Welcome to our 2018 ECE Summer Institute!

This Summer Institute will focus on the pedagogical possibilities related to the garden, as a place of teaching and learning with young children. The idea of a garden as a pedagogical context in early childhood education can be traced to Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten in the early 1800s. Gardens are valued as a context of teaching and learning and as a living co-teacher, from both Indigenous and international perspectives, and have pedagogical applications in relation to history, science, math, poetry, ecology, etc. We will explore garden-based learning with young children through practical, arts-based, and multi-sensory approaches. We will work with developing children’s and teachers’ empathy and community with the living world, and a sense of competence and well-being, with an awareness of gardens as natural habitats and sources of food, fibres, dreams and stories.

Overall, this Summer Institute will be of great interest to early childhood educators, classroom teachers, and other professionals involved in the education and care of young children.

This Summer Institute is part of a three-course sequence the Centre for Early Childhood Education and Research has developed for 2017, 2018, and 2019, consistent with the Faculty of Education value of “inform[ing] our research and practices by consideration of issues such as, inter alia, poverty, minority rights, inequality, and social justice.”

We are delighted to be here together, on the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the Musqueam people, in the spirit of learning, experimenting and enjoying this Summer Institute together!