Many professional working with or for children know about the UNCRC and that children have rights but are not sure how rights can guide pedagogical practice with young children, especially early verbal children.
This pathway provides an opportunity to develop your critical thinking on the implementation of the UNCRC by exploring the relationship between children's rights, professional practice and children’s everyday experiences through concrete examples. By drawing on theory, and your own and other’s real-world examples, you will explore how a rights-based approach might impact on young children’s right to develop to their fullest potential.
Taking a praxeological approach to children’s rights, this pathway reflects on the professional’s actions and children’s daily experiences, making explicit power and values, in order to transform practice.
By examining the substantive rights of the child in the UNCRC and how to translate those rights into practice you will gain:
- Greater knowledge of children's rights theory directly relevant to ECEC
- The ability to articulate how the UNCRC can guide practice in early childhood settings
- A clear understanding of how children’s rights support wellbeing, relationships, freedom of expression, play and learning
- A strong vision and value base for rights-based practice from birth to eight
- Clarity about what and how to provide for context-specific, rights-respecting experiences
- Confidence in developing practice that is rights-respecting from birth
- The ability to analyse and interpret rights-based practice from a child perspective
Learning to use the Significant Events Approach to Children’s Rights will give you a tool to discover what rights, interests, priorities and concerns are important to young children themselves, based on evidence from observational data.