Tullia Musatti

Documentation and analysis of children’s experience: an ongoing collegial activity for early childhood professionals

Systematic documentation and analysis of educational practice can be a powerful tool for continuous support to the professionalism of early childhood education practitioners. This paper discusses data from a three-year action-research initiative carried out by a research agency in collaboration with a network of Italian municipal nido services. The action research aimed at elaborating and implementing documentation procedures that nido practitioners could accomplish continuously and that could form the basis of a collegial reflection on children’s experience and the improvement of practices. The analysis of practitioners’ discussions about weaknesses and strengths of the new procedures shows how they could be inscribed within the framework of their current professional engagement and support their processes of reflexivity. The analysis also highlights the important role of collegiality in sustaining practitioners’ analysis, evaluation and improvement of their practice.

Mothering young children: Child care, stress and social life

This study focuses on mothers’ and young children’s everyday social experience by analyzing their social relationships, social support in child care, mother-child interaction, and mothers’ evaluations of all these aspects. Three hundred and eighty-four mothers with a child aged between I and 3 years, living in a city in Central Italy, were interviewed. A Principal Components Analysis was performed on items concerning mothers’ and children’s social experience and mothers’ evaluations. Four PCA generated factors were regressed on the mother’s and Four PCA generated factors were regressed on the mother’s and child’s characteristics. Results show that, even in a context characterized by social conditions supportive to mothering, there is a comparatively widespread desire for social interaction with other mothers and children. A stress related to intensive mothering was found in a minority of the mothers and was predicted by the mothers’ continuous commitment in child care during the whole day. Results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that social contacts with other mothers may have a mitigating effect on mothers’ stress. One implication is that early educational services that provide the opportunity for social intercourse among parents can be an important resource for them.RésuméCette étude est centrée sur l’expérience sociale dès mères avec leurs petits enfants dans la vie quotidienne. On analyse leurs relations sociales, l’aide reçu dans les soins de l’enfant, leurs interactions avec leur enfant ainsi que leurs évaluations de tous ces aspects. On a interviewé 384 mères d’enfants âgés entre 1 et 3 ans, rèsidant dans une ville de l’Italie Centrale. Les résultats montrent que même dans un contexte social favorable on retrouve très fréquemment chez les mères le désir d’interactions sociales avec d’autres mères et enfants. On retrouve aussi chez une minorité de mères l’expression d’un certain stress concernant leur maternage intensif; ce stress pouvant être attribué à leur engagement continu, dans le soin de l’enfant pendant toute la journée. On discute les résultats par rapport à l’hypothèse que les rapports sociaux avec d’autres mères de jeunes enfants puissent atténuer le stress des mères. Une conséquence importante en serait que les services éducatifs pour la petite enfance, qui offrent l’occasion aux parents de se retrouver, entre eux, puissent constituer une ressource importante.

New educational provision for young children in Italy

A widespread latent demand for educational provision for under 3s exists in Italy. This demand emerges from different material and psychological needs of families. In the last twenty years a large network of day care centers for infants and toddlers, asilo nido, have been installed by local governments in many regions of Central and Northern Italy. These facilities provide daily child care within an educationally oriented context. More recently, new types of facilities have been set up. They stem from the public asilo nido in both cultural and organizational terms and are integrated, together with all the other services, into a local network of educational facilities for young children and their families. The new facilities are aimed at quantitatively expanding the supply of educational provision and at broadening the range of choice for families with respect to their different needs. This paper provides an overview of the new facilities.RésuméUne importante demande de prise en charge éducative des enfants de moins de trois ans existe en Italie. Cette demande correspond à différents besoins matériels et psychologiques des familles. Dans les vingt dernières années un important réseau de crèches et de garderies pour nourrissons et jeunes enfants (“asilo nido”) a été mis en place dans beaucoup de régions du centre et du nord de l’Italie. Ceci permet une prise en charge quotidienne dans un contexte à visées éducatives. Plus récemment, de nouvelles structures ont été proposées aux parents. Elles dérivent des “asilo nido” dans leur conception et leur organisation et sont intégrées dans un réseau local de services éducatifs pour les jeunes enfants et leurs familles. Ces nouvelles possibilités visent à augmenter quantitativement l’offre de prise en charge éducative et à élargir la diversité des solutions offertes aux familles en fonction de leurs différents besoins. Cet article donne une vue d’ensemble sur ces nouvelles structures.

The use of documentation in a participatory system of evaluation

Pedagogical documentation is a practice currently used in Italian early childhood education and care (ECEC) services to make visible children’s learning processes in ECEC, to promote parents’ participation and to support professionals’ reflexive competences. These functions of pedagogical documentation have been enhanced within a system of participatory evaluation of ECEC service quality, which has been implemented in several Italian sites. Specific procedures of documentation of children’s and parents’ experience in the ECEC setting were proposed. On the basis of the documentation, all stakeholders participated in the evaluation process and expressed and discussed the quality of ECEC provision from their different perspectives as professionals, parents or managers. They expressed their judgements considering whether children’s and parents’ experiences in the service were congruent with the educational goals and objectives pursued. The use of documentation guaranteed a common basis for anchoring discussion among stakeholders to concrete matters as well as for making judgements transparent for everybody. The final outcome of this discussion is also documented and constitutes the basis for further planning and improvement of the quality of the service.

