Literacy news

The Baby Room Project

29 Jul 2010

Canterbury Christ Church University has spent the last year investigating what goes on in baby rooms in nurseries. The Baby Room project, as it’s been named, has been working with a group of local practitioners to examine how they operate and practise in their baby rooms. The participants have come together for development sessions and had their in-room practice observed and filmed. A key feature of the project has been to provide opportunities for participants to look inwards at their own practice and outwards to find ideas, affirmations and evidence they can research and challenge.

The participants have also had access to a social networking site, set up specifically for baby room practitioners, where they can share thoughts and chat. The site, NING, was set up for participants but is now open to people who work in a daycare setting with babies.

The fact that people working in baby rooms feel overlooked and need professional development was an assumption investigators went into the project with and their findings have confirmed this. The project has also shown that it is important for practitioners in baby rooms to feel the enormous importance of the professional responsibility they hold.

For more information about the project, development day or social networking site email sacha.powell@canterbury.ac.uk. (To join the social networking site put NING in the subject line.)

The Baby Rooms project will be presenting its findings at the Talk To Your Baby conference on 18 October 2010. For information on attending the conference please see our conference registration page.

Also see the article about the project published in Nursery World on 1 September 2010, "Positive Relationships: Baby room - Who Cares?".

Tags: Early Years, Early years sector, Talk To Your Baby

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