#24 Fifth Landing - Relationships with Children, Families and Community

Welcome to the ECA podcast Talking Pedagogies, a podcast emerging from the ECA National Conference in 2022 about identifying and declaring our unique Australian pedagogies. In an era of inquiries and reshaping of policy, it is now more important than ever to inform change by confidently claiming our pedagogies for the future of children's education and care experiences. In keeping with ECA's commitment to First Nations perspectives, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners on whose land we are joining you today and pay respects to elders past and present who have taught us about the importance of teaching and learning on country for thousands of years. Welcome back everybody and thank you for joining us at our sixth episode of the ECA podcast Talking Pedagogies. In this episode, we're going to be exploring a really important landing, our relationship with children, families and community, a really big idea, something that is all the way through our everyday practices. Welcome, Sandra. Thanks, Catherine. Yeah, a really interesting talk. I'm very topical and timely as we look at policy ships and changes in the early childhood and our school, our sectors. I'm really interested to explore this, as you say. It's a really big topic. As we are building on our conversation from the 2022 ECA National Conference, we would like to remind you to visit the ECA Conference website and register to join in person in Adelaide or virtually. Big topic. And of course, it's new, but it's old. So we've been talking about the ways in which we relate to children and families and communities for ages and ages. And if we go back to our first landing, of course, the invitation from our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues, families and children over many years is to build a relationship with country as well. And it's also to connect deeply with the people who form part of our community. So this relationship is really important. And we should say right from the get-go, that the notion of relationships has got a really big boost in the updated early years, learning framework and my time, our place. And this will come as deeply reassuring to many of our educator colleagues out there who would absolutely say that this is a very strong feature of our Australian pedagogy. But of course, we're in this space again, Sandra. Is it unique? Is it unique to us? What are we uniquely doing in this context, which is a really important question. And one of the reasons we're put children, families and community in here is that there might be different types of relationships that we pursue with children and families and community that of course shape what we understand as unique to the way we undertake this process. But Sandra, before we ask some of those big questions and explore that, it's a concept that we need to think about in terms of shaping our pedagogical understanding here in Australia. But of course, around the globe. And we've been inspired by our colleagues in Ridge, Amelia, who've spoken very strongly about a relational pedagogy. And of course, deep theoretical perspectives. People will be sort of sitting here thinking of things like attachment theory and all sorts of ideas of things that they learnt when they were studying to become educators. So relationships are increasingly understood. And I think we keep coming back to those spaces regularly as central to outcomes for children. So this relationship piece is not a fluffy warm blanket, Sandra. It's something that is robust and very clearly understood. And again, there's been champions over the years, Sandra, who said, hold on to the relationships, make sure that the relationships are an important part of what we do. And also people who have helped us understand the rigorous, that head space, the rigorous ways we understand forming of relationships in the work we do. And of course, in practical components, there are many, many educators on a daily basis who choose to position themselves, you know, physically or relationally to really support and nurture the relationships that we have with children, their families and the communities of which we're apart. Yeah, look, I think this is something that we can be genuinely proud of. And I think if we go back through history, we can see that the origins of early childhood education care, perhaps not so much outside school else care, but this historic origins in philanthropy in the concern of women for other women and for young children. I think there's always been this really rich connection to community and to families. And as we've evolved as a sector, and as I guess we've become bigger and I guess more sophisticated, some would say, we've moved much more into large organisations and perhaps there's this threat that we lose the imperative of connecting so strongly with community. But I still see lots of standalone centres run by voluntary management committees with this energy coming from community. This real want to own and to operate a service in their community for their children that's really contextualised and relevant. Not everybody wants the sort of cookie cutter, flashy labels, picture of what early childhood education or outside school hours care can look like. Some people really want, some communities really want to own that for themselves. And so I think we've got really strong underpinnings and strong origins. It's really being thoughtful about that and conscious, I think, as we move into a different space with larger corporations, what is our connection to community and how do we be more, I guess, explicit about that because I do think it's really important for children. And there'll be people who are nodding, I'm sure, when they're hearing you talk about the nature of those really local place-based connections. And again, that notion of place-based pedagogy has been picked up in their updated frameworks and something that I know will be very pleasing for educators who are reading that as they familiarise themselves with these big changes. And of course, this commitment requires rigor and requires planning and processes. You know, people are completing risk assessments, so take children out and about into the communities. And people are also being quite bold about the unlikely partners that they form relationships with. We know there is a significant amount of work happening in various places around Australia to form relationships with aged care facilities. And we know there's some good research happening in that space, which is fantastic. So it's not just a lovely thing that people have seen on television, but also something that people are thinking about in terms of outcomes for children. And indeed, the aged care participants who are joining in those spaces. So I guess it's an opportunity for us to think very deeply about it. At the same time as going out and about into your