What We Do and How We Work

In all we do, we aspire to fulfill the promise of our vision, mission, values, and goals by pursuing our signature programs through four areas of focus aligned with the university’s land-grant heritage—research, practice, policy, and outreach. From the outset, we understood our role in bringing people together to transform early childhood care and education. We know that fulfilling our mission is dependent on collaborating with others and being a catalyst that brings about broad systemic changes. In the early years of the Institute, this aspiration was constrained by a tendency to view our work in conventional academic terms—as a collection of related but ultimately separate endeavors. Not only did we struggle internally to integrate our work across our four focus areas, but the fragmentation of the early childhood field—across diverse academic disciplines, early care and education settings, policy and economic infrastructures, and cultural and community contexts—was evident in the systems of early care and education we were working with at local, state, and national levels.

Over time and with experience, we learned collectively to adopt more integrative and systems-based approaches to our work. Our commitment to working this way is rooted in the understanding that for young children to grow and thrive and families and communities to prosper, it is necessary to attend to the multiplicity of connections among them. We seek to accomplish this by nurturing relationships, partnerships, and collaborations across multiple, diverse sectors—including early care and education, K–12, higher education, public policymakers, state regulatory agencies, businesses, philanthropic organizations, and families in communities across the urban to rural continuum.

Our goal is to be collaborative, cooperative, open, and responsive to one another and those outside of the Institute. We understand that individually our expertise has limits. Over our first decade, we learned to rely on colleagues across the university and nation, as well as those in our partner organizations, including the children, families, early childhood professionals, schools, and communities we engage with who bring their own strengths, challenges, experiences, and expertise to the work. We are focused on strengthening, expanding, and nurturing relationships—through consulting, coaching, facilitating professional learning, monitoring and assessing progress, jointly discovering opportunities for continuous improvement, and enlisting new thought partners from communities across the state who continue to teach us how to look at issues in new ways.69-71

We believe that it is only through collective efforts of this kind that we can hope to successfully confront the challenges we have committed ourselves to. Our commitment to working this way is reflected in how we approach research, practice, policy, and outreach.