The Promotion of Participatory Processes in Nurseries as an Opportunity to Qualify the Educational Ecosystem

Abstract

The scientific community shared from a long time the belief that it’s important to promote a capacitive and participatory approach in the educational contexts of all types and levels. From early childhood, it seems strategic to design the contexts and the educational activities in order to guarantee everyone the opportunity to participate and grow on a personal and social level. In this regard, especially in a complex scenario such as the current one, it might be useful to involve families in the processes within the Services to contain any social inequalities that may emerge. Their involvement might also be effective for sharing and co-building knowledge and awareness. The paper deepens a research developed on 50 Nurseries of the Rome province. The interest was to understand the educational design strategies of each Service and the interaction and collaboration strategies that they used with families. The main results that emerged allows to highlight an overall good quality of the Services in terms of educational design and internal organization, as well as with respect to the strategies used to involve children in the educational activities. Instead, seem to be important to significantly strength the spaces dedicated to families’ participation, especially if the goal at the systemic level it’s to configure Nurseries as democratic educational contexts.