Network Objectives
Earlyarts focusses on five core areas
Professional Development - to build the confidence, skills and ideas for exploring powerful creative learning environments in your organisation, and embedding a creative culture within mainstream early years provision.
Knowledge Networking - to share ideas, collate action research and case studies, and inspire great creative practice across the sectors.
Research and Evaluation - to better understand the characteristics of successful learning environments and provide a rigorous evidence base of research to raise aspiration, develop practice and influence policy.
Advocacy - to promote key messages about the positive impacts of creativity on children’s lives at the highest levels and bring it into the mainstream.
Brokership - to provide the tools and connections for sustainable partnerships that support children’s ideas and learning needs, and achieve a much higher quality, breadth and depth of practice across the field.
The network is a learning community that...
• Provides a supportive and inclusive community committed to operating with openness, respect, trust, collegiality, motivation and responsibility. It actively engages in multi-agency dialogues which build shared visions, common languages and new understandings outside of our immediate spheres of reference.
• Seeks creative opportunities for working together through collaborative enquiry, insightful leadership, project and information exchange, training, mentoring and brokering connections between creative, social care and early years professionals.
• Provides a secure ‘critical friend' through which members can test new ideas and thinking, explore what the next series of questions should be to enhance our professional working environments, understand the starting points for children's creative thinking, encounter the real meaning behind children's ideas, embed a culture of playful learning, increase a critical awareness of who our children are and what they need and to uncover the next steps in helping to build positive relationships between children and the world around them.
• Challenges conventional thinking or institutionalised systems, policies and practices that do not support children's individual learning journeys or take responsibility for building safe spaces for them to explore their identities, both now and in preparing them to deal with the future.
• Collates reflections, evaluations, enquiries and research in order to build a strong evidence base and achieve a recognised legitimacy with which to influence policy and practice.
• Explores a range of methodological, theoretical and pedagogical influences around creative early learning environments which serve to generate ongoing thinking and to inspire, enlighten, challenge, improve and guide our professional practices.
• Advocates amongst professionals, academics, practitioners and policy makers, the long term impact of creative practice on children's social, physical, mental, spiritual, cognitive, creative, and cultural health, supported through evidence from our collated research.
• Enables strong advocates, through the powerhouse of the network, to promote the value and impact of arts and creative practices on children's development. It invites deeper connections (nationally and internationally) between professionals who share these values, expands the evidence base, and builds a critical mass of demand for this exploratory work.
• Seeks a more coherent and central positioning of creative early years practice in training, curricular and policy contexts by building strong relationships with higher education stakeholders, arts, culture, education, social care, health and child care policy makers, intercepts and influences mainstream strategic initiatives where possible, and retains a currency of strategic opportunities to bring greater visibility to this work.