is a core value that guides our practices and the way we teach and relate to people. It prompts us to take action and advocate for all early childhood participants to be valued and respected for who they are. Social Justice is achieved for all families, learners and early childhood practitioners through adopting an anti-biased approach to early childhood education.
Bright Futures
Philosophy
1. Social Justice
2. Our service is an extension of home
for all families who attend the service. Our service is small, which ensures we get to know the families well. It also ensures that we are able to support children to develop meaningful connections with peers and educators at a heightened level due to our small size. This creates integral partnerships between the service and families and supports the ‘extended family’ culture we aim to maintain at the service. The partnerships that we develop with the families are collaborative, reciprocal and genuine. The connectedness of the service’s children, families and educators, enriches its everyday operations and is achieved by open and respectful dialogues, empathy, patience and a commitment to synergy.
3. Learners are respected
as competent, enthusiastic and valued members of the early childhood community. We show respect to learners by being a supportive, responsive and enthusiastic learning chaperons that build knowledge alongside children and their families. We believe that the curriculum we provide should be developmentally appropriate and focused on life-long learning. All children join the search for knowledge and understanding at birth and develop their own rich and unique learning style. This is celebrated in our pedagogy and practice, by ensuring they have sufficient access to resources, time, provisions and support to enable them to drive their own learning and experience genuine engagement.
4. Connection to the world
is a central component of the human experience. The concept of connecting to the world prompts us to seek inspiration from natural beauty and also inspires learners to appreciate and gain meaning from their world. Interacting with the natural environment encourages conceptual thinking, builds a connection to other living things and lays the foundation to implement sustainability practices. We as a service encourage the exploration of the wider world through investigating different cultures and the wider community. Children are respected members of a broad community and deserve to be active participants. We engage children in various forms of community engagement and instill a sense of belonging and purpose within children in doing so.
5. Reflective practice and continuous improvement
guides the way we evolve our teaching practices and learning environments. Reflective practice ensures that early learning spaces are considerate of sociocultural contexts and reflective of learners’ current requirements. We aim to create learning spaces that are stimulating, imaginative and inspiring for young learners. Reflection enables us to develop and fine-tune our daily practices and become responsive to children’s needs. It also assists us in thinking critically about our practices and striving for continuous improvement.
6. Contemporary Pedagogies
underpin our curriculum decisions and teaching practices. We aim to use multiple early childhood beliefs, theories and concepts and manipulate these to respond each learner’s requirements. We believe that 21st-century teaching practices are a necessity in the current educational climate, in which most of the jobs children we are educating will have, have not been invented yet. This means as a service we have a strong focus on technology and critical thinking to help assist children in future learning scenarios.
7. Respect for childhood
stimulates us to respect learner’s time and unique development process. We support learners to engage genuinely with their world, gaining knowledge about themselves and their surroundings and making meaning through investigation. We value and honor the importance of childhood memories and relationships and create opportunities for these to develop. We protect children’s right to a childhood, through supporting learners to mature at their own pace through an inclusive, holistic and balanced approach to instructive and play-based learning.
8. Educators are the life blood of our services
and are the key ingredient in our recipe for excellence. We believe that by embedding practices within our organisation that invest in educators’ growth, fulfillment and wellbeing that we celebrate and recognise the significant work that they do and support them within their pursuit of teaching greatness. Early Childhood Practitioners all bring diverse experiences, skills, knowledge, teaching styles, and perspectives with them, which creates a rich tapestry of opportunities to learn for families, children and educators alike. Collaborative efforts across our team of educators ensures that high quality practices are embedded and forever evolving as each practitioner adds their own expertise to our learning community.