First Nations Pedagogies Network

The First Nations Pedagogies Network (FNPN) is dedicated to cultural continuance and revitalization in early childhood education with First Nations children, families, cultures and communities on Indigenous terms.   

Hosted by the BC Aboriginal Child Care Society (BCACCS) and building on an opportunity to work within the Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN)—as  its inaugural Indigenous Stream—the FNPN  is a unique program of support, creation and sharing of distinctly First Nations ways of supporting children, families, cultures and communities.  

From First Nations’ strengths in early learning and child care (ELCC), the FNPN is helping to develop new ways to support and share resurgent and emerging practices while broadening conceptions of quality in Indigenous ELCC on First Nations terms. 

Following the First Nations ELCC Framework, and in close partnership with the ECPN, the FNPN supports and brings together the work of First Nations equivalents of Pedagogists in the ECPN to work with each other, Indigenous Elders, First Nations early childhood education programs (those existing and those being created) and First Nations communities to realize, affirm, extend and secure distinctly First Nations promise and practice in ELCC.   

Indigenous ‘pedagogists’ work together and in the guidance and collaboration of First Nations communities throughout this Western land to strengthen First Nations ELCC in diversity, continuity and innovation. These experienced early years professionals have been laying the groundwork for the Network’s expansion beyond, by together co-developing and engaging this new role on Indigenous terms in different ways contexts.   

The FNPN provides a key pathway to realizing the vision of the Framework in community-based First Nations ELCC curriculum and pedagogy innovation and development.  It is a flowering of ways to continue in new beginnings.