|
|
I was pleased and honoured to be asked to address you this morning. Thank you.
The commitment to a cross sector childcare conference is a mature approach and not one that 'I'm sure we could have taken a few years ago.
The theme of learning and sharing together is one which in its essence asks us all to listen and learn from each other, and realise that the diversity we experience within children's services is replicated in the diversity and complexity of the families and children we strive to support.
That listening and learning will enhance your practice with children.
It was the need to talk with other people who have children as the focus of their work; to learn from them to enrich my understanding that is the very reasons for my commitment to, and involvement in the Australian Early Childhood Association. That involvement has given me the opportunity to be part of a large group of people who in their hearts, passionately care about children wherever they are. It is this total focus on what is right for young children that gives AECA its mandate to speak out on their behalf. It is this focus on children that made me become a member of AECA after the AECA conference in Adelaide and return to my centre on the North Coast and work with some other energetic and committed people to set up the first regional group of AECA. Working with that group of early childhood professionals is in some ways similar to the work this conference is asking of all of you who are part of this conference.
My own knowledge is enriched when I listen to my colleagues from across the children's services the sector and the wider community. I learn from their understandings of the children they work with and the impact of government policies on the lives of children and their families. I ponder too about why the wider community does not see that meeting the needs of children and guaranteeing them their rights is as important to the future of this society as education, health, and GST rollback which were the issues identified by respondents to a recent election poll.
If we are to change this then we will all need to think and talk more to others about what our practice with children, the way we run our services, the effect of government funding policies are like if seen from a child's perspective. We need to put ourselves in their shoes - Today I would like to challenge you all to do this.
I chose this focus on the child's perspective as I have wondered and worried for some time about what its really like for children now we not only have more EC Services, but more of a range of services for young children. I can remember when preschool, playgroup and informal care with friends and neighbors were the only choice.
Attending the recent AECA conference in Sydney reinforced for me the multiple perspectives we need to consider in our work with young children in this post-modern world.
Peter Moss in his address on "making space for ethics" reminded us of living in a world which is inescapably plural, and one in which "all knowledge is perceptual, contestable and provisional". By this he meant that there is not one right answer to almost anything -that we need be ready and able to question our own thinking and practice in the light of new understanding.
How can we continue to work well with young children, as we must, when what we thought we knew as EC experts and I hasten to say were trained to understand as being the right way, is now being questioned.
The following quote from Gunilla Dahlberg's Who is a child and what is childhood
about an other understanding of the young child sits well with me.
Gunilla Dahlberg said:
"The notion is of the child as an active and creative actor, as a subject and citizen with potentials, rights and responsibility. A child worth listening to and having a dialogue with, and who has the courage to think and act by himseif...the child as an active actor, a constructor, in the construction of his own knowledge and his fellow beings' common culture...a child who wants to take an active part in the knowledge-creating process, a child who in interaction with the world around is also active in the construction, in the creation of himself, his personality and his talents. This child is seen as having "power over his own learning processes' and having the right to interpret the world." - Gunilla Dahlberg
When this understanding of the child is linked to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, from which I will quote later in this address, it leaves me with little doubt that we need to review our current practices and begin responding and see the potential for growth in uncertainty and doubt.
Certainty after all is antithetical to learning- put another way - for learning to be possible we need to have a healthy openness about our own practice and the thinking on which it is based - we need to be critics of our own practice and thinking. This is fundamental to improvement and the essence of a profession.
To start this journey some of the questions you could ask yourselves are; and these are some of the questions that have made me rethink how I plan for young children.
In your EC environment how many of the children have control over their own day. Can children choose to play outside or inside or are these times controlled by a "well thought-out program" that's dictated to by regulations, environments and the need to document to justify what we do in EC services.
It seems to me there is still a view that children do not learn as much when playing outside as inside, Is this the case or is it more that it's often easier to "sell" our service to parents when we introduce the notion of teacher directed learning as opposed to child directed play.
My own staff reinforced this with their cries of "but how will they learn ~- they will just want to play in the sandpit all day". When I raised this issue in my centre.
A few years ago I was asked to be part of a panel to choose the Family Day Carer of the Year in a local area. I was interested in obtaining a picture of what the day might look like for a child in a high quality family day care service. I was looking for ways in which the FDC experience for a child drew on the ordinary richness of being in a carer's home.
Cooking with her, doing the garden, smelling the flowers, passing the pegs while she hung the washing on the line.
To my disappointment all contenders for the honour of FDC carer of the year described an experience for children that I would describe as a mini childcare service. That is, structure - timeslots and muting - dare I say institutionalized care but on a much smaller scale.
Let's pause for a moment and reflect on how we learn and when. Do we only learn when someone has predetermined the outcome of your activity.
What will you learn from this keynote and all the other keynotes and workshop~ during this conference.
You will build on what you already know or now don't know, You will, in your own way, try and make sense of it all and construct and deconstruct it so that is makes sense for you. This will be different for every EC setting you work in. Ultimately seeing things you knew differently, having what you know already enriched and strengthened with knowledge gained from the speakers and participants here will enable you to be a different and better EC professional. This is a learning process.
The learning process in the same for young children - They need time to experiment, to try and retry, question, ponder, "muck about", have fun, listen. They need the support from responsive adults that leads to children becoming active and successful learners, Confidence in this process and outcomes is learnt very early on.
If we are really serious about looking at the way we work from a child's perspective, their experience of the outcomes of the Accreditation process has to be part of this. The question we must ask ourselves is Has accreditation for LDC centres made a difference for the children who use these services?
Will the accreditation system for FDC make a difference for children?
Will a proposed QA system for other sector make a difference for children?
AECA was the first organisation to advocate for an Accreditation system in Australia. We ran the first voluntary trail in NSW. We did this because we believed that an Accreditation process would make a difference for children.
It is my very strong view as a service provider, a reviewer and from my experience as a member of AECA that in many cases Accreditation in LDC did not make that difference it was hijacked as staff and management become bogged down in a process that had to be endured, The outcome of that process for services would hopefully be the 3 slurs accreditation- (I mean years), as opposed to quality improvements and more appropriate daily experiences for children, We became so entrenched in the recording and documenting we almost forgot or did not have time to interact with the children.
We have even accepted the idea of communication books as a way of "talking" with parents. Are you happy for your doctor to send you a note telling you about your health or for your lecturer to simply give you a note telling you of your progress. I know I would rather some personal contact with those that provide a service for either myself or my child. You can ask questions and get some feel of how the person who is responsible for the service and child’s growth and development understand the uniqueness and special foibles of your child.
If we had more staff time to make a more personal contact with families would we see communication books as best practice. I think not.
As EC childhood educators we need to continually test ourselves by asking questions such as:
- Where does the child fit in all of this?
- Is the child the client or the parent the client?
- Is it as simple as stating that the person who pays the fees is the client or is the consumer of our day to day practice the one to whom we have the primary obligation?
- We all have to take responsibility to ensure that children attend the best type of service for them and their families.
- Where does this leave our most vulnerable children. I'm sure your experiences mirror mine -there is often a lack of continuity in care due to level of fees, changes in circumstances, lack of transport, housing, financial restraints and domestic violence.
We know there has been an increase in CCB to support families entering LDC, Family Day Care and Outside School Hours Care, including vacation care and recently in home care, but has it really made a difference for our most vulnerable children and their families. Recent statistics suggest more and more children at risk and we know they are not in many of our services not only about most at risk children but all young children.
Currently I believe we have opportunities to influence Governments like we never have before as we take advantage of the publicity that the "medicos" have received with regard to Brain Research.
This as we know is not new information. But what is true is that these people have found a different way of speaking that governments and politicians understand and can relate to. Do we need to change our language from one about play to one about neurons and wiring of brains and windows of opportunity.
I'm not sure about this – we need to speak in a way that affirms the here and now experience of childhood as of value in its own right and not simply because it guarantees the quality of the future for children and ourselves. Notwithstanding this AECA is delighted that there are now more advocates for children. We do not have enough people or organizations that commit themselves to the well being of children.
We are all aware of children who attend multiple services and families trying to juggle major organizational arrangements each week just to manage complex CC arrangements.
If we are serious about collaboration within our sector and what's best for children, how do we manage this. In times of economic rationalism and competition for filled places can we suggest alternatives for families to ease the number of carers a child has in a week and hopefully the complexities and stress levels for families and children.
If we look at these complexities from the perspective of the child, in consultation with the family and the other service types in the area, maybe we can come up with a win/win situation. Dare I say should we consult with the child. Where I work in NSW the Preschools are struggling for survival. A swing from a couple of years ago where LDC were in this position. People who work in these services are worried about their jobs, about whether the service can stay open.
But how does this impact on children and their families. 'How do the inequities in funding, which undermine preschools impact on the lives of the young children who use them, We say families have choice but what is the choice based on - convenience, affordability, availability.
No one can deny the increased levels of funding allocated to young children and their families in recent years.
However, for many many years have we raised our concerns about child/staff ratios not only in the before school settings but in the early years of school.
How can we continue to hold our heads up high and say for example that a 1.5 ratio for babies in NSW or a 1?4 ratio is Qld is good for a baby, or a 1.8 ratio for toddlers in NSW is OK. It cannot be.
What happens to all the others babies in a room when one baby takes 20 minutes to take his/her bottle, what happens when more than one cries at once. We somehow need to mobilise families to think about this and demand that funding is sufficient to support ratios that are better for babies – we need to do this without downgrading how we do our work and risking our jobs. We need to be able to say to parents that we do the very best we can but despite 1:5 cannot deliver a quality experience for a baby.
In doing this we do need to acknowledge that it will be hard for us to say this.To say to government and families that we are doing the best we can but we cannot do the right thing by children with current ratios. It is increasingly my view that we are all negligent if we don’t begin to say these things. – this is a hard position for me to take – I am a service provider too.
The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child should be something we as Australians should be able refer to with pride. We cannot when we know of the breeches to that Convention that we are perpetrating in this country., The current situation when children in detention centres have no access to toys, to childcare to schooling is but one example Mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory and Western Australia are others.
Robert Fitzgerald the Human Rights Commissioner spoke at AECA's conference on how the quality of the caring for the very young, guarantees not only the quality of the here and now experience of childhood but also children’s capacity to build the social capital in the future.
We need to build a constituency for children amongst parents and the public before governments will take account of children in the way they should. This will take courage and honesty on our part, a willingness to put our practice to the test of seeing it from a child's perspective and then a willingness to speak out on behalf of children.
I charge you to take up this responsibility. Children really do need a better deal.
If you liked this article, you can 'social bookmark' it with others who might be searching for good content on early childhood. This means you can share your favourite webpages with others, or just keep an online list of your bookmarks so you can access them on any computer.
Read more about social bookmarks
|
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 14 June 2007 )
|
 |
|
|
