These worksheets lack cultural responsiveness

Dear Editor,

I have had the opportunity to review the grade one worksheets posted on the Ministry of Education’s website for use by our country’s children during the pandemic. The worksheets lack cultural responsiveness. The majority of the worksheets (obviously taken from somewhere else) portray people that do not look like 99.9 percent of the population of Guyana. In some instances, there is  portrayal of a lone brown person.

This is inexcusable in 2020. Where are the materials produced by NCERD? In other Caribbean countries, with the assistance of donor agencies, they recruited authors in their countries who produced culturally appropriate and local-context learning materials for home learning their children since the pandemic. Even if the Ministry wanted to “borrow” other resources at a minimum they should have selected materials where the people portrayed looked like the people of Guyana. In addition, many of the situations in the worksheets would be unrelatable to rural and hinterland children. I will leave a discussion of the psychological impacts on children 5 and 6 years old to the sociologists and psychologists but I am sure it is not positive. This is unfortunate 50 years after independence.

Yours faithfully,

(Name and address supplied)