The evaluation has just been published of the Pre-School Education Initiative for Children from Minority Groups. The motivation, which the Federal government funded throughout the Dormant Accounts Fund, involved training and mentoring intended for early child years educators in diversity and equality practice, using the Anti-Bias Education way.
The analysis found the approach to always be very effective in achieving confident change. The anti-bias strategy supports teachers to reveal critically on their practice. In Ireland this informed the development of the Г©ist project, which in turn influenced the recent initiative.
Its desired goals are to: Support children’s identity (individual and group) and their sense of belonging. Engender children’s empathy and support them to be comfortable with dissimilarities between children. Encourage every child to take into account diversity and bias. Empower children to stand up on their own and others in difficult circumstances. It’s an approach that fits well with both the SГolta nationwide quality platform and the Aistear curriculum platform.
The principles of SГolta suggest that equality is usually an essential characteristic of top quality early the child years care and education, which quality settings respect diversity and have all their individual, personal, cultural and linguistic identity validated. Similarly, nurturing equal rights and diversity is among the 12 rules of Aistear, and identity and belonging is the four designs. Fundamentally, the anti-bias procedure does not focus on additional helps for children from minority groups, but about changing popular practice so that the uniqueness of each and every child can be recognised and supported, therefore that the dissimilarities between most children are highly regarded.
That’s how come equality and variety are so central to high quality practice they benefit all children. The Pre-School Education Motivation involved training and coaching of personnel in one hundred sixty early care and education settings, pass on across almost all counties, in 2011-2012. Building on the operate of the Equality and Diversity Early Childhood Network (EDeNn), the initiative was implemented throughout the City and County Daycare Committees, and was the first time the education was provided at a national level.