28 Kindezi Model
Kindezi: A Distinctively Africentric Perspective on Childhood Education
by Francis Y. Lowden / March 2000. [1]
Dr. Frances Y. Lowden is an Associate Professor in the Education Department at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York. Her specialty areas are: Early Childhood Education, Early Literacy, Multicultural Education, Africentric Education, Urban Education, Teacher Education and Parent Education.
The impetus for this paper is to contribute to and advance the research on viable global approaches to culturally and developmentally appropriate early childhood education. According to Bredekamp[2] in Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children From Birth to Age 8, “The concept of developmentally appropriateness has two dimensions: age appropriateness and individual appropriateness. Although the content of the curriculum is determined by many factors such as tradition, …social or cultural values, and parent desires, for the content and teaching strategies to be developmentally appropriate they must be age appropriate and individually appropriate”.
According to their social and cultural values, each child in each cultural context must be valued on the basis of where they come from, where they hope to go, and the process by which they reach their destination. In order to accommodate these diverse cultural challenges, we as educators must take our own personal journeys to uncover who we are, where we are, and how we arrived here. Then we need to do our homework and prepare ourselves for the greatest challenge of the century which is to genuinely educate all children. One way to accomplish this is to examine, conceptualize and employ the philosophy of Kindezi.
Kindezian philosophy expresses the sentiment of many African peoples including the Bantu people of Kongo, Africa, and rests on the idea that children are highly valued; they are a ‘gift of God’. Bantu means human beings, cultured people, or beings who embody values associated with good behavior and civility. [3]
According to Bunseki Fu-Fiau and Lukondo-Wambo [4] Kindezi,….is basically the art of touching, caring for, and protecting the child’s life and the environment in which the child’s multidimensional development takes place. The word “Kindezi”, a kikongo language term means to enjoy taking and giving special care. Baby-sitting is an experience required of all members in the African world, no matter what their physical state may be. Understanding the process of child development is one of the basic and most important principles in the understanding of the value and respect of life.[5]
Kindezi, as a philosophy, affords children the possibility to develop and grow into their full potential; to fulfill their God-given destiny. In a Kindezian model, children learn through modeling, intentionality, and nurturing. Children’s knowing, cosmologically, is derived from being at one with their world view.
Children are valued thus they value.