The RESPECT Project : Participants

Eleven early childhood staff from seven long day care services in the City of Melbourne participated in RESPECT. The participants had diverse cultural and educational backgrounds and diverse experience in early childhood; and their centres were either council-run, work-based or community-based. The participants formed ‘an action learning circle’, working together through a guided process based on their own interests and ideas. Action learning is a form of professional development that grew out of action research (see, e.g., Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988; Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998; MacNaughton, 2001a). It is an especially effective form of professional development, because it starts from participants’ current issues and concerns and builds on their existing strengths and knowledge. At the heart of action learning is the practice of critical reflection, i.e. questioning your taken-for-granted practices and their effects and considering alternative ways to speak and act that imply changes in your view of yourself and of others. Action learning circles can challenge and transform how participants understand and experience their circumstances and act within them. Participants reflect critically on their current practices and on relevant current research and plan changes in their practice informed by their reflections. They enact those changes, then reflect on the effects of the changes in what becomes another cycle of action learning.