What is culture? How do I feel when I interact with someone from a different culture? How can a teacher in early childhood education institutions better manage cultural differences?
These were some of the questions that the partners of the BODI project set off to answer to at the joint staff training event held in Paris, France, between February 15th-19th, 2016 to acquire the methodology of critical incidents, developed by social psychologist Margalit Cohen-Emerique, and overarching approach of the project.
“BODI – Cultural diversity, body, gender, health in early childhood education” is a two-year project co-funded by the Erasmus + Programme through the French Erasmus + National Agency. The project aims to contribute to the development of teachers’ competences for an understanding of cultural differences in early childhood education, for the involvement of parents also with different cultural background, as well as to the improvement of schools’ capacity to address cultural diversity for the better inclusion of children and parents in our intercultural society.
The partners of the project, Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (Cyprus), Kindervilla (Austria), La Xixa Teatre (Spain) and CESIE (Italy), are coordinated by Elan Interculturel (France) in their efforts to approach intercultural interactions in early childhood education by applying the methodology of critical incidents.
BODI will develop a set of readers and materials for the benefit of kindergarten teachers in the project countries and beyond. The first intellectual output, the reader of school practices on cultural diversity, will be available in a few months and will compare the way cultural diversity is taught and dealt with in a sample of schools from France, Italy, Cyprus, Austria and Spain and from an additional set of four countries from Europe and the world.
Moreover, the project will produce a reader of best practices for parent inclusion at school, and a handbook and toolbox of practical activities to carry out with children.
Another project output is the reader of cultural diversity, tackling real-life intercultural situations (critical incidents) that teachers in the project countries have had to face in their professional life. The material feeding the reader will be collected during a workshop aiming to transfer the methodology of critical incidents to teachers in each of the countries. In Palermo, the workshop will be organised by CESIE around mid-April 2016 and the application process to participate will open soon – watch this space!
The intellectual outputs produced by BODI will then be adapted to an e-training course for teachers of early childhood education, hosted by the BODI platform which will be soon available. The official launch of the free e-training course will be held at an international conference and training event in Barcelona, Spain in July 2017.
CESIE is currently recruiting teachers of early childhood institutions in Palermo to evaluate the project outputs throughout the BODI lifecycle.
For more info, or to show your interest in taking part in the Palermo workshop and/or in the evaluation of the BODI outputs, please contact school@cesie.org.
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
