Language and Cultural Support Parents/Guardians Offered to Adolescent Girl Pupils during the COVID-19 Era to Ensure Psychosocial and Emotional Stability in Zimbabwe

Language and Cultural Support Parents/Guardians Offered to Adolescent Girl Pupils during the COVID-19 Era to Ensure Psychosocial and Emotional Stability in Zimbabwe

Beatrice Taringa

Issue: Vol.6 No.14 Article 47 pp.4034 – 4048
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.202561447| Published online 30th December, 2025
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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ABSTRACT

Prolonged school closures due to COVID-19 worsened the situation and created a new and additional set of challenges on top of already troubled learning circumstances. The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (MoPSE) provided for an Alternative-Learning-School (ALS) Out-of-School (OoS) in a phenomenon code-named ‘stop-schooling-without-stopping-learning’ (SSwSL). There has, however, been a gap in parents/guardianship support despite that they are home environment custodians who are crucial in pupils’ schooling life, and particularly in COVID-19-induced OoS new normal learning contexts. Parents/guardians serve as pillars that pupils fall back on in times of schooling distress. The study is based on an inductive qualitative paradigm and case study design. Purposively sampled were education officers, teachers, parents/guardians, and girl pupils who served as key informants. They responded to open-ended interview questions individually and in focus group discussions. The Empowerment Theory informed the study. The Grounded Theory served as a coding scheme and analytical tool. The study revealed mixed perceptions, sometimes punctuated by either ‘non-interference’ or ‘caring’ phenomena by parents/guardians. The study recommends workshopping parents/guardians accordingly in line with the age and uniqueness of their children, especially in critical times of emergency when their support is much needed. The study provides new information on a neglected research area, which is the language and cultural support system that parents/guardians offered to girl-children during the COVID-19 era in Binga, Zimbabwe.

Keywords: Parent/Guardian Engagement, Non-Interference, Empowerment Theory, COVID-19

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ABOUT AUTHOR(S)

Dr. Beatrice Taringa holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Education. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Language Education, Arts and Culture at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in South Africa. She is a consultant, and she participated in Curriculum Review for the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (2022-2023) in Zimbabwe, which culminated in the Heritage Based Curriculum (HBC). She has research interests in Curriculum Issues in Language Education, Language and Education, Language and Gender, Culture and Human Rights in Education. She has several publications in language education, culture, gender and environmental issues. She is the author of the Three-dimensional Grounded Gender Representation theory that guides in selection of gender sensitive instructional materials. Email taringabeatrice@gmail.com, Orcid ID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0652-9728.

TO CITE ARTICLE

Taringa, Beatrice. “Language and Cultural Support Parents/Guardians Offered to Adolescent Girl Pupils during the COVID-19 Era to Ensure Psychosocial and Emotional Stability in Zimbabwe.” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 6, no. 14 (2025): 4023 – 4033, https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.202561447.