Silver – journey of reflective practice  

Reflective practice is something that we hold in really high regard. With regards to reflective practice and how it impacts University Children’s Centre day-to-day operations, we’ve really started in early 2000, before I actually worked for the organization, and we started a journey towards emergent curriculum. And I think that that was sort of the time that the majority of centres were sort of buying into this way of learning alongside children. And when I joined the team in 2003 we’d already sort of started seeing programs evolve into, you know, moving away from theme-based and into really following the lead of the children.    

I was able to move out of a classroom and into a management position as a program coordinator, and at that time it really opened up my opportunities to do more research and to learn alongside the children and families and the staff that we have at University Children’s Centre.  

So that research and learning alongside in a different role really led me to look at what are the nuts and bolts? What are the, you know, the actual components that make an emerging curriculum function well? And to me at the end of the day in order to have an emergent program, you really need to have a reflective practice. You need to look through each interaction with children, interactions with teachers and also how you’re researching what’s happening and be reflective on all those pieces.  

So we sort of moved away from calling ourselves an emergent program, even though I do still feel that those are the basis of where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. I just feel that emergent curriculum is often used very loosely without real understanding or meaning of what that practice looks like. So in order to operate and to live in emergent curriculum I feel very strongly that you need to have reflective teachers and you need to be reflective in all areas of the organization.  

So that’s sort of where we started, from that emergent journey moving more into focusing on reflection and interactions and documentation and then now we’re at this point where I feel that we can – we can honour what we do by saying we are reflective in our programming.