Exploring the context of teaching character education to children in preprimary and primary schools

Abstract

The objective of this study was to explore the contents of moral and character education for children and the pedagogy or approach employed by parents and teachers to teach character and moral education for children. The study was conducted in 18 schools found in East Gojjam, West Gojjam and Awi administrative zones. Preprimary and primary school teachers (N = 272) and one of the parents of children (N = 272) participated in the study. Concurrent mixed design was employed and quantitative and qualitative data were gathered using questionnaire and document analysis respectively. Descriptive statistics was employed to analyze the quantitative data and thematic analysis was applied to analyze qualitative data. The study found that among the six categories of character (caring, honesty, emotional intelligence, responsibility and respect) parents emphasized on teaching children to be honest (M = 2.6,SD = 0.46) and responsible M = 2.48,SD = 0.38) to their actions and behaviors. Teachers give high emphasis for teaching children to be respecting and caring to others and to Fairness (M = 2.62, SD = 0.43) and Respect (M = 2.63,SD = 0.37). Advising is the most frequently used common approache used by parents and teachers. Besides, using fairy tales with animal characters and songs are mostly found to be important approaches to teach character education about right and wrong behaviors to children. The study reveals that there are pieces of moral and character contents included across different subjects. Yet, there is a challenge in providing character and moral education as a separate subject in schools and failure of parents and teachers to be good role models for children. This implies that the Ministry of Education shall plan character and moral education to be offered as a separate subject for preprimary and primary school children and parents and teachers need to work in collaboration to teach character and moral education for children.