Promoting professional identity development: community capacity building in early childhood education across the local context

This paper draws on a collaborative inquiry that employed the methodological design of Participatory Action Research. It involved two Australian preschool communities exploring how children’s literature could be used as a strategy to support and promote an anti-bias multicultural curriculum. Based on the argument that anti-bias multicultural education is a key factor in developing human capital for an inclusive, productive multicultural society this paper discusses three imperatives that impacted on the collaborative inquiry. The first imperative concerns the fact that anti-bias multicultural education must begin in the early years. The second imperative highlights the importance of investing research energy into early childhood education to assist educators with strategies for implementing an anti-bias multicultural curriculum. The third imperative emphasises the need to underpin such research with collaborative inquiry that is participative and transformative