4.2 Summary of Good and Risky Practices

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Table 4.2 summarizes good and risky practices and provides some implementation verification questions for monitoring the process.

Table 4.2 Summary of Good and Risky Practices

Principle Good practices and decisions that strengthen Risky practices and decisions that weaken Guiding questions

Overall Safety

Nontoxic habitats and healthy practices make all feel safe. • Have access to clean water. • Have handwashing systems. • Implement hygienic practices. • Use natural light, air flow, gardening, and organic farming to overcome noise, temperature, and poor air quality. • Raise safety awareness by having, sharing, and practicing safety protocols for emergencies. • Involve community in safety maintenance through observation turns, mapping violence, and building security in settings.

Pedagogical Organization

Various learning centers and interest spots build knowledge and engage children in meaning-making. • Use all spaces and objects as learning drivers to foster a specific learning experience or outcome. • Organize learning centers and zones that all children can understand and access. • Ensure learning centers and areas have clear tasks and experiences for small-group or individual work. • ECE settings without clean water services and sanitation facilities. • ECE spaces without airflow, natural light, and noise dampers. • ECE setting next to industries that manage hazardous or toxic elements. • Are there minimum safety and hygiene requirements for

ECE programs? • Are there mechanisms to ensure compliance with safety and minimum hygienic requirements? • Is there public funding for maintenance?

• Decorate walls and spaces with stereotyped images and/or branded products. • Place materials on the perimeter of the room walls, leaving the center empty. • Overcrowd spaces with different resources and materials. • Store materials out of children’s reach, just for adults’ access and use. • Is the ECE workforce trained to prepare and organize the environment pedagogically? • Does the government offer guidelines, programs, or professional development to help ECE staff implement pedagogically intentional spaces?

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Table 4.2 (continued)

Principle Good practices and decisions that strengthen Risky practices and decisions that weaken Guiding questions

Spatial Flexibility

Multipurpose spaces respond to emergent teaching-learning interests and needs. • Continually rotate and change all materials and resources to maintain children’s wonder and raise new interests and projects. • Have open-ended materials and spaces that teachers and children can easily adapt for different purposes. • Use simple objects and spaces as dividers to break the whole space into different learning places, pathways, and flows. • Use signposts and points of interest to design pathways and sightlines that connect the indoor and outdoor learning experiences. • Encourage teachers and children to explore and try out flexible uses of space and time, for example by moving meal and self-care routines to outdoor spaces. • Have teachers plan and synchronize the flexible use of space, based on children’s interests. • Enjoy spatial flexibility with children and families. • Overcrowd classrooms with pedagogical resources and materials. • Punish or disparage children’s and teachers’ efforts to try out spatial flexibility. • Impose a single layout for classrooms and common areas. • Do infrastructure regulations or guidelines promote the flexible use of spaces? • Do ECE programs have both indoor and outdoor spaces? • Is there public and social understanding of the importance of the use of outdoor spaces? • Is the ECE workforce trained to be flexible in the use of spaces and adaptation to children’s needs?

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Table 4.2 (continued)

Principle Good practices and decisions that strengthen Risky practices and decisions that weaken Guiding questions

Empowerment and Authorship

Children and educators actively cocreate learning places that express their knowledge and meaning-making. • Give children the opportunity to personalize classroom spaces, rearranging furniture and materials according to new ideas and projects. • Include photographs and children’s creations that reflect their personal interests and experiences in learning centers and common areas to make them a collective matter. • Talk about inhabiting environments with children, and deliberate with them better ways of doing so. • Share responsibility for organizing indoor and outdoor spaces with children and families by cocreating new places for learning and living together. • Communicate on walls, furniture, and surfaces the ideas, projects, and experiences that teachers and children are developing. • Listen to children’s ideas, interests, and practices to extend them in the design of new spaces. • Define the classroom layout permanently. • Compel the use of the same materials, resources, and spaces for all children within determined learning experiences. • Make educators and managers alone decide how to design learning spaces. • Make children organize, clean up, or rearrange the environment by using competition or awards. • Do the curriculum and other policy instruments allow adaptation for children’s ideas and interests? • Is the ECE workforce trained to identify and respond to children’s interests and needs? • Is there a shared understanding of the central role of children in cocreating their learning process?

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Table 4.2 (continued)

Principle Good practices and decisions that strengthen Risky practices and decisions that weaken Guiding questions

Child-Centered Design

Space size, child-adult ratios, and scaled materials make the environment cozy, culturally significant, and reachable for all children. • Provide a cozy, homey environment with meaningful objects that capture children’s everyday lives. • Use natural resources and authentic cultural objects to create multisensory landscapes (sounds, fragrances, textures, lights, and flavors). • Make material handy for children, and ensure they can reach and have access to the different materials and learning resources. • Permanently renovate the resources that are available in learning centers with children’s and the community’s treasured items. • Overcrowd spaces and surfaces with learning aids and pedagogical resources. • Use artificial and stereotyped materials that underestimate relevant cultural objects and practices. • Forbid children from bringing personal meaningful objects to school (toys, favorite blanket, or loved pillow). • Let resources deteriorate and lose the power to motivate and amaze children. • Prefer perfectly adult-organized spaces over imperfectly child-organized places. • Store learning resources in high, unreachable shelves or in hermetically sealed containers. • Are there minimum requirements (standards) for child-adult ratio and group size for ECE programs? • Are there minimum requirements (standards) for indoor and outdoor spaces for ECE programs? • Are there mechanisms to ensure compliance with structural quality requirements? • Is there financial support for ECE programs to comply with requirements or standards? • Is the ECE workforce trained to make child-centered design decisions?

Source: Original table for this publication. Note: ECE = early childhood education.