Doan – CoP professional development 

Within the community of practice, the groups get together once a month, usually face to face, and they take part in professional development. And we really look at professional development as something that happens actually every time they meet. So sometimes it might involve a guest speaker. Sometimes it involves a discussion that’s led by the facilitator or led by some of the educators themselves. Whatever it is, that is the content, we see that as being professional development.  

Some of the different topics have been things like reflective practice, looking at our own practice as educators. In British Columbia, and I think in many provinces and territories in Canada, we have early learning frameworks. We just have a new one that has come out recently. So interest in exploring that. We had one community of practice recently that was looking at the B.C. Code of Ethics, and they had a discussion in one of their one of their meetings looking at how do we value ourselves as early childhood educators and really a focus on self-care, but even beyond self-care, personal wellness, what does that look like. The next time that they met, they said, let’s look at how we value children, and so they again were informed by that code of ethics. Some of the communities of practice decided to do a book study and they might look at a particular book and read, you know, a chapter each time. Some of the communities have been looking at pedagogical narrations and, you know, how do you find time to observe children and what does that look like? And how do we share stories with families and with children? So, it’s just a wide gamut of different things that they’re involved with.  

So again, another example on the island, there was a small community of practice in a small remote area, and when I went to do a focus group there, it was lovely just to hear about how some of the educators were saying that they had been hired into an Indigenous early learning program and were then to be sharing and speaking the Nuu-chah-nulth language, but it was new to them. They were non-Indigenous. And so, within the community of practice, some very brand new, new early childhood educators who were Indigenous, who also spoke the Nuu-chah-nulth language, then became the experts in that context and were able to support these non-Indigenous educators in learning the words, learning the language. So, to me this is an example of breaking down barriers and not seeing how many years you’ve been in the field or you’re new, I’m experienced. Recognizing we all have value. We all have expertise. And it was just amazing to see. And the people within that focus group and that community of practice said to us, we don’t have a resource center that we can just go to. In many of our communities, certainly in B.C., we have the Child Care Resource and Referral Centers. So, it’s sort of a hub that you can go to for workshops and professional development, and they said, we don’t have that. But what we have is we have this, we have this community of practice. So, I don’t think I anticipated the ways that the support could happen.