The Culturally Responsive Calendar is a visual reminder to reflect on how you are embedding cultural responsiveness as a practice in your room and service while simply capturing your planning and reflections to share with families, update your Quality Improvement Plan, and show evidence for Assessment and Rating. It promotes a continuous cycle of planning and reflection for the year ahead.
Quality area 1 of the Australian National Quality Standard (NQS) focuses on educational program and practice. Standard 1.1 ensures your program is guided by an Approved Learning Framework (ALF) to promote learning in relation to children’s identity and connection with community. Programs should be child-centred and include children’s culture as the foundation.
Quality areas 5 and 6 promote responsive and respectful relationships with children, families, and the community, that can only be achieved when your relationships are built through meaningful interactions and active involvement that includes celebrating expertise, culture, values, and beliefs.
A recent review of Approved Learning Frameworks has highlighted changes to strengthen the connection between Learning Frameworks and the National Quality Standard in Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing. The review aims to increase the recognition of the role of early learning services including OSHC in advancing reconciliation. These changes include, strengthening Indigenous “perspectives throughout the frameworks including the vision, principles, practices, and outcomes” and moving from cultural competence to cultural responsiveness.
Combing cultural responsiveness with effective pedagogies requires considering;
- Language acquisition
- Continuity of learning
- Relationships and partnerships with professionals, and
- Family and community learning environments
* considerations and terms of reference included in Discussion Paper: 2021 National Quality Framework Approved Learning Frameworks Update, August 2021
Our Culturally Responsive Year Calendar links with: - LO1: Children have a strong sense of identity
- 1.1 Children feel safe, secure, and supported
- 1.2 Children develop their emerging autonomy, inter-dependence, resilience and agency
- 1.3 Children develop knowledgeable, confident self identities and a positive sense of self-worth
- LO2: Children are connected with and contribute to their world
- 2.1 Children develop a sense of connectedness to groups and communities and an understanding of the reciprocal rights and responsibilities as active and informed citizens
- 2.2 Children respond to diversity with respect
- 2.3 Children become aware of fairness
- 2.4 Children become socially responsible and show respect for the environment
- LO3: Children have a strong sense of wellbeing
- 3.1 Children become strong in their social, emotional and mental wellbeing
- 3.2 Children become strong in their physical learning and wellbeing
- 3.3 Children are aware of and develop strategies to support their own mental and physical health and personal safety
- LO4: Children are confident and involved learners
- 4.1 Children develop a growth mindset and learning dispositions such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination, and reflexivity
- 4.2 Children develop a range of skills and processes such as problem solving, inquiry, experimentation, hypothesising, researching, and investigating
- 4.3 Children transfer and adapt what they have learned from one context to another
- LO5: Children are effective communicators
- 5.1 Children interact verbally and non-verbally with others for a range of purposes
- 5.2 Children engage with a range of texts and gain meaning from those texts
- 5.3 Children express ideas and make meaning using a range of media
- 5.4 Children begin to understand how symbols and pattern systems work
Considers Dewey, Bronfenbrenner, and Gardner in its design, Opportunity to plan experiences that cover physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and language experiences, which are also linked to milestones and Framework outcomes. Links with the three exceeding themes; Embedded in Service Operations, Informed by Critical Reflection, and Shaped by Meaningful Engagement with Families and Community. Applies the National Quality Standards, Our Culturally Responsive Year Calendar covers: - 1.1.1 Approved Learning Framework
- 1.1.2 Child-centred
- 1.2.1 Intentional teaching
- 1.2.2 Responsive teaching and scaffolding
- 1.3.1 Assessment and planning cycle
- 1.3.3 Information for families
- 6.1.2 Parents views are respected
- 6.1.3 Community engagement
Download our Compliance Information Factsheet (next tab) designed to support you in identifying, reflecting on, and documenting how your service operations and practices are linked to frameworks, NQS, theorists, developmental milestones, and exceeding themes.