Abstract:

High-quality Early Childhood Education (ECE) resources play a pivotal role in shaping inclusive, equitable, and linguistically-rich learning environments that support children’s holistic development (UNESCO, 2023; OECD, 2022). Thus, ensuring that such resources are openly accessible and reusable enhances not only pedagogical innovation and collaboration among educators but also equity in early learning opportunities across diverse contexts (Hilton, 2019; Weller et al., 2020).

In this context, the present contribution explores the degree of openness of ECE teaching and learning resources available across Europe. In particular, by starting from a consolidated, the research aims to assess the extent to which these materials adhere to open standards and Creative Commons licensing schemes. Hence, the overarching goal is to examine the transferability potential of open educational resources (OER) in the ECE field, fostering cross-border reuse and adaptation of openly licensed educational content.

With regards to the methodological framework, the pool of resources are drawn primarily from EU-funded projects, public educational organisations, and international bodies such as the Council of Europe and the European Centre for Modern Languages.

The study involved a non-exhaustive, qualitative mapping of resources across four thematic areas central to ECE, namely:
a) plurilingual competence,
b) language awareness,
c) intercultural awareness, and
d) early literacy skills.

Each resource was coded according to a set of descriptors, including source category and typology, format, language, and evaluated based on its openness criteria (license type). To communicate findings in an accessible and engaging way, the results of the mapping and openness analysis were translated into interactive visualisations, thus enabling comparative insights across thematic clusters and supporting evidence-based reflection on the current landscape of openness in European ECE.

Acknowledgement:
The mapping and analysis were part of the EU-funded project AGENTIVE (“Digital, multilingual and cross-sectoral early childhood education through school-university-business synergies”, https://agentive.uni-muenster.de/).

Keywords:

ECE, Openness, learning, resources, Europe.