At ECMS our place-based approach is a core tenet of our Pedagogical Framework, inviting children to know who they are and where they are, and holding within it a deep understanding of and commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island perspectives. How does this work in the everyday life of a service?
Sometimes it happens in incremental ways and always directed by the wonderings of children.
At Bulldogs Community Children’s Centre a simple, everyday observation of a bird commonly found in that area led to a deeper exploration of place – of Country, of the Bunurong people and of Indigenous languages. And all of it was led by the observations and reflections of children.
Service Leaders Liz Bogioglou, Josie Rigby and Archi Walia recall how this journey of place started small but captivated the community in so many ways.
“It came from the children”, Archi explains. “We were sitting outside exploring a book called The Art in Country by Bronwyn Bancroft. We were exploring the illustrations in it, how Country was represented, and looking at our garden. At that time, a bird landed on the sunshade where we were sitting, and a child started talking about the bird and shooing the bird away.”
This moment gave Archi opportunity to purposely explore the children’s understanding of Country, beginning with a conversation about taking care of the birds and how they're a part of nature.
“And that led us to a conversation about what is nature - are we part of nature, the land part of nature, the Bunurong people part of nature? So it started a whole lot of conversation about Bunurong country.”
Archi had a book called Obie the Orange-bellied Parrot by Kate Rijs. They talked about Obie, and created a beautiful story, with illustrations and words from the children. This led to a conversation about our knowledge of birds coming from illustrations, which then circled back to Country.
“The children started talking again about the Bunurong people - maybe they lived here a long time ago and maybe some of them had seen these birds a long time ago. That's where Obie led us.”
The journey has only just begun.
“We talked about birds being represented as black in Indigenous art, and we know there’ll be future conversations to be had about the words ‘black’ and ‘dark’. It’s going to be an ongoing process.”
The discoveries of children were at the centre of the learning here, and Liz explains how the team set the conditions to make that possible: “The conversation we had before this all started was about how do we involve the children more, really looking at our programming and how children lead their own learning through intentional teaching. Everything just organically evolved from there and it's not something that we're just going to stop.”
Josie emphasised the importance of putting the children at the centre of everything: “It's not about what we know - which we then teach the children - it’s ‘what do the children know?’ They can teach us as well.”
Becoming with place embraces not just an understanding of where we came from, but also where we are today – the local community in all its richness, as Archi confirmed:
“That's part of our anti bias approach - we've got so many different family structures here in our learning environment. It’s pretty vast around the entire centre as well. So that's something we did at the very start of the year - talking with the children about diversity and everyone's social environments. And they’re ongoing conversations.”
Becoming with place is an essential aspect of enacting our Pedagogical Framework at ECMS and drives transformative practice at scale, with research evidence highlighting the importance of relational and place-based pedagogies for children’s optimal learning, development and wellbeing (EYLF, 2022).
One child spotting a bird can lead to so much.