Futuro Infantil Hoy: Una experiencia de calidad en educación para la primera infancia

What are the main achievements of FIH?

Preliminary outcomes identified from the research data include evidence of:

• Increasing enrolments, attendance and retention.
• Improved learning outcomes for children.
• Increasing participation of parents in their children’s learning experiences, at the centre and at home.
• Enhanced aspirations of parents for their children’s learning and educational futures.
• Enhanced leadership capabilities in educators.
• Increased use of technology tools to develop learning experiences.
• Strengthened pedagogical strategies engaging children in active learning.

Educators

Personal practices


• Increased pride and pleasure in their work as educators.
• Strengthened leadership identity and self-esteem as a professional.
•  Enhanced dispositions to work with family strengths.
• Increased technological literacy.
  
  
  Pedagogical practices

• Planning of learning experiences informed by children’s interests.
• Integration of children into the pedagogical proposal through consultation and conversations with children and parents.
• Increase in use of active learning approaches using children’s life experiences. Learning environments. characterised by increased visibility and incorporation of visual, verbal and written literacy activities.
• Increased use of technology tools to develop learning experiences.
• Production of participatory digital media short videos for Internet delivery.
• Enhanced leadership capability (pedagogical and community).
  
  
  Community practices

• New resources developed to establish and improve communication with families.
• Increased respect for families and willingness to engage with them in meaningful ways to support children’s learning.
• Inter-institutional collaboration and networks established for the first time.
• Production of portfolios as visual records of children’s learning that make this learning visible to families and the community.

Families and communities

• Increasing parental awareness and understanding of the precepts and significance of early childhood learning experiences for their children’s education.
• Increased parental and community participation in the centre and in their children’s learning and education.
• Increased opportunities provided for children to use literacy in exchanges between the centre and home (reading, writing, travelling book).
• Enhanced aspirations for their children.
• Increased pride in the education provision their children are receiving.
• Increased understanding of the value of play as an important learning pedagogy for young children.

Early Childhood Centers/school

• Increasing enrolments, attendance and retention.
• Improved learning outcomes for children.
• Decreased incidents of vandalism and theft from the centres.
• Significant increase in accreditation rankings.
• Increasing participation of parents in their children’s learning experiences, at the centre and at home.

The above preliminary results are presented in more detail in the FIH 2010 report. Even though these are preliminary findings, these achievements clearly indicate the valuable investment in the FIH pilot project, in terms of exploring how to improve the quality of early childhood education, the kind of approaches that can successfully achieve personal and pedagogical change, the creation of communities of practice, and engaging families in their children’s learning and building leadership capacity. 

Expansion Proposal

UWS developed an elaborated expansion and replication proposal for Futuro Infantil Hoy during the latter part of 2010. The proposal was informed by the experiences of the pilot project and the conceptualisation of a cascading model, paying special attention to sustainability and feasibility issues. The key structural devices of the expansion model are Clusters and Leadership Round Tables. Mentors are suggested to play the essential role of change agents. It is expected that the mentors for each successive “cascade” phase will come from the previous “leadership table” groups.
The elaborated proposal itself has been a significant task that has required a careful analysis of the pilot project experience, and a consideration of literature and information related to the expansion of pilot projects.

Project Expansion in the Antofagasta Region

This is a challenging undertaking that requires a clear understanding of successful change management, the components of the project and the necessary requirements to support implementation.

The expansion includes 15 early childhood education centres ‑ with around 1.300 children and 150 staff –implemented during a four-year period starting in 2011 and ending in  the first half of 2015.

The objectives of the expansion model are to expand and implement the socio-cultural approach in ECEC in a context of social and economic vulnerability and marginalisation. In this sense, the focus of the model is on building sustainability through leadership capacity building and establishing local communities of practice in order to improve children’s social and cognitive learning. The key agents in this process are locally based mentors who have been actively involved in capacity building aspects of the pilot phase (2008-2010).
The expansion is planned over 4 years in a ‘cascading’ model that builds a progressive increase in local leadership of the program training and support for clusters and their Leadership Round Tables. This can be seen as a network of mentors across the region with capabilities to sustain ongoing communities of practice within the clusters. A cluster model has been developed in an attempt to maintain program fidelity and also sustain the relationships dimension that has been a key element of the pilot program.
Based on a socio-cultural approach, the main pedagogical aim of this proposal is to build community and pedagogical leadership capacities in ways responsive to and respectful of the conditions of marginalised communities and the development of a range of pedagogies that reflect, engage and go beyond local community knowledges and literacies. This requires the establishment of bridges between families and centres/school, and the development strategies that not only support families in their parenting role, but also engage and affirm them as active agents in their children’s learning.

There are 3 core components of the proposal:  (a) a professional learning program Vinculos de Literacidad - which focuses on literacy teaching and learning, and (b) Leadership Round Tables in which participative action research methodologies are explored as part of leadership development and (c) mentor training. Both components translate into different projects that understand ECEC as a platform for building community capacity, recognising and making visible funds of knowledge, and strengthening support networks available in the territory.

These components will be undertaken through different activities such as lectures, master classes, workshops and digital storytelling amongst others.