Esther Anonga, from Finschhafen District, is the only female provincial early childhood education mentor in Morobe Province.
In partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea, she and her colleagues wrote Morobe’s early childhood curriculum in 2019.
From Kotec LLG, she was sponsored by the Australian Agency For International Development (AusAID) and the PNG government, and underwent a Bachelor of Education in Early Childhood program at the Queensland University of Technology. She commenced her studies in 2013 and graduated after three years.
Her passion in educating PNG’s young minds – and grit that sees her walk long distances to teach and train teachers – has seen her involvement in the compilation of an early childhood education (ECE) curriculum for Lutheran-run schools.
Some schools in Finschhafen, under her leadership, have started using the ECE curriculum that she and her male colleagues authored in 2019.
“In our curriculum, we wrote everything for ECE, like rhymes and poems and play activity, integrating our culture; we wrote all those things,” she said. “Like culture and mathematics, culture and community, science – that time we said science and technology – so now we will say, imagine science. The word changed but the ideas are the same.
The curriculum was written from 2019-2020.
Anonga was part of the three-man team that wrote the first draft, then brought in all trainers – with AusAID’s support – and did the second draft.
The third draft was written with support from the Kokoda Track Foundation.
“So then we invited Lutheran churches in Papua New Guinea to go and run the ECE program.”
Anonga mentioned her mentor and author of PNG’s first early childhood education book, Haring Qoreka, who helped her with the curriculum.
Their curriculum adopted ECE from other countries but tailored it to fit PNG’s landscape.
Anonga stressed on the need for teachers to know their curriculum before proceeding to educate PNG’s human resource.