Lydia's case study

Stage One: Formulating my research question

Lydia joined the RESPECT project because she believed that parent involvement helps early childhood services to meet the needs and expectations of all its stakeholders and because she wanted to change her practices in order to involve all stakeholders in the early childhood curriculum. Lydia wanted children, families, teachers and the wider community to have a real voice within the service:

I am more comfortable with using the term families rather that parents when talking/writing about this group of people as I think by limiting it to parents may exclude other members of the child’s family that also play an integral role in the child’s life at home and at the centre. Therefore from now I will refer to parents as families.

Lydia suspected that while early childhood staff say that they include children’s and parents’ voices in their program, in practice they include only the voices that agree with them; and she recognised that she certainly spent more time with some parents than with others:

I struggle with much of early childhood theory and practices that say it (early childhood education) is child-centred and that children have a true voice in an early childhood curriculum … (because) … for the most part, adults still play a major role in decision making on behalf of the child on a daily basis.

Lydia had tried various ways to include parents’ ideas and wishes in her program, but was dissatisfied with them. She had found that families rarely wrote anything in the ‘room journals’ - although they talked more about them with staff when the books included photos of the children. She had found that rather than tell the relevant staff member about any problems with their children, families used the Communication Books to notify the Centre as a whole. Also many parents used Communication Books to specify how their child should spend her/his time each day, making teachers feel that they should keep to that timetable, thus limiting the child’s ability to have a say in how their day looks.

These concerns led Lydia to formulate this research question:

• How can we create genuine space for the voices of children, parents, teachers and the wider community to be incorporated and woven into the early childhood curriculum in meaningful and respectful ways?