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The Literacy Café
For some time we have been wondering which was the biggest difficulty we had in our work, and as a team we concluded that our centre was always giving information to families regarding how to support educational tasks or how to improve their parental role, but we realised that there were no instances for gathering information from families, which would allow us to improve our experiences with the children, making them more real and consistent with their family culture.
Thus the Literacy Café was born, as an instance for effective communication between the centre and the family: an enjoyable morning on which we invite a group of family members to have a coffee with one of the educators. We prepared 10 key questions or conversation starters about how they spent their free times with their children, and in what ways children took part in the decisions taken by the family.
This initiative generated great enthusiasm with families, allowing us to know them better, and improved meetings and participation in parents workshops, strengthening the relationship of educators with parents, in addition to strengthening our learning experiences, by being more in tuned with their reality.
On the other hand, the possibility of showing family members photos of all the educational experiences their children had inside and outside the classroom, was a plus in relevant areas such as valuing the role of the center in their children’s education, raising parents awareness about the need to support it, as well as changing their understanding of the role they have as first educators.
Silvia Rojo, Directora Jardín Infantil
Granito de Esperanza, Antofagasta
The Pasantia (Study Visit)
“I really want to thank everyone for the opportunity to be part of the Pasantia. I believe it was an excellent Project and it’s been really important for me in professional terms. I try to communicate to my colleagues lots of things I saw and learned over there and we have implemented some in the classroom here”
The pasantia (internship or study visit) has consistently emerged in the research and evaluation data as a key experience, leading to an understanding of the internship as a ‘critical success factor’ in seeding changes in pedagogical practices and family engagement. The educators who undertook the internships in 2009 and 2010 repeatedly refer to aspects of professional practice seen or experienced in Australia during workshops and centre visits by UWS, and have adapted many of the practices in their own early childhood centres in Antofagasta. This influence is clearly visible in the centres. Significantly, these practices are not just reproduced, but have been thoughtfully adapted to reflect local realities. Parents also spoke about the positive impact of the internship in the practices at the centres during interviews conducted by UWS, stating that they had noticed a positive change in the centre after the educators returned from Australia. |
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