All posts by Erica Gardner

Erica Gardner has extensive experience consulting to early childhood education and care (ECEC), health and community services. This includes six years working as a Project Officer at the Centre for Community Child Health (CCCH) in Melbourne. Erica has also been a teacher in urban and rural settings.

Embracing inclusion—an educator’s experience

Posted on May 4, 2017 by Erica Gardner

During my time as an educator, the children in my group spanned across a three-year age range and hailed from 15 or more distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Two were funded for educational support, one with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and the other with an unspecified intellectual disability/foetal alcohol syndrome. At the start of […]

Using the talents at hand: multilingualism within early childhood

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Erica Gardner

We are a culturally and linguistically diverse sector. I have taught in classrooms where I have been the only person who speaks just one language. I had many joyous and at times humorous interactions with children. One little girl (a native Farsi speaker) whose English was progressing in phenomenal leaps and bounds, to the point […]