WELCOME MESSAGE
You are all welcome to the Department of Early Childhood Education home page. This Department is the Centre of Excellence for ALL Early Childhood Education related programs in Uganda. This is a department that brings to you content, strategies, training pedagogies and opportunities for collaboration in the area of Early Childhood Education. Early Childhood Education here is covered under programs that range from child care for 0-3-year-old children; early years’ education for the 3-6-year-old children; lower primary for 7-8-year-old children; Teacher Training programs from Certificate, Diploma, Bachelors’ degree, Masters’ degree to PhD. Structurally, the Department has Tutor Training Centre; Teacher/Caregiver Training Centre; Early Years Education in form of a Play Learning Centre; and Affiliations.
The Tutor Training Centre
This centre train tutors who will be the Early years’ teacher trainers. We believe that quality learning for children result from quality teachers. However, we cannot have quality teachers if we do not have quality tutors. This centre provides hands in teacher tutorship. The availability of children’s centre and teacher training centre in the same place allows this hands on training. We welcome collaborations in this area to further improve the quality of the early childhood education workforce in the country. We are able to do Continuous Professional Development (CPDs) for tutors and teachers in this area. the training programs here are from certificate to PhD level. If you need more information in this area, kindly give us a call, send an e-mail or browse here.
The Teacher Training Centre
This is the early childhood education teacher training centre. It has programs for caregivers and teachers ranging from certificate to PhD. The centre being located in the near the early years’ centre helps us to do hands on training with the children as the laboratory for trying out new and innovative pedagogies. If you have an interest in this area, please visit us here.
The Play Learning Centre
This is the centre where children come to study in a form of a nursery school. The school has largely local play materials that are used to implement a play based curriculum for children’s better cognitive, creativity, social and physical development. The learning materials and learning areas will work as a demonstration to help us implement hands on training of teachers as well as providing the best opportunity for children to learn. We also have an online school, with video lessons that you can download freely and play on either you TV set, smart phone or DVD player. These lessons can be downloaded on a flash, memory card or shared over blue tooth if needed in an area with no internet. For more details, check the page here. We can have collaboration in this area if you have a pedagogy or approach that can improve learning for our children.
Affiliations
We have a number of public and private colleges and institutions that we work with to deliver the early childhood programs. We provide our curriculum to them and they do the training. We do the assessment and later award our certificates to those who qualify from those institutions. Currently we have 43 of such colleges affiliated to us, and the number is still growing. We offer affiliations for certificate and diploma programs. If you are interested in knowing the colleges affiliated to us, check here, while if you want to affiliate, click here to get more guidance.