The Project aims to enhance the integral development of children attending the Project educational centers, especially their oral and written communication skills.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
What is Futuro Infantil Hoy?
Programa Futuro Infantil Hoy (FIH) is a pedagogical and community capacity building project in early childhood education grounded in a socio-cultural perspective. The approach points out the importance of building learning practices from the participants’ existing and contextual knowledge and literacies. It conceives knowledge as a process of co-construction where children and their families become active agents of learning and change.
Futuro Infantil Hoy is not a curriculum but more a framework or approach to the early childhood curriculum. It can be easily adapted to curricular structures, and doesn’t replace existing curriculums, but rather identifies concepts and strategies to optimize children’s learning. Futuro Infantil Hoy is focused on building communities of learning, within the centre and reaching inot the community and enriching children’s learning for a solid foundation for sucessful school achievement.
The Futuro Infantil Hoy grew from an international collaboration between Fundación Minera Escondida (FME), the Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles (JUNJI), Fundación INTEGRA y la Universidad de Western Sydney, (UWS) Australia. It has been developed for vulnerable and disadvantaged children attending early childhood centres in low socioeconomic areas, intitially in the northern suburbs in the city of Antofagasta. The pilot project phase was undertaken between March 2008 and December 2010 in 5 early childhood centres. The pilot project has enabled the development of an integrated early childhood education model relevant to the Chilean context. The project has been framed within the early childhood education reforms undertaken by the Chilean Government in 2006, and it is expected that from 2011, the experience will also be framed within the new institutionality and current regulations (Education Law, SEP Law and the Strengthening Education Law) so that FIH will also be included in the articulation of the new quality, equity and transparency systems announced by these legislative initiatives.
Project Approach
Futuro Infantil Hoy reflects a pedagogical and community intervention implemented from a socio cultural approach that is replicable and sustainable. FIH aims to improve children’s social and cognitive learning, pedagogical practices, and family and community participation. The program focuses in developing educator’s leadership capacities. The theoretical and methodological framework has been designed by the School of Education of the University of Western Sydney, based on its experience in adopting socio cultural approaches, implementing action research frameworks and facilitating community engagement. The design has been developed within an ongoing dialogue with relevant stakeholders in Chile at national, regional and local levels
The literacy-focussed socio cultural approach underpinning the proposal developed by the UWS team of professionals aims at consolidating an alternative model, relevant to the challenges Chilean Early Childhood Education identified. These include imperatives for developing a model of integrated education for children during their early development stages, as well as establishing the role of the ECEC as a significant site of learning, empowering families and community, and defining an activist leadership role for the educators.
Educators and assistants incorporate new theoretical and pedagogical tools in their daily practices, working to establish communities of practice, through distributive leadership and acknowledging families as significant educational agents in co- constructing knowledge. FIH has also explored what it means for early childhood professionals educators in Chile to engage in socio cultural approaches.
Which are FIH main Objectives?
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Establish and consolidate the recognition of early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a significant site of learning and engagement for children, families, and the community
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Strengthen the, conceptual, pedagogical and leadership capabilities of ECEC professionals and institutions to improve children’s cognitive and social learning and expand the repertoire of pedagogical and community engagement strategies from a socio-cultural perspective.
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Build bridges between families and centres/schools, and develop strategies that engage and affirm families as active agents in their children’s learning and support them in their parenting role.
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Strengthen family and community participation in children’s learning and development
Key Project Objectives are
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Enhance the wholistic learning and development of children attending the projects educational centres, especially their oral and written communication skills and knowledge about literacy.
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Implement effective and low cost participation strategies with families and community.
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Strengthen the individual and team skills and capacities of participating centres for their work with children, their families and community.
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Design and implement methodologies that allow the project to be undertaken in the identified communities and its replication in other communities
Proyecto piloto en Antofagasta (2008-2010)
To expand and consolidate community and pedagogical leadership capacity and to develop community building pedagogies in ways responsive to and respectful of the conditions of marginalised communities.
KEY CONCEPTS
Scaffolding
Scaffolding is both a metaphor that describe ways educators, family members and peers build understanding of children through interactions and a robust concept linked to social constructivist learning theory and the Zone of Proximal Development.
Co-construction
A term usually used to refer to learning strategies and processes in which adults and children are jointly involved in constructing knowledge and meaning, where the adult takes an active role in the learning experience or play episode, following and responding to how the play is led by the child and then leading the child to enhanced or expanded enquiry and understanding. The process involves collaboration and negotiation of shared meanings.
Building Community Capacity
Strategies to strengthen knowledge, skills, capacities and behaviour of individuals, groups and institutions in a sustainable way. Citizenship, agency, communities of practice and democratic principles are key concepts associated with building community capacity.
Funds of Knowledge
A funds of knowledge approach involves finding out about and paying attention to the skills, knowledges, processes and relationships that occur in the families and communities to which a child belongs, and incorporating these respectfully into the curriculum. This enables children to see connections between their learning, the community and experiences with which they are familiar. Funds of knowledge is a concept that has been developed by Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff and Norma Gonzalez, (teachers, academics and anthropologists), drawing on some earlier research on poor children’s schooling by Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and James Greenberg in Mexico. It is a research approach founded on the belief that the home and community knowledges found in local households are often rich repositories of skills, resources and reciprocal social networks which can be used for innovations in teaching.
Pedagogical Leadership
Describes early childhood educator’s practices and capacities to provide leadership in curriculum decision making, in a context of productive partnerships with other educators, families and community members.
Community Leadership
The early childhood educator’s role in building social capacity through establishing mutual and productive learning relationships with families and community members.
Literacy is a social practice. We create and use literacy in our daily lives in a range of social and cultural contexts which influence how we construct and express meaning. Critical literacy involves reading beneath the surface of the text to understand the way that written, visual and spoken texts are constructed to express a particular point of view.
The 5 Literacy Keys
1. Literacy is a social practice; 2. Children are learning about literacy in their families and communities; 3. Play with familiar literacy materials encourages children to take on roles of literacy users; 4. Literacy learning involves key concepts and processes. 5. Educators have a critical role in scaffolding children’s literacy understandings.
Sustained Shared Thinking
Sustained shared thinking involves episodes in which two or more individuals ‘work together’ in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate activities, and extend a narrative. It has been identified in the landmark EPPE study as a key component of teacher child interactions in quality early childhood programs.
Socio Cultural Curriculum:
Adopting a sociocultural approach has important implications for how early childhood educators approach their work and the focus and resources of the curriculum (Edwards 2006, 2009). This includes taking account of the social, historical and cultural context in which children live and incorporating this perspective in the learning experiences of the children. Adopting a sociocultural approach also requires educators to place a stronger emphasis on their interactions with children (Jordan 2008, 2009).
Thus moving from a child development focus to undertaking early childhood education within a sociocultural framework requires early childhood educators to make significant changes in their practices and to reposition their role in relation to children, families and the community. Making the transition to adopting a sociocultural framework is recognised as a significant journey that requires institutional support and opportunities for ongoing professional learning (Edwards 2007). Providing the professional learning and institutional support for this transition has been the focus of Futuro Infantil Hoy.