Sustaining ECEC quality through continuing professional development: systemic approaches to practitioners’ professionalisation in the Italian context

There is a broad consensus in international debates that the quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services is inextricably linked to the professionalisation of its workforce. In particular, the importance of providing ECEC practitioners with continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities has been increasingly recognised in recent years. Against this background little attention has been paid to the investigation of professional development practices that have proved to be effective and supportive for qualifying educational work within ECEC settings. Drawing on the data collected from documentary sources and interviews with local experts, this paper will illustrate and critically analyse relevant CPD initiatives that have been implemented within municipal early childhood services in the Italian context. Practitioners’ active engagement in professional development processes and peer exchanges within a collegial framework, both of which create fertile ground for educational experimentation and shared reflectivity, have been identified as main strengths of these programmes. By disseminating the pedagogic knowledge and expertise elaborated within such programmes, the present analysis offers a significant contribution to the existing debate on the CPD of early years practitioners from a systemic perspective.

Object Substitution: Its Nature and Function in Early Pretend Play

A theoretical reappraisal of the meaning of object substitution in the development of children’s representational abilities is suggested, and a functional distinction between five types of object subs

Towards the use of symbol: Play with objects and communication with adults and peers in the second year☆

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between the onset, the development, and the increase of conventional acts spontaneously exhibited by toddlers in play with objects and in communication with adults and peers within one play context. Five triads of same-age familiar children (8, 13, 18, 24, and 27 months) and on adult were video-taped while playing with familiar objects. All the communicative acts addressed to adult and peers and actions with objects were identified and coded. Conventional acts and the ability to combine them appear earlier in actions with objects. Although from 18 months conventional acts increase dramatically in both domains, they play a different role in doing than in communicating. In communication, the use of language leads to a substantial increase in communicative production itself. At all ages, children are highly motivated to communicate with both adults and peers. As soon as language is acquired, it becomes the predominant modality of communication with both partners.

Minor phenomena and major processes of interaction with objects and peers in day care centres

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relation between interaction with objects and interaction with peers in children attending day care centres. The day care centre provides the child with an opportunity to interact with peers and for new cognitive experiences. It also provides researchers with an opportunity to study the relationships between peers and objects in the child’s cognitive construction. These two domains — peer interaction and interaction with objects — represent the two poles of a unitary system which allows the child to consolidate and acquire different kinds of knowledge. The two poles can be differently activated in the child’s cognitive construction. Their integrated study affords greater understanding of a series of behavioural phenomena which occur among peers in day care centres. Naturalistic observations on early peer interaction and object-related activities will be used to illustrate the analysis. The study of the processes involved in the child’s object- and peer-related interaction and the related behavioural phenomena can provide educational suggestions in order to ensure their actual emergence and to support their positive aspects.RésuméLes interactions avec autrui et avec les objets constituent les pôles principaux des activités cognitives chez les jeunes enfants. Ce travail a pour but d’analyser les relations entre ces deux types d’interaction chez les bébés fréquentant les crêches. La crêche présente une écologie particulière par rapport à la famille et offre aux enfants la possibilité d’echanger avec des partenaires d’âges voisins et de réaliser des expériences nouvelles. Selon nous les interactions avec les objets et les pairs s’organisent dans un système unitaire, dont les pôles sont activiés différemment dans les constructions cognitives de l’enfant. Nous tentons de présenter ici leur étude intégrée, en nous appuyant sur des observations d’échanges entre enfants, au cours de la deuxième année, dans des situations variées comportant des objets. Nos analyses, illustrées par des exemples, tendent à montrer les processus fondamentaux apparaissant dans le système considéré selon que les enfants sont centrés principalement sur le pôle objet, sur le pôle autrui, ou sur les deux à la fois. La connaissance de ces processus et de leur rôle positif dans le développement psychologique des enfants peut contribuer aux transformations de l’environnement et des pratiques éducatives dans les crêches.

Toddlers’ Participation in Joint Activities with Peers in nido

Socialization with peers is one of the main goals of early childhood education and care outside of the family but the processes of young children’s sociality in ECEC centres are still to be fully understood. This chapter presents an analysis of toddler’s sociality with peers during their everyday life in an ECEC centre, based on ethnographic data (videos and written notes) collected during a whole morning within the toddler program of a municipal nido in Italy. It highlights that in a group situation children’s attention is aroused by a multiplicity of social stimuli and that they often participate in joint activities with peers. The analysis of toddlers’ participation shows that both social and cognitive processes converge in children’s sociality with peers and contribute to make the ECEC experience an important step in the course of their life. Implications for educational practices in ECEC centres are also discussed.

Avaliando a qualidade dos serviços para a infância: uma abordagem participativa

Early childhood education and care services present some specific features that have important implications on theoretical approach and procedures for evaluating their quality. We will present a system of evaluation of ECEC quality designed by our research group and implemented in some Italian municipalities, discussing its approach to evaluation and describing its procedures. In the evaluation process, the participation of different stakeholders (teachers, pedagogical coordinators, managers and parents) is promoted. The system is based on procedures of observations and written documentation of children’s and parents experience collected systematically by ECEC professionals analyzed and discussed during collegial meetings. Evaluation activities are inscribed within the current professional practices of ECEC professionals and are aimed at improving educational practices as well as professionals’ reflexivity.