English
Atlantic Canada
Early Childhood
Education Lab
Learning and resources from three years of
collaborative innovation to support a thriving
Early Childhood Sector in Atlantic Canada
Atlantic Canada
Early Childhood
Education Lab
Learning and resources from three years of
collaborative innovation to support a thriving
Early Childhood Sector in Atlantic Canada
“How can early childhood educators thrive in their careers?”
More than 50 early childhood professionals from New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland & Labrador explored this question together through a three-year innovation lab.
This website shares what they learned, created, and field-tested.
Explore the themes below to discover information about people working in ECE. Then download and try out the prototypes developed in the lab to help ECEs thrive in their work.
Themes from the Lab
ECEs as Professionals
“We’re so much more than babysitters.”
ECE practitioners are passionate and creative professionals in the field of early childhood education and human development.
Reflective practice and ongoing learning are cornerstones of ECE professional development, and there are many career pathways through early childhood education as a field.
ECEs support each others’ career development through peer mentorship and communities of practice.
ECEs as Leaders
“Who me, a leader?”
Leaders in ECE have many names: Directors, Operators, Administrators, Home Childcare Providers, Pedagogical Leads – to name just a few. Some own their centres and employ many ECEs, others serve as Executive Directors of non-profit early learning and care organizations, and others operate out of their homes as solopreneurs.
ECEs also serve as informal leaders through mentoring peers and students, and by participating in the collaborative leadership of their centre.
ECEs as Innovators
“Let’s try it!”
ECE professional practice is highly compatible with the iterative test-and-learn cycles of innovation design. Every day, ECEs work with children in responsive, adaptive ways – trying out new ways to support their care and learning, gathering feedback from the children, and making adjustments to their environment and interactions.
In the ECE Lab participants applied this iterative approach to the sector’s systemic challenges around recruitment and retention of the ECE workforce. They created nine social innovation prototypes that offer new ways of addressing these challenges. Supported by embedded design coaches, each prototype was field tested and refined, and now all nine are offered here for use by anyone in the ECE sector.
ECEs in their own words
About the lab
From winter 2020 to summer 2023, the Pond-Deshpande Centre’s NouLAB partnered with All In Research & Innovation to convene the Atlantic Canada Early Childhood Education Lab (ECE Lab). The lab was funded by Future Skills Centre and brought together the ECE sectors in Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland & Labrador and Nova Scotia to collaborate on innovative new programs and services to support the ECE workforce. Three of the provinces moved forward with teams to participate in the lab. Through two cohorts, more than 50 people working in early learning and childcare came together through the lab to learn and experiment.
Teams included early childhood educators, pedagogical leaders, childcare centre operators, administrators and directors, government regulators, policy-makers, college instructors and deans, professional association staff, and ECE advocates. Including primary research, webinars and gatherings, and prototyping activities, the lab engaged more than 400 ECE interest holders in the region.
The challenges explored in this lab are not unique to Atlantic Canada. The need to better support the ECE sector is an area of international concern. Many scholars and think tanks have been working on these issues for over 30 years, and many of the recommendations made 30 years ago still stand. The Atlantic Canada ECE Lab created the space and conditions to apply systems thinking and co-design to these long-standing problems.
The ECE Lab was one effort among a recent groundswell of support to address challenges in the ECE sector. During the Lab, in 2021, the Canada-wide agreements were announced. The overarching goal of these agreements was to transform Canada’s market-driven early childhood learning and care provision toward a high quality publicly-funded system that supports women’s workforce participation and gives every Canadian child a head start. None of these objectives can be made possible without a qualified early childhood education workforce. In other words, ECEs are central to making many of Canada’s goals for workforce equity and child wellbeing a success.
The learning and prototypes produced in the Lab contributed tangible, local-level solutions and valuable insights into how this support could be leveraged effectively on the ground to create the conditions for ECEs to not only enter and stay in the early childhood workforce, but to thrive and flourish in their careers.
Years
Provinces
Teams
Prototypes
Team Members
Research Informants
Prototype Participants
Sector Representatives Consulted
Reports and learning from the lab
Download reports that document learning and insights from the Atlantic Canada ECE Lab.
Atlantic Canada ECE Lab Report 2020-2021
ECE Lab Prototype Reports
Round 1
ECE Lab Prototype Reports
Round 2
Acknowledgements
Partners from across Atlantic Canada contributed to the ECE Lab.
We would like to acknowledge that this work was carried out on the traditional unceded territory of First Peoples: in Newfoundland and Labrador, the homelands of the Inuit of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut, the Innu of Nitassinan, the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq peoples; in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, the territory of the Mi’kmaq, and in New Brunswick, the Wəlastəkwiyik, Mi’kmaq, and Passamaquoddy Peoples.
We would also like to thank the many Early Childhood Educators, Administrators, Directors, and Operators who shared their time, experiences, and insights with us.
For more information
Contact the ECE Lab’s provincial partners for more information about Early Childhood Learning and Care in Atlantic Canada.
Prince Edward Island
New Brunswick
Early Learning and Child Care in New Brunswick
Services d’apprentissage et de garde des jeunes enfants au Nouveau-Brunswick
Email: ECEQuestionEPE@gnb.ca
Newfoundland & Labrador
For more information on Early Learning and Childcare in Canada, visit the Canadian Child Care Federation and Atkinson Centre for Society and Child Development at the University of Toronto.