EducationWorld Early Childhood Education National Conference 2019

EW’s 9th Early Childhood Education Conference convened in Bangalore on January 19 attracted over 350 early childhood care and education professionals, academics, principals and teachers from 70 cities across India – Summiya Yasmeen Despite massive disruption of flight schedules due to heavy fog enveloping Bangalore’s Kempegowda International Airport, which delayed dozens of outstation arrivals, EducationWorld’s 9th Early Childhood Education National Conference 2019 convened in the garden city on January 19, was a resounding success. Over 350 early childhood care and education (ECCE) professionals, academics, principals and teachers from 70 cities across India congregated in the packed ballroom of the gleaming new, upscale Shangri-la Hotel to discuss and debate best practices in early years education and on ways and means to draw government and public attention to the importance of providing professionally administered ECCE to all of India’s 164 million children in the 0-5 age group. In his welcome address, Dilip Thakore, publisher-editor of EducationWorld (estb.1999), urged the representatives of India’s top-ranked pre-primaries to exert pressure on the Central and state governments to increase budgetary outlays for the country’s 1.4 million government anganwadis — nutritional centres for new-borns and lactating mothers which are also mandated to provide early years education to bottom-of-pyramid households — which grudgingly accommodate 84 million children. “Most industrially advanced OECD countries and China are allocating ever greater resources for early childhood education. Unfortunately, within India’s Central and state governments there’s very little awareness about the critical importance of professionally administered ECCE. For the past two decades, national expenditure for all education has averaged a mere 3.5 percent of GDP, leaving little for ECCE. This is unacceptable. I appeal to all of you to become evangelists for human capital development beginning with early childhood education,” said Thakore, while applauding the efforts of the country’s 300,000 private pre-primaries for providing enabling early years education to 10 million middle and higher income household children countrywide. The highlight of the EW-ECE National Conference 2019, sponsored by JBCN Education, Brainsmith, Square Panda, National Academy of Science and Creative Arts, and Afairs Exhibitions & Media Pvt. Ltd, was a live broadcast from the US by Dr. Shuchi Grover. An alumna of Stanford and Harvard universities and an internationally renowned researcher in computational thinking who leads several projects funded by the National Science Foundation (USA), Dr. Grover’s address was on ‘Infusing computational thinking into early childhood education to spark young minds’. In her live broadcast address, Dr. Grover stressed that rather than introducing children to digital devices in their early years, youngest children can be introduced to logical and computational thinking from infancy. For Dr. Grover’s full address see https://youtu.be/zmTIanwI1X4 The live broadcast from America was followed by an interactive workshop on the theme ‘Igniting the senses, using the aesthetic power of drama in pre-primary classrooms’ by Jehan Manekshaw, an alumnus of Wesleyan University (USA) and University of London, and co-founder and managing director of Theatre Professionals Pvt. Ltd and the Drama School, Mumbai. The post-lunch session featured five expert lectures on issues critical…