WHAT IS ACCESS?
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ACCESS Curriculum is decision-making that has been developed and implemented at the University of Dayton's (UD) Demonstration School, the Bombeck Family Learning Center (Bombeck Center). The work reflects years of partnering with teachers who work with children and families in poverty as well as teachers of children and children with special learning needs.
The Bombeck Center teachers and administrators have worked with UD's early childhood faculty to develop and implement this curriculum that: (1) uses assessment data to support instructional decision making; (2) encourages high quality teacher-child interactions and is child-centered and play-based; (3) benefits from an emergent negotiated curriculum component that incorporates integrated project-based learning; (4) provides children with opportunities to acquire both developmental skills and early learning content; and (5