Implementation of the Positive Early Childhood Education Curriculum for students with migration experience – the assumptions and directions of action

Abstract

Migration puts children in a difficult situation – it takes away their stability and constancy of everyday events and plucks them from a safe environment. The purpose of the article is to present the main assumptions and innovative ideas related to the author’s Positive Early Childhood Education Curriculum, as well as indicating the forms of work with students with migration trauma experience. The applied method was the educational project description. The extraordinary nature of the Curriculum is exhibited in the relocation of metatheoretical assumptions – from pedagogy of “lack” to pedagogy of “growth”. Therefore, it is recommended that the child’s well-being should be nurtured (M. Seligman, A. Antonovsky) alongside the development of intercultural proximity and “soft competences”, which are of importance for students with trauma experiences. The Curriculum allows as well for acquiring teacher’s self-awareness. It has been indicated how to implement the Curriculum assumptions – positivity, optimality, balance, and prospectivity for students with various cultural and biographical backgrounds. Special attention is devoted to strengthening the resilience in students with migration experiences and to the directions of actions to enable them the emotional, socio-cultural, instrumental, material and procedural, systemic, environmental and preventive support.