Many refugee families come to Australia each year from different parts of the world and with a vast range of experiences. As Australia awaits the settlement of Syrian refugees over the coming months we, as early childhood leaders and educators, can start preparing to receive these children and families, and ensure that our services are […]
Incorporating culture into the curriculum In May, a group of us from Queen Elizabeth Childcare Centre attended the ECA Reconciliation Symposium held in Adelaide. Wanting more insight and knowledge surrounding reconciliation and Aboriginal culture we attended with high expectations and enthusiasm and things have certainly snowballed from there. We came back to our service inspired […]
The other day, my toddler son came home from childcare saying “piss poo”. He is one of the younger children in his classroom and clearly he heard this phrase from an older child he admired. I couldn’t help laughing at this unexpected outburst, which reinforced this behaviour – thus cementing the phrase in his emerging […]
I was introduced to the idea that the care-education dichotomy was something we needed to move beyond, as a first year Early Childhood undergraduate back in 1980. We have come a long way, but the questions are still relevant due to issues of historical context, discursive politics and semantics. My PhD thesis examined the nature […]
During NAIDOC week (5 to 12 July 2015) many early childhood services have acknowledged and celebrated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. I encourage all Early Childhood Services to reflect on the week, and particularly how culture can be embedded beyond the week’s activities. I was cynically disappointed that a small minority of educational services […]
Anne Stonehouse succinctly described cultural competence as ‘about attitudes and approaches to people than it is about facts’. I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. I recently conducted interviews with a number of early years educators around their understandings and perspectives of cultural competence as identified in the Early Years Learning Framework: The journey for educators: […]
I’ve visited several primary schools and early education and care services in Melbourne recently where the families have many different cultural backgrounds. Among them are refugees and asylum seekers, families who have experienced trauma and who continue to lead lives filled with uncertainty and difficulty. The conversations I had reminded me of the life-altering role […]
The blog was originally posted in 2015 and updated in August 2020. Conversations about family, kinship, culture and Country help support mental health and wellbeing. Yarning is a way of capturing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ story and description of how they see and experience something. We have seen yarning benefit many individuals, groups and […]
This blog was originally posted in 2014 and updated in August 2020. Expressing joy, sharing and giving, these are evergreen qualities yet Christmas can look and feel different in different settings. This blog post is a timeless reflection on the end of the year: all that it brings us and all that we bring to it. […]
