The BECERID project is an Erasmus+ KA2 project, granted by the European Union from 31-12-2017 until 31-08-2020.
Good-quality Early Childhood Education and Care (henceforth ECEC) has a beneficial influence on children’s well-being, development, and later school career. This holds especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, it can be challenging to provide high quality ECEC in settings with many disadvantaged children. Furthermore, professionals struggle with diversity and multilingualism and they often lack the knowledge and skills needed to support children in developing intercultural competences. Although there is a growing research base on what works to target these issues, these insights are not yet widely adopted in practice.
This project will tackle these obstacles by launching a blog in each partner country, maintained by teacher educators and researchers, as an open learning platform for ECEC professionals and other teacher educators to increase their knowledge of research-based insights, their awareness of social inclusion, and their positive attitude towards research and innovation. Teacher educators and researchers will write the blogs bridging the gap between research and practice. They will make scientific research accessible and attractive for ECEC professionals. Further, they will reflect on current practices and innovations and stimulate ECEC teachers to contribute to the blog and adopt an inquisitive and innovative attitude in their own practice. Central topics will be ECEC for disadvantaged children, high quality, valuing diversity, and teaching children competences to deal with diversity.
Prior experience with a similar popular blog in Flanders revealed its strong potential to create an open learning community in the field of ECEC. Blog messages are shared on social media and discussed in Facebook groups with ECEC teachers.
Apart from these national blogs, we will set up a European blog in English with the same scope, and a slightly different target group (teacher educators, researchers, policy makers and professionals with a good command of English). National blogs will deliver blog messages for this European blog and translate blog messages from the European blog into the national language to increase the visibility of ongoing research and innovation in the European context. This European blog will be helpful to reach the field of ECEC in other European countries, and to serve as an inspiring example for other levels of education.
This project will (1) strengthen ECEC professionals’ and teacher educators’ research-based insights in the central topics of the project, (2) increase awareness of social inclusion, (3) increase a positive attitude towards research and innovation, and (4) strengthen the open learning community of ECEC teacher educators, professionals, researchers and policy makers.