Building parents’ understandings of quality early childhood education and care and early learning and development: changing constructions to change conversations

ABSTRACT

Educator-parent partnerships have long been constructed in a discourse of improving outcomes for children. Notwithstanding the value of parent engagement for children's learning, development and wellbeing, this paper calls for a broader construction. In the context of marketised provisioning in which parents generally operate as uninformed consumers, the paper proposes a positioning of parent engagement that builds parents' understandings about quality ECEC and early learning and development, and which operates from a strengths-based platform. Findings from an Australian study that explored such a positioning from the perspective of five centre directors highlight the challenges involved, with participants exercising different degrees of intentionality. Those who actively sought to build parents' understandings demonstrated a professionalism that viewed parents from a strengths-based perspective, and strategically used time with parents and educators to undertake this work as part of their daily practice. In contrast, the less intentional participants appeared to comply with a marketised framing of parents as consumers, whose real or perceived needs took priority.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• parent partnerships
• advocacy
• child care choice
• quality

Acknowledgements

This study was supported financially and in-kind by KU Children's Services and Goodstart Early Learning. The authors gratefully acknowledge the constructive feedback received from two reviewers of an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Marianne Fenech http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4892-5585

Andi Salamon http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5024-9144

Tina Stratigos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0561-8809