Silver – image of child

So image of children is something that we’ve been exploring a lot in the last three years. We started after I came back from an institute at the beginning of my career as executive director at University Children’s Centre. I was inspired to sort of look at values and what do those mission statements, philosophy statements, and vision statements really mean? You know, we have all those, most childcare centres do. Do you look at them? Or do they just stay inside your personnel policies. You know, what does it look like? Are you living those things? 

Those were the questions that I started asking. So we had this conversation around values. We did this beautiful activity where, you know, everyone wrote down their top values and you know, we sort of went down from there based on all of the things that we could buy into, that we could agree on. That this is how we live our lives together at University Children’s Centre.  

So we sort of said, wait a second. Let’s stop. Let’s pause. Let’s think about what we do every day and who we come to live with every day. And we went back to, what is our image of children? So having a conversation about what is University Children’s Centre’s image of children really changed the practice, the feeling, a bit of the culture. And to really look at how is it that we see children when they come through our doors?  

So we really took a lot of time to sort of hone in on the words that were powerful to us. You know, the top that, you know, constantly we’re coming out were capable, curious, unique, full of emotion. Those are all the things that, you know, we could all sort of just buy into and say yes, this is true in every group. This is true in every aspect of our work.  

So from that point I thought, this is a really great conversation and I don’t want it to stop here. I don’t want it to fall flat. I want this to drive the program. And it really has. We sat down with those words and really crafted them based on all of the conversations that we’ve had, and then sent it out to every single team, all of these words. They strung the words together individually within their teams. They submitted them back to us. We sort of said, hey, look, you guys are saying the same thing. Your statements are the same, isn’t that weird. You know, it’s so strange that you can live in isolation in a toddler room and next door in the baby room they’re feeling the same way. Because sometimes it does feel like when you’re in a separate classroom that you have these walls built around you and it’s really hard. But in that reflective practice we still need to come together and pull things back together. 

So we did that by sort of saying, these are the statements that you’ve created, what can you all buy into? You know, what is true of your work. And then we had these conversations where everyone was saying, oh, who came up with that? Like, risk is so important in child’s play. Risk is so important at all stages. And so we’re making connections between teams, and between locations, because we do have that second location with our school age program and the conversations that came out of that were not only rich, but they were meaningful.  

So now we have a lens to see every interaction between – and one of the biggest things I feel came from that is the realization that all the things that we know are true of children are true of every single human and every single early childhood educator that we have here. So we treat each other in that same way. You know, that when you have an interaction, be it positive or not, you have to see the other person for coming for capability, competence, uniqueness and with emotion.