Page 38 - Diversity in Action

Silva Bratož, Anja Pirih, Anita Sila, and Mojca Žefran

When teachers listen to and engage with children’s ideas, they are practis-
ingparticipatorypedagogies(Carey-Jenkins,2018),whichareteachingmeth-
ods that support children’s rights and agency in the classroom by encourag-
ingthemtoexpressandactontheirownideas,perspectives,andknowledge.
Shier (2001) emphasises the importance of listening to children’s voices and
supporting their views, including those of children who may not yet speak.
These children can communicate through body language, non-verbal cues,
pictures, or signs to express their thoughts.
Forenhancingchildren’sparticipation,wemayfollowtheframeworkofde-
veloping participatory practices proposed by Kangas (2016), which consists
of four core elements:

1. The starting point of developing children’s participation is to create
conditions and an environment which enables participation.
2. In the second core-element, teachers observe and gather information
from children’s skills and interests and learn to understand the child’s
perspective.
3. In the third core element, the teacher and children join in shared expe-
riences. The teacher uses the information from children to support chil-
dren to participate.Thisrequiresprofessionalunderstandingofmaking
interpretationsanddrawingconclusionsfromtheinformationreceived
from children.
4. In the last core-element, teachers adopt an interest in developing par-
ticipatory activities in everyday life in the early childhood education
settings.

The activities in this model are intentionally designed to promote chil-
dren’s participation and interaction with the teacher. For instance, teachers
are encouraged to explore new destinations by train with the children, in-
volving them in discussions about the journey and its different countries.
Children and teachers collaboratively create new activities and develop new
rhymes in various languages, with a particular focus on the additional lan-
guages the children bring to the group. As de Sousa (2019) points out, teach-
ers can incorporate the children’s home languages into the preschool envi-
ronment, even if they do not speak them directly, as children can communi-
cate through other means, such as visual aids or body language. Additionally,
the internet provides many useful resources and tools that teachers can use
to integrate languages into the classroom and interact with the children. Fur-
thermore, an important connection with family members can be established

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