The Image of the Child – How Beliefs Shape Practice and Curriculum

Duration: 2.5 hours

This workshop explores how your image of the child—the beliefs you hold about who children are and what they can do—shapes every decision in early learning: environments, routines, documentation, and curriculum.

Grounded in the BC Early Learning Framework (2019), we treat curriculum as living inquiry across the four Living Inquiries: Well-Being and Belonging, Identities, Communication and Literacies, and Engagement with Others, Materials, and the World. We draw on Malaguzzi (the child’s “hundred languages”), Rinaldi (a pedagogy of listening), Vygotsky (learning as cultural and relational within the ZPD), Pacini- Ketchabaw (critiquing the “universal child” and attending to equity), and Moss (the child as citizen of today).

Across four essay-style modules, you’ll analyze scenarios, reflect, and practice child-inclusive activities that align documentation, environments, and routines with the ELF—so daily practice becomes democratic, relationship-rich, and responsive to every child’s competencies.