Innovation as a partecipatory process of renewing educational and professional development practices. Voices of ECEC practitioners in two Italian site

This paper is part of the project Curriculum Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European Education and Care (CARE) funded by the European Union within the Seventh Framework Programme. The study is part of WP3 professional Development: Impact and Innovation. Within this project, three case studies of exemplary innovative approaches to ECEC professional development were conducted in three EU countries. In this presentation we will present findings from the Italian case study conducted in Milan and Reggio Emilia, two innovative exemplary approaches to professional development within ECEC-city systems. Both cases are revelatory examples of innovation in contemporary Italy because they have some of the common features drawn from the literature review on innovative approaches to professional development (e.g. systemic, sustainable, networking). Our review suggests that although there is an increasing consensus regarding the need to adopt most promising forms of innovation to improve the professionalism of the ECEC practitioners (Core, 2011, Oberhuemer, Schreyer & Neuman, 2010), so far few study in the field have described “the mechanisms responsible for or influencing change” within these innovative processes (Sheridan, 2007, p.378). It is not always clear what innovation means in the field of ECE, how it works, how it is possible to study its impact and how practitioners perceive their changes and improvements. This is particularly true in the ECE field where multiple stakeholders are involved in the decision making process at several levels: policy makers, practitioners, children, families, communities (Vandenbroeck, 2012). Aims of our study include: describing how the innovative framework developed on a large/macro level, which is typical of the two selected sites, is transferred and further implemented on a local/micro level; exploring which types of professional development are effective in improving ECEC quality; studying how practitioners perceive and interpret the impact of innovation on their educational practices and on ECEC quality. Within the case study method (Yin, 2005), we adopted qualitative techniques to gather new data (interviews, focus groups) and to analyze existing data (documents, observations, videos). We conducted semi-structured interviews with ECEC-practitioners, stakeholders and pedagogical coordinators, and we combined these interviews with observations of dynamic processes of innovation at a micro level. Data analyses procedures followed the content analyses method. Main results regard: the need to strengthen in-service training initiatives by encouraging the active involvement of practitioners at the all different level of innovation (macro/meso/micro); the importance to connect theory and practice in order to improve the impact of professional development initiatives; the potentials of innovative methods (including ICT) to sustain critical thinking, and habits of "reflection in action" well connected to processes of changes and renewing practices; the role of pedagogical coordinators as ‘multipliers’ or engine of innovation. In the presentation we will discuss our national findings, within a broader Europen perspective in Early Chidhood Education