This report describes the Centre of Innovation (COI) research project carried out by the teacher-researchers of Citizens Preschool and Nursery, Dunedin between 2005 to 2007. This COI was part of the second round of funded centres, where the focus area for research was how collaborative relationships impact on children’s learning and development.
The innovation described in this report is the collaboration of early childhood teachers with a Family Whānau Support Worker within an early childhood centre to support families and whānau. Over the three years the teachers, with the support of the research associates from the University of Otago, undertook action research to investigate how best to support families who attended their centre.
Citizens Preschool and Nursery is a community based early childhood centre in South Dunedin. Since 2004 a step toward a ‘one-stop-shop’ model has been established within the early childhood community at Citizens Preschool and Nursery with the appointment of a Family Whānau Support Worker (a Social Worker role) sited within the early childhood complex. Citizens Preschool and Nursery has two centres (a Preschool and a Nursery) on the same site and is managed by Dunedin’s Methodist Mission. The focus for the Centre of Innovation research was designed to investigate the wider aspects of support for families and children that had been established at Citizens Preschool and Nursery, examining how the Family Whānau Support Worker and the teachers made a difference in the lives of the families attached to the Nursery centre. The final research question has been: What counts as support for families from a childcare centre that actively works with parents and children?
Key Results
Three key themes arose from the research data, reflections, and analysis of the role of the Family Whānau Support Worker for supporting families at Citizens. These themes were called: Being there and being seen; Making time to talk; and Building bridges. Together these three themes demonstrate both the philosophies and the practices that provided successful practice examples for the work of a Family Whānau Support Worker in the early childhood setting. From the investigations with both the teachers and the Family Whānau Support Worker, the findings have been grouped under three key themes: It’s the little things that count, To know you better and for you to know me better, and You don’t know if you don’t ask.