"Educators are encouraged to get to know a child’s family by regularly holding informal conversations with them, visiting their homes, and approaching their relationship as a personal connection instead of a client-provider one."
Very compelling! The teachers I know personally would love to do this but are so overwhelmed. What are the class sizes here? What's the teacher student ratio that makes this possible?
That's a great question, we should've included that in the piece. Will make a note to add it. The minimum legal ratio is 1:5 for children under two, and 1:10 for children over two. The total can't exceed 4:30. The typical group size seems to be around 10-20 kids. Those numbers aren't markedly different from some of the ones we see in European settings, so the implication of community members on top of ECE staff might be what's helping implement the curriculum here. But I'm not entirely sure, will investigate further!
Thank you! A related question is what the built environment looks like in the community. I am in an American suburban environment that is 100% car dependent. Even neighbors who go to the same school don't necessarily have pedestrian access to each other. Needing to set up formal visits at individual children's homes is quite the time drain, there are few opportunities for informal meetups when there's a car pickup line at exactly dismissal time every day. I appreciate you indulging my curiosity!
That's an important point too, and a crucial one for replicability. New Zealand has a much smaller population (5.3 million), but it seems quite spread out so it would be interesting to know how exactly teachers manage this. We did reach out to a few to ask them about their daily experience of implementing Te Whāriki, but weren't able to get to the end of the process. Will keep in mind for next time!
"Educators are encouraged to get to know a child’s family by regularly holding informal conversations with them, visiting their homes, and approaching their relationship as a personal connection instead of a client-provider one."
Very compelling! The teachers I know personally would love to do this but are so overwhelmed. What are the class sizes here? What's the teacher student ratio that makes this possible?
That's a great question, we should've included that in the piece. Will make a note to add it. The minimum legal ratio is 1:5 for children under two, and 1:10 for children over two. The total can't exceed 4:30. The typical group size seems to be around 10-20 kids. Those numbers aren't markedly different from some of the ones we see in European settings, so the implication of community members on top of ECE staff might be what's helping implement the curriculum here. But I'm not entirely sure, will investigate further!
Thank you! A related question is what the built environment looks like in the community. I am in an American suburban environment that is 100% car dependent. Even neighbors who go to the same school don't necessarily have pedestrian access to each other. Needing to set up formal visits at individual children's homes is quite the time drain, there are few opportunities for informal meetups when there's a car pickup line at exactly dismissal time every day. I appreciate you indulging my curiosity!
That's an important point too, and a crucial one for replicability. New Zealand has a much smaller population (5.3 million), but it seems quite spread out so it would be interesting to know how exactly teachers manage this. We did reach out to a few to ask them about their daily experience of implementing Te Whāriki, but weren't able to get to the end of the process. Will keep in mind for next time!