Empowering early childhood educators

Who Sibylle Seidler, Managing Director of Little Scientists Australia

What Child-led, play-based exploration in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is at the heart of Little Scientists Australia’s philosophy. Its hands-on professional development ensures that early childhood educators can proficiently support children in discovering scientific phenomena. With a national network of skilled facilitators, the program aims to make inquiry-based learning accessible to all children.

Finalist in the 2021 Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources Eureka Prize for STEM Inclusion

Early childhood qualifications don’t typically feature STEM units of study. How do your programs build up the confidence and abilities of educators when it comes to STEM?

In our workshops, we really reignite the educators’ curiosity and transport them back to the days when they were children and explored the world around them, open-mouthed. Our aim is to let educators — and children — explore and ponder the world, alongside each other, with children leading the explorations and educators being their learning coaches.

Little Scientists promotes inquiry-based activities in everyday play. Can you tell us a bit about this philosophy?

At Little Scientists, we believe that to discover the joy of STEM, children need to be given the opportunity to explore the world in a nurturing and playful setting that boosts their natural eagerness to learn.

The open-endedness of our workshops promotes inclusion for all children, as the idea we share with educators is that they should allow children a combination of free and prompted exploration. This means that educators can be guided by children and their development stage — observing what comes from the free exploration lets them build on those experiences through prompted exploration.

By having the freedom to explore in their own style, children experience success moments and feel valued for their efforts and learning. For educators, the learning lies in the experience of working both alone and with others. They can pass this lesson on to children, by encouraging them to share their new knowledge and be aware of the greater learning of acquiring knowledge with others.

Little Scientists’ workshops are also designed to remind educators to connect children to the natural world, and facilitate exploration and discovery of their environment and the effect they can have on it. As part of this, we promote use of recycled equipment and the importance of showing respect for the natural world.

Your workshops cover topics like acoustics, chemical reactions and water. How are topics selected?

We look at topics that come up in conversations with early childhood educators and those that young children aged three to six are especially interested in. And we always find topics that interest both the Little Scientists team and educators — we often tackle those in our online workshops, Inspire STEM, and in our monthly webinar series, STEM Hour.

What do you enjoy most about your work?

From the moment I stepped into the role, I have loved that it has such a collaborative character. We get to work with people from all walks of life across Australia, and beyond. Knowing that upskilling our amazing early childhood educators across the country will enhance their ability to identify STEM in the everyday, alongside our next generation of curious Australian children — that is just amazing!

At Little Scientists Australia, we work with wonderful local network partners and their communities, who are all part of our success. And you know what brings the biggest smiles? When I get a phone call at the end of a long working week and on the other end is one of our early childhood educators, who breathlessly wants to share a special Eureka moment that they and the children in their care just had. That just makes my day!

What are some of the larger impacts you hope to see from Little Scientists’ programs in the future?

First, we want early childhood educators to recognise that they are already “doing so much STEM” in their daily practice — so our task is to train their STEM muscles and allow them to go and flex them!

We also want early childhood recognised as the foundation for learning, not just STEM learning. Early childhood educators and teachers are doing an amazing job across the country — centres have remained open, and supported families and children throughout the coronavirus pandemic. It’s important to us that early childhood educators are given the recognition they deserve!

Our overarching goal is to enable access to high quality education for all children from an early age and to ensure the competitiveness of Australia’s workforce in the future.

What’s on the horizon for Little Scientists?

We are constantly seeking to improve our workshop offerings and are always looking for new ways to engage our audience. Thus, we are reviewing and expanding our online professional development range as well as hopefully getting back to delivering face-to-face workshops across all states and territories, in 2022. Online delivery gives us a lot of connectivity, but it cannot replace the excitement and wonder that comes with being in a room full of educators during one of our workshops.

2022 is also a big year for us as we will run our National Little Scientists Early STEM Award for the third time. This is the only national award that recognises and celebrates STEM excellence in the early years. Every year we are blown away by the high quality of the child-led and inquiry-based projects that are submitted to our jury.

I cannot wait to get stuck into reading the award entries again — and hopefully get back into communities to celebrate their successes. That really is the best part of my job — being in community with our educators, children and their families and friends!