Multigrade Pedagogy and Practice: Accelerating Millennium Development Goals for Sub-saharan Africa

Global initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) process, the Education for All (EFA) movement and the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) highlight the growing recognition of the vital role that education plays in improving health, social inclusion and driving economic development in a knowledge based society. Multigrade teaching is a common practice in many primary schools throughout the developing countries for achieving improved access to education for all primary school aged children. This paper reports the findings of a study which involved a situational analysis of the perceptions of stakeholders in Zambian multigrade contexts. The study found that the educational human and physical infrastructure in rural Zambia is in a poor state, which makes it highly unlikely that the MDGs projected for 2015 will be achieved. Capacity building involving the training of teachers and the effective use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to motivate learners, facilitate innovative teaching and learning, and enhance multigrade education are suggested as possible engines to drive the realisation of MDGs, by 2015. It is argued that failure to provide effective multigrade teaching and access to the appropriate use of ICTs will commit millions of children in the developing countries to the vicious cycle of extreme poverty, unemployment, hunger, ignorance and disease.