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