For the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2, quality is central: “By 2030 ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education…”
SDG 4.2 is recent (2016), but some scholars have explored issues of quality Early Childhood Education, Care and Development (ECCE/ECD) for decades. One such exploration is the Investigating Quality (IQ) project that initiated a fundamental re-formation of how quality in early childhood care and education is understood and operationalized at a provincial/state (or country) level. This website provides an overview of the multiple-systems approach taken by the IQ project and successes and challenges to date.
Background
Although the specific origin of the Investigating Quality (IQ) project was a request received from the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) of the British Columbia, Canada government in January 2005, the experiences and thoughts that most influenced its approach were evident by 1992, at a by-invitation scholarly workshop entitled ‘Quality Child Care in International Perspective’ which was held in Seville, Spain. As an invitee, I (Pence) opened my presentation entitled ‘Quality Care: Thoughts on R/rulers’ with: “I am interested in not only the small ‘r’ ruler, or how we attempt to measure quality, but also the capital ‘R’ Ruler, or who defines what it is that will be measured.”
Those thoughts subsequently influenced the development of an edited volume that Peter Moss and I co-edited and published in 1994, Valuing Quality in Early Childhood Services. That volume began with: “The starting point for this book is that ‘quality’ in early childhood services is a relative concept, not an objective reality”.
Valuing Quality was followed by the co-authored volume Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care, (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 1999) which, given its 3 editions and translation into 14 languages, has tapped into a broad set of interests, and concerns, regarding how ‘quality’ and child care are understood and addressed globally.
Launching IQ
Given this background, the 2005 invitation to explore and seek to operationalize these ideas with a provincial-level government was an opportunity not to be missed. For details about the IQ strategy and activities undertaken to re-form British Columbia’s approach to ECCE. For a list of the publications that either influenced or describe aspects of the IQ, click here.
Overview
The Investigating Quality (IQ) initiative began with a January 19, 2005 email received by Alan Pence at the University of Victoria from the Director for ECD and Child Care Policy of the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), Government of British Columbia, Canada. In communications that followed it became clear this contact was an invitation by the Ministry to “partner” with them on a substantial research and development project focused on “Child Care Quality”. Given the scope and possibilities of the project (and Pence’s on-going commitments regarding ECD in Africa and with Indigenous communities) Pence asked departmental colleague Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw to join him as Co-Director.
Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw shared a commitment to the kind of ‘out of the box’ thinking that had been addressed in both Valuing Quality (Moss & Pence, 1994) and the increasingly influential Beyond Quality volume (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 1999). The contact by the B.C. Ministry in 2005 provided an opportunity to not only critically examine ‘quality’, but also work to operationalize a re-formed, innovative approach to ECCE/child care in the province. Such an implementation would require engagement with multiple sectors and systems: governmental, academic, services provision, professional association, families and children, to name several key ‘partners’.
Those ‘investigations’ have, fourteen years later, taken us many miles down a road of discovery and development, with an increasingly broad range of partners: individual, institutional and provincial. The initial ‘storyline’ pursued by Pence, Pacini-Ketchabaw and MCFD, has been joined by numerous other stories, authored by a growing number of scholars, practitioners, advocates and leaders. This website provides many of those, and an edited volume is under development.
There are two principal sections of this IQ site, with sub-section texts available through links:
- An overview of the IQ
B. A vision of change – change to what?
C. Sponsoring ECCE international innovators’ engagement with key participants across BC systems
D. Revising BC’s approach to ECCE through a new Early Learning Framework (ELF)
E. Designing and delivery an ELF Implementation Project
F. Establishing a Community Early Learning and Child Care Facilitators Program
G. A spin-off of the IQ: ‘Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education’
2. Publications that either stimulated the initial IQ work, or have arisen from the work or extensions of the IQ initiative