Ghana should invest in research, systems and strategies to ensure the continuous education of children during emergencies, Professor
Dr Daniel Buor of the Department of Geography and Rural Development, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, has advised.
He said the repercussions of natural disasters, economic downturns, pandemics, political conflicts and other emergencies on the education of the child could not be glossed over.
To avoid the tendency where the education of children who found themselves in such unfortunate situations was not truncated, there was the need for proactive measures to promote academic activities, he said.
Prof. Buor, who was addressing the ‘Colleges of Education Research Conference’ at Nsuta in the Sekyere-Central District of the Ashanti Region, said the educator must be empowered to be abreast of such unforeseen circumstances, their implications and methodologies in dealing with them.
Citing the outbreak of COVID-19 and other disasters in Ghana, he noted that those occurrences had heightened the need for intensified preparations on education during emergencies.
“The state must allocate funds for such areas of research to be able to avert these catastrophes in order to make the education of the child a priority,” he said, and appealed to policymakers to endeavour to act on research reports.
The Research Conference was on the theme: “Education in Emergency Situations: Prospects and Challenges”.
It was organised by Teachers in Colleges of Education with support from Transforming Teaching, Education and Learning (T-TEL), a non-governmental organisation, in collaboration with Universal Wiser Publication, Singapore.
It sought to provide the platform to share research knowledge and to sustain the best practices in teacher education.
Prof. Eric Anane, the Director, Centre for Teacher Professional Development, University of Cape Coast, said it was important to rethink teacher education curricula by incorporating self-regulatory behaviours into the courses.
These courses must provide more discriminate and focused approaches to nurturing and assessing self-regulatory behaviours for optimal performance whilst in college, and possibly transfer to the field of practice.
Mr Akwasi-Addae Boahene, the Chief Technical Advisor, T-TEL, urged teacher training institutions to prepare “the future teacher” to be responsive to the emerging technological advances and trends and make the necessary adjustments.