community, we're also thinking about those very clear and land and nurturing relationships with children in the everyday. Those little micro moments, those micro relationships. And for you and I, Sandra, when we visit early childhood education and care services and outside school, I was, we see what it looks like for an educated to have Veggie Might toast with a child before school at 730 in the morning and have a conversation about how they're traveling. And I've seen it a couple of years ago, I saw an educator have a conversation with a child about the fact that her parents had decided not to adopt a puppy. And this was devastating for her. And I hope that Veggie Might toast, the educator, really supported that child to make sense of that decision, she was very upset. And it was a space that was really relational. It was such a profound offering to that child. And no doubt it created a space for that child to actively participate in school life. And of course, educators can identify those types of decisions that they're making every day to really prioritise relationships over getting the trolley back to the kitchen and prioritise relationships with families that slow things down and help families to understand what it is to raise children in really complex and challenging times. And I guess in us, the question, Sandra, is again, whether this is unique and is this unique to us? What about us and the way we do this in outside school hours and early childhood services across Australia makes it unique? Can we answer that question now? Sandra, is this still a work in progress? Well, I think, Catherine, there's nothing more Australian than a Veggie Might toast. So I think in many ways it is in that nuance of how we do it. And what is that Australian might? But I do think it is around us seeing the role that we play in children's lives as beyond just learning the content and really bringing in the child for the learning that they're up for and that is important for them. And that often comes from their experiences of home. But as she was speaking then about being thoughtful and planning, I was really thinking in Queensland this week, it's under eights week. And this is an ECA sponsored event across Queensland where early childhood settings engage with schools. And the parents sent me a photo this morning of her daughter heading off to an under eights week event at the school. And I just think this is where community is really singing when we have events like that that really do connect different parts of our education system, different parts of our community and give children that really great opportunity to get outside the gate and to be a part of community with their group of peers. So different from engaging with your family, it's this sort of growing into your community with your own peers. And we can go back to the title of our frameworks for longing, being and becoming. And this is about citizenship, it's about democracy, it's about well-being. And I think in this space too, we are expanding our understanding of relationships to ensure that there is more going on here. It's not just this, as I said at the beginning of this sort of fluffy idea, it's got a rigger around it and we need to describe it in really clear ways. And perhaps that's the big challenge to our centres to understand that we've been undertaking this work in a whole range of different ways, micro and macro. And to be bold and clear and positive and proud of the way we engage with this on an everyday basis. And to promote that to, as many people who listen. And I think we also need to be really cautious and careful that we don't take on too much, that we really sort of stay in our lane of our area of expertise because when we are engaging with families and particularly families who are in crisis or experiencing trauma, it can be really easy for us to leach into that area of concern for the family and trying to take some leadership role in supporting and helping the family. But I think it's so important for us as a profession to know where our boundaries are and how we can refer on and connect families with the agencies that are experts in those areas. - Highly advised to us, I think Sandra, particularly in post-COVID times and in complex communities where there are lots of things going on. And of course, this is also an invitation to build relationships with our colleagues in different professions and with allied health and our colleagues in the school community. So this relationship piece is something that we can really be rightly proud of in the space that we are undertaking this work. But there are perhaps some more defining moments that we need to think about so that we've got a clearer understanding about what makes it that unique for us and how we might progress this into the future. Now, of course, as we always do in these episodes is to invite you to contribute to our discussion around these landings. And you'll hear, you'll have heard all the time that Sandra and I are not completely convinced. So we do need your assistance. We need you to help us think through this because we are going to bring this back to the ECA National Conference in 2023 at in the end of this year. So we're going to start thinking about what it might look like and then who knows where it might end up and how we might think about into the future. So these are your questions everybody. Does our relationship with families and community define our unique Australian pedagogy? And if you're thinking practically that hand idea, how are you engaging with children, families and community in relational pedagogy? Can you give us some examples of that? So we start to understand what that might look like. So again, you can respond to these questions by visiting the ECA National Conference website. Click on the podcast tab and add your contributions. Please read other people's contributions. See what they say. You can agree with them or disagree with them and it's fantastic to have a robust debate about what we think about these ideas as we start to define those important landings in the Australian pedagogical approach for early childhood and outside school hours. We look forward to talking to you in our next episode. Until then, take a moment to rate us on your favourite platform. We invite you to watch the recording of our presentation at the 2022 ECA National Conference. We need to talk about pedagogy. Is there a unique Australian way? You can use this on the ECA conference website by clicking the podcast button. While you're there, check out the conference website and don't forget to register and we look forward to seeing you in person in Adelaide or joining us virtually. You've been listening to the ECA podcast series talk and pedagogies. The copyright for this material is owned by early childhood Australia and all rights are reserved. The ECA podcast is available to stream on all of your favourite podcasting platforms and only ECA.