Welcome to the 8th episode of PedPod by EX-PED-LAB. In this episode, I had an online conversation with Marilyn Fleer, a Professor Emerita in early childhood education and development and leader of the Conceptual PlayLab at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia where she is also a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellow. Her research interests lie in the areas of early childhood science, engineering and technologies with particular attention on digital visual methodology framed through cultural-historical theory.

In this episode, when asked about pedagogical innovations, she responded:

I think that as a field of early childhood educators and researchers and community-based people working with young children, we've actually conceptualised it in different and new ways. And for me, what I draw out of what we have as a community is that our innovations around early childhood education have been fundamentally about thinking about children and their development in practices and thinking about it and progressing it in relation to evidence-informed ways. And this is something that I think has been very powerful.We know in the medical sciences, that there's always been evidence-based approaches. I think in early childhood, our innovation is that we have consistently and deeply over the last 20 years had early childhood educators who have come from that tradition actually do the research in practice as collaborators to inform and to develop our own evidence-informed ways of doing things. So rather than researchers coming in and telling us, what and how we should do things.

We've actually generated our own knowledge.
And to me, that's a really important part of innovation.

Happy listening!