Extension activity
Extension activity – Working with children with ASN
The content in Section 4.3 discussed the importance of gaining support from a wider community. This can be about making use of your local landscape, such as finding support from your library, using an outdoor space or requesting help from a social worker or a health specialist. You may need to work in partnership with a range of professionals, as well as with parents and an extended family.
Think of a child in your setting, or simply think about your setting. How is it connected to the local community? Are there people or organisations it would help to get to know? Other adults in your community may be aware of children and families in need of extra support who perhaps you aren’t aware of.
Draw a map with your setting, or a particular child, at the centre. Think about local charities, religious communities, shops, food banks, leisure centres, parks, libraries. Who is in your community and how are you working alongside them to support children and families in your care? If you understand and have a relationship with local services, you’ll be better placed to direct families to extra support.
You will not always know what to do. There may be times where you are uncertain of your role. Being uncertain is a common experience of working with young children and is something to be valued.
Read how early years professional and academic Elizabeth Henderson (2017, pp. 81–2) describes the experience of working with children with a range of ASN:
My encounters with Marcus, Rachel and Rashid stripped back my humanity to its core making me challenge my assumptions and my ‘un/conscious ideals around normality’ (Goodley, 2014, p. 85). Often I felt uncertain about what to do, how to help them and how to understand them, while experiencing my own frailties and anxieties about my in/competence. So I did what I do best and I watched, attuning myself to their world and listened daily. On a continuous basis they humbled me as I witnessed them trying to make sense of their world, my world, our world. Consequently, their gift was to make me a far better human being for, as I journeyed with them I watched in awe of their courage and tenacity to simply be in an ever hardening, excluding world. Slowly they revolutionised my world, from the margins, inside; they were my teachers.
Our job as early years practitioners is to listen and think, and be prepared to have our worlds challenged. Early years work at its best is hard work!