Abstract
‘I came here when I was young in 1966. We used to have only one big village called Kawama. In the evening we used to get together and play; “kamunshi kalila lila, nabushe, leya leya”, just like that’.
This is a short excerpt from the story of Joyse, a grandmother we met in a village at the Copperbelt in Zambia as part of the fieldwork. The aim of this chapter is to discuss a local-oriented approach to education, development and care in early childhood, pointing to the value of contextual knowledge about everyday life, play and learning of the past, and thereby contesting global discourses on education, rights, investment and school readiness. The discussion is anchored to a case study in rural Zambia, using grandparent’s memories of childhood to create intercultural dialogue and implement a local-oriented approach to development of early childhood development (ECD) centers in the communities.
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- 1.
The research project, Effects of civil societies on early childhood education and care in Ethiopia and Zambia, funded by Norad, was directed from Norwegian Centre for Child Research, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in collaboration with Save the Children, University of Zambia (UNZA) and Addis Ababa University (AAU). The principal investigation team consisted of Professor Robert Serpell, UNZA, Associate Professor Teka Zewdie, AAU, and Professor Anne Trine Kjørholt, NTNU.
- 2.
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Kjørholt, AT., Matafwali, B., Mofu, M. (2019). ‘The Knowledge Is in Your Ears, in the Stories You Hear from the Grandparents’: Creating Intercultural Dialogue Through Memories of Childhood. In: Kjørholt, AT., Penn, H. (eds) Early Childhood and Development Work. Palgrave Studies on Children and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91319-3_9
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