Early Childhood Development Intercultural Partnerships

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NEW TITLE! Supporting Indigenous Children’s Development: Community-University Partnerships This book challenges and offers an alternative to the imposition of best practices on communities by outside specialists. It tells the story of an unexpected partnership initiated by an Aboriginal tribal council with the University of Victoria’s School of Child and Youth Care. The partnership has produced a new approach to professional education, in which community leaders are co-constructors of the curriculum and implementation proceeded only if both parties are present and engaged. Word of this “generative curriculum” has spread to numerous Aboriginal communities and now over sixty communities have participated in the First Nations Partnerships Program. Jessica Ball and Alan Pence show how this innovative program has strengthened community capacity to design, deliver, and evaluate culturally appropriate programs to support young children’s development. The authors: Jessica Ball and Alan Pence are professors in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria. For more information on how to order, please go to the UBC Press website by clicking here. Investments to strengthen Indigenous capacity to introduce and operate programs and services for young children are a priority in many countries. In Canada, Aboriginal capacity building efforts are yielding some increase in the numbers of First Nations, Inuit and Metis adults qualified in the fields of early childhood education, supported child development for children with special needs, youth outreach, and family support. There remains a critical shortage of Aboriginal community members with training to participate in health, education, infant development, and early language programs, and a critical shortage of accredited, in-country training programs that are effective in recruiting, retaining, and graduating Aboriginal trainees. Successful capacity building initiatives demonstrate the need for extraordinary ingenuity, flexibility, deployment of resources, and persistence in the manner in which training is delivered and the content of training curricula. Most importantly, education and training must be shown to address community-identified goals for development, harness and build upon local resources, and incorporate Indigenous knowledge in order to yield sustainable capacity to meet local needs.

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