Abstract:

Continuous professional development of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) professionals is crucial in ensuring the quality of pedagogical practice, emphasized also in the European Quality Framework (Council of the European Union, 2019) and the European Commission's report on the professionalization of staff (Working Group on ECEC, 2020). The most effective forms of professional development are those that enable the exchange of experiences, sharing of ideas and the reflection of practice, such as observation practice followed by a reflective discussion, during which professionals get to know practices already applied in different contexts and learn from them as well as reflect on their own practices and transform concepts or practices they used to take for granted.
Some public health measures during the pandemic resulted in "professional isolation" of ECEC professionals, as connecting and sharing of practices have been greatly reduced. Moreover, during this period it became evident that the digital competences of professionals should be strengthened. All these recent experiences encouraged the development of an idea on enabling a valuable international exchange of a wider interested professional public. With this aim, the Green Learning Community (GREELCO) European co-funded project has been developed.
The project consortium has strategically been developed already at the proposal phase to include 11 partners: the leading organization, Educational Research Institute (Slovenia), International Step by Step Association (the Netherlands), Hellenic Open University (Greece), and kindergartens from Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia and Serbia.

GREELCO outcomes include an educational Platform at which virtual Study Visits to 8 ECEC institutions from 8 EU countries will be organized and take place. Furthermore, video footage of pedagogical practice will also be included on the Platform and serve as a starting point for a group or individual reflection on the quality practice among ECEC professionals around Europe and wider. The aim is to encourage even more ECEC institutions worldwide to present their work, to learn on how to create such videos and based on them improve their practice.
In the first year of the project, professionals of the involved ECEC institutions have been trained in the field of digital competences through an online training at which they learnt more about the child-centered quality practice, about preparing quality videos of their practice and about editing such videos in order to deliver a useful footage of their work to help other professionals to learn from it.
Based on the results of the Training, a Webinar is already being developed covering the most important topics from the training and providing learning material also for professionals outside the project consortium. At the same time, the ECEC professionals are preparing the videos which will have the central role at the Study Visits that will be carried out during 2024. The main goal of these online events is to introduce the educational systems of specific countries, getting familiar with the kindergartens and their approach of addressing holistic children development by keeping the child in the center of learning.
This paper aims to present the GREELCO methodology as well as some already existing project results and conclusions based on the experiences that have already arisen during the project implementation.

Keywords:

Virtual learning, digital skills, community, quality practice, professional development, early childhood education and care, child-centred approach.