better practitioners when we graduate?

These are but 3 examples of what we have been “taught” todate.

I therefore ask this question:
Have both the materials/contents and the quality of the lecturers in your institute been screened and vetted by you for proper relevance and for professionalism? Just because these materials have been used in other institutes or that the teaching methods had been deployed elsewhere (such as “show & tell”) do not mean they qualify to be applicable in the context of an adult education environment. Your institute is the sharp end of the arrow in helping the ECE field upgrade itself, and in so doing, reduce the large turnover and dropout rates that seemed endemic today. I am sure the Ministries overseeing ECE would readily agree.

I am hopeful that this open letter will bring some insights to you from the eyes of one of your students (read, ‘customers’), and thus, initiate a review of your course for the better, if not this year then perhaps for the next cohorts to come, for the good of the ECE sector as a whole. Otherwise, the next open letter may well be titled “Did I Really Pay $10,000 for this ECE Course?”

Sincerely,
George Lee
NY-SD-A2