Excursions in Early Childhood: a reality check

A few months ago, I was asked for my views on excursions in Early Childhood Education, as Rattler Magazine was preparing an article and wanted some input from practitioners about excursions and the Early Years Learning Framework (that's our new national curriculum, for my overseas readers).  Here's my response.

'Engaging with the wider community' v 'what actually happens in childcare'

I think it's important that both the people who created the new curriculum (and so understand their intent intimately) and the people who write about it, but who are not daily practitioners, understand the huge gulf that exists between aspiration and reality.

At this stage, what I see is not practitioners being pushed to rethink their practice on engaging with the larger community- I don't think it even occurs to them that they should. Practitioners are mostly struggling with what the EYLF means in terms of what they need to do that's different from before, and what will affect their accreditation if they don't do it. It's very basic. It's 'how do I record something flexible? Will I fail if I do this the way I've always done it?'

The aspirational intent has not reached ground zero, except in terms of more play-based learning and fewer designed and highly structured activities, and the aspirational challenge is more about some practitioners throwing out intentional teaching and calling a lack of structure 'play-based learning'- and some refusing to change at all or keeping their heads in the sand- so there's a bit of a tug-of-war going on. That's not statistically based, but just what I see in some of the centres I visit.

Perhaps in the long term, when we are more comfortable with what the EYLF means in terms of our documentation, daily practice and pedagogy, we might come around to seeing a need for change in the negative attitude to excursions and interaction with the community, but I doubt that this will happen for the sake of fulfilling an imposed outcome. If you took an Early Childhood practitioner off the street and asked how the children should engage in civic living while in childcare, she'd probably look at you as though you had dual craniums- because in the whole scheme of daily survival, that's the least of our concerns. Many practitioners would question whether that's actually what the outcome means. It's just so far from our day-to-day world to consider the role of very young children in the wider community.

Anyway, my view is that until the issues I mention in the following writings are addressed, excursions will continue to be avoided by most centres.

Notes for Early Childhood Educators: Australian Aboriginal inclusion

I went to a wonderful workshop today run by Bev Grant Lipscombe.  It was full of wise advice on how to understand and teach indigenous children.  I'm just going to pop my notes up here in case any of you would like to read them.

The power of a child's home language

Way back when I was learning to be a high school music teacher, I remember feeling incredibly irritated by having to learn songs in foreign languages (including one Aboriginal song which was never even translated for us by the tutor).  I honestly couldn't see the point of the exercise.  It wasn't that I was bad at languages- in fact I was brought up with a French-speaking grandmother, and I studied three languages at high school. I just couldn't see that singing in other languages was meaningful or useful as a teaching tool- it seemed to detract from the study and enjoyment of the music itself.

Back then, the likelihood of striking a genuinely multicultural classroom was much lower.  We were taught ethnomusicology (the study of other cultures' music) as an academic discipline, not as anything that related to our ability to connect with the children.

Come to think of it, I don't think connecting with the children got a look in at all- teaching was an intellectual process for my lecturers, and the idea of trying to touch the children's hearts with music as a learning tool was a radical concept.  Their view, I think, was that we needed to sing in other languages in order to nurture the future opera singers we met in our classrooms.  (As if.)

These days, though, I'd like to go back and bang my old lecturers' heads together, and ask them why on earth they didn't explain how important a working understanding of the language and music of other cultures could be in the classroom, on a human level. And last week I had cause to be rapt that I learnt that Aboriginal song- here's why.

An Aboriginal inclusion story and activities for NAIDOC week

In Australia we're moving towards a very inclusive education syllabus which aims to give all children in our care a sense of belonging. I wrote the following child-friendly version of the story of Sorry Day because there really wasn't anything at all to help Early Childhood teachers deal with Australia's rather dark history of race relations in an honest (but not too scary) way.  And in the absence of anything to help teachers with this tricky topic, there was a lot of well-meaning misinformation going out.  For example, I watched at one school's group time while a very good teacher told her kids that all aborigines have 'really, really dark skin and live in the desert'; the little honey-brown indigenous girl who was sitting right there in front of her must have found it rather confusing.