Graduate Diploma in Early Childhood Teaching (GD-ECTCH) // Attributes, outcomes and skills

Intended learning outcomes

On completion of this course, graduates should be able to:

• Foreground Indigenous Worldviews to promote learner engagement with complexity that is inclusive and respectful of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, communities, organisations, and standpoints in early childhood education
• Enact interdisciplinary learning ecologies and foster ecologically minded children, families, and teachers who participate and contribute to sustainable communities
• Critically review, discuss, and advocate for the inclusion of multiple ways of knowing, being, valuing and doing that are informed by the connection between contemporary educational theories and research connected to teaching and learning
• Translate early childhood content knowledge and pedagogies to design curriculum and assessments strategies that enable creative and productive learning ecologies that articulate and enact the image of the child, family, and teacher as capable and learning in relationship
• Promote teaching and learning as a political and ethical act that respects diversity, humanity, advocacy, and equity
• Exemplify a range of 21st century skills to create complex curriculum that engages and builds reciprocal relationships with children, families, teachers and communities
• Exhibit the role of the teacher as researcher illustrated by engaging in continuous professional learning through teacher practitioner inquiry and research.

Generic skills

• Clinical reasoning and thinking
• Problem solving
• Evidence based decision making
• Creativity and innovation
• Teamwork and professional collaboration
• Learning to learn and metacognition
• Responsiveness to a changing knowledge base
• Reflection for continuous improvement
• Linking theory and practice
• Inquiry and research
• Active and participatory citizenship.

Graduate attributes

Graduates of the Graduate Diploma in Early Childhood Teaching will:

• Be culturally and socially aware (in particular, foregrounding Indigenous Worldviews and engaging with sustainability). Graduates will establish respectful and ethical relationships with students, staff, and communities, in early childhood settings.
• Embody the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL) to support the development of teaching as a profession.
• Be a practitioner of teaching who views children as capable, using an inclusive, developmental and post‐developmental, relational approach through complex learning and teaching strategies.
• Be creative, innovative, self‐directed and life-long learners, able to link theory and practice and respond pedagogically to a changing educational landscape.