A new early childhood education degree program will launch this fall at UH Mānoa, expanding the program’s focus to include even the youngest of keiki.
The new program will better align Hawaiʻi’s early childhood education programs with national standards while promoting teaching, UH officials said.
The College of Education already has an early childhood education program that focuses on children 3 to 8 years old. The new program will cover children from prenatal to age 8.
Professor Theresa Lock runs a project called the Hawaii Early Childhood Educator Excellence and Equity project that acted as the catalyst for the new degree gaining ground while raising questions about how to teach infants.
“These early childhood years, they learn through play, and they learn to explore questions and develop their language and be able to enjoy books that they’re being read to,” Lock said. “So the whole curriculum is really based on what we considered called developmentally appropriate practices.”
According to an article published by the National Library of Medicine, the benefits of preschool not only provide short term academic and psychological success but persist through middle childhood, adolescence, and even into young adulthood.
“Developmentally appropriate practice looks at the whole child,” Lock said. “Besides social emotional learning; we also look at arts like music, performing arts, visual arts, gross motor and fine motor skills, math, science, social studies and language arts.”
Lt. Gov. Sylvia is leading an initiative called Ready Keiki where the state wants to see as many 3- and 4-year-old children in a preschool setting. Ready Keiki aims to provide preschool access to all 3- and 4-year-old children by 2032.
“This effort would really help, especially focusing on those younger children, and giving the educators who are going to be working with them the specialized skills and knowledge they need,” Lock said.
Through collaborating with Ready Keiki and faculty at UH Mānoa, the program was developed with the help of funding and faculty from community colleges across the university system that already have early-childhood programs.
“So we’re able to bring them together, look at these national standards and competencies and begin to realign all of our courses to the standards and competencies, and from that, we’re able to develop this particular curriculum,” Lock said.
Lock also mentioned the importance of working with community college faculty to align their programs with the hope that students will pursue their bachelors and teaching license after they attain their associate degree. The College of Education expressed the need to make this degree as accessible as possible to help with the teaching shortage.
“One of the reasons why we worked with the community colleges is because we were offering this statewide,” Lock said. “It’ll be a hybrid format, early evening, so if people are working in the daytime, they can also come to take classes in the evenings.”
According to the Hawaiʻi Department of Education’s employment report for the 2023-2024 school year, the public schools lost 909 teachers due to a range of reasons ranging from retirement to leaving Hawaiʻi, while hiring 1,614 new teachers.
Prospective students can visit the College of Education website for more information on how to apply, as the deadline to apply for the fall semester is March 1.
