Rowan - learning stories and relationships

One of the things, you know, in our field of early childhood education, it happens that sometimes early childhood educators have not been held in the high esteem that they deserve. And what the stories did was they created a different kind of a presence, but a stature for the educators as writers, as documenters, but as program planners, as carers of children that became visible through the stories. And that actually did quite a lot to support their relationships with the parents. But, it also enabled parents to witness through the documentation what their children were doing at the child care centre. And again, that uplifted their understanding of their child’s capacity as well as the educators’ contribution. And then through the stories, children were building relations and also building communication skills and other things. I remember a day so vividly there are two little children on the floor looking at the binders that we created to house stories, lying on their tummies, two year olds, looking at their stories. So, it was building relations child to child, child to educator, child to parent, parent to child, multiple directions.