Training-research-action project "Welcoming Diversity and parental involvement”.

Since 1998, ACEPP is trying out a new program to accompany the network’s childcare centres in “welcoming diversity”. It is the training-research-action project "Welcoming Diversity and parental involvement”.

With this program, our objective is to accompany childcare centres in order to help them evolve and facilitate Respect for Diversity. The development of this program was guided by the hypothesis according to which, for a childcare centre to evolve towards respecting diversity, it is necessary to act on all its levels (institution, parents’ and professionals’ representations, professional practices, financing etc.) and with all the actors involved (parents, professionals and the institutional partners). Therefore, an evolution of both the attitudes and the concrete functioning of the centre is pursued.

This plan of action is a research-action-training program. In addition to its benefits in terms of training, it has a "research" dimension : the childcare centres generate some thinking about respect for diversity and about the involvement of parents. This is capitalised and shared. This project is also centred on action: the childcare centres are invited to initiate actions, experimentations reinforcing respect for diversity and the parents’ participation.

This project is set up as a participatory process, starting from the analysis of each childcare centre’s issues by parents and professionals, then inviting them to engage in experimentation and finally to capitalise their shared thinking.

These principles are implemented in a plan of actions which includes :

• times of training on site (in each centre), with parents and caregivers, to carry out an inventory of the situation then to accompany the evolution towards the desired changes;
• times of grouped training on “welcoming diversity” grouping the childcare centres of a department;
• forums with the institutional partners to discuss about departmental policies and to communicate the thinking produced the by the childcare centres.

Contact:
emmanuelle.murcier@acepp.asso.fr
M.Clausier-Houberdon@wanadoo.fr