Education

Trends in Early Childhood Education: A Chat with Michelle Erridge

Tanya Dunne, Physiotherapist & Educator  — October 2023 

The Okanagan College (n.d.) website states that the Early Childhood Education program “prepares students to work with young children in a variety of inclusive early childhood environments” (Program description, para 1). During our conversation Michelle explained how the understanding and approach to learning in childhood has changed over the course of her career in ECE. In her training and early career, ECE was heavily influenced by developmental psychology which describes children’s learning in developmental stages. Today, child development is seen through a lens that respects and values the diverse sociocultural contexts in which children learn. 

This shift has brought changes to the pedagogy used by early childhood educators in the classroom. Educators are encouraged to adopt an inquiry stance where they focus on listening and co-learning with children. Michelle provides more detail and resources on this topic in her September 16, 2023 blog post titled “What Stories Lay Within This Representation”.

Within her field of adult education, particularly as it pertains to the ECE program for which she is an instructor, Michelle highlighted the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in the classroom. The cry for the expansion of childcare spaces within the province has led ECE training institutions such as Okanagan College to increase the number of seats in their programs (McIntyre, 2022) and to be more welcoming to international applicants. The need to fill these extra seats to meet the community’s need for childcare spaces has created classrooms of adult learners with very diverse backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and needs. Thus, increasing the challenge for ECE program educators to facilitate the learning for such a diverse group. A challenge that I am confident Michelle is capable of taking on with all of her past experience and the knowledge and skills she will gain through the Provincial Instructor Diploma Program (PIDP).