Child centered pedagogy for at risk children at Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur

Abstract

Street children are children who faced a significant problem in their everyday life with the everyday concern of survival in urban area from the age 5 to 18 years old. UNICEF (1984) has categorized the street children into three categories which are children at risk, children on the street and children of the street. Accordingly, a category of street children in Chow Kit is under category of „children at risk‟. A at risk children is defined as any person aged from infants to 18 years who facing social, economic and political problem in daily life. The issue of the street children is increasing problem namely in urban context due to social, economic and political factors. According to UNICEF (2000) there are three reasons to this problem including root, underlying and immediate cause. Past literature by scholars has focuses on children development but none of this had focused on proposing on an appropriate child care environment in terms of architectural planning and form making by focusing at issues found in newly developed countries like Malaysia. The objective of this study is focusing on the characteristic of the street children in Chow Kit area, problem of existing children center, arising issue relating to current intervention and available program and approach for street children to fulfill the needs of the street children. The method use for this study is qualitative methods where the data is collected from the unstructured interview and space syntax observation method then the data is analyses based on building explanation. From this discussion, explanation will be seen how the proposed pedagogy (approach) for Chow Kit Children at risk can fulfill the needs of this children and how the solution contribute to the urban renewal of the Chow Kit area.