The Role of Teachers in Values Education in Pakistan: A Case of Early Childhood Education and Development from Pakistan.

The teachers in early childhood education and preschool have a significant influence on curriculum and daily practices in the class, therefore, have a dominant influence on the implementation of values education. Deeming values as a social construct, this small-scale qualitative case study was carried out to explore the priority values of early childhood education teachers and their ways of teaching values in a school in northern Pakistan. Interviews and classroom observations were conducted to gather in-depth data from the school leadership and the teachers. Teachers were found primarily focused on the inculcation of societal values, behaviors and life skills needed for children to successfully adjust to society. In this school, teachers are playing a dominant role in the values education of the young children through role modeling, daily practices and routines and interactions with the parents. School leadership is focused on values education. While doing so, they are aspiring for other stakeholders to accept the upper hand of the school values and expect them to facilitate the inculcation of these values in young children. The school and teachers are facing the problem of the reluctance of parents to take full responsibility for the values education of their children. Introduction Values are the commonly recognized and approved principles, convections, and standards of society that are transcending specific situations. Therefore, “values appear to be an allembracing element of human life; that is, values are connected both to the human mind and action, and they emerge at the levels of individuals, cultural groups, and societies” (Johansson, Emilson, & Puroila, 2017, p.14). These principles are the foundation of the social structure (Dasari, 2017) to cultivate and ensure harmony, peace, and prosperity in the social order. Hence, values are the “determiners of how people will live in harmony and peace without hurting one another and become virtuous individuals within the community” (Khathi, Govender, & Ajani, 2021, p.404). Human societies are steadily transferring these principles, convections, and standards to the next generations to ensure a constructive, peaceful, and prosperous society. This transformation of values to the young generation is taking place at multiple stages of the family, school, and broader society. School is considered a value-laden context where implicit and explicit values education is imparted to young children (Ulavere & Tammik (2017). The schools which are explicitly teaching values education have structured a concrete plan, and overtly included it into their school curriculum whereas, the schools which are following the implicit route, are embedding values education in their daily practices and ethos but it is not included in their formal curriculum (Thornberg, 2016). In ABIDA BEGUM