Teachers’ understanding about young children rights in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

According to Larsson (2012), the traditional belief among teachers in early childhood education (ECE) is that they are empowered through traditional authority in the classroom, and pupils should submit to such authority with no resistance. Traditional belief means a custom/behaviour that transferred from previous generation/societies, for example, teachers do not tend to refer to or mention children of 3 years or below in discussions on participation because of low knowledge of how to treat them. There is an unbalanced and hierarchical relationship found between pupils and teachers in classroom settings where pupils are assumed to be dependent, undisciplined, and inexperienced. The purpose of this research is to examine the level of understanding among nursery schoolteachers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) about children’s rights. Exploratory research design was used for this study, and purposive convenience sampling was used in selecting the 31 participants and these participants are selected from 8 nursery schools in Bisha. Both semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were administered to respondents. Thematic analysis and simple descriptive statistics used in analysing the results, and it was discovered that there is lack of resources, skills and awareness among teachers about protecting the rights of children in nursery schools. Furthermore, the rights of children in nursery schools in KSA are strongly centralised and enmeshed in social and cultural factors. The study however recommended professional training for teachers, in a bid to become aware of their expectations regarding the rights of children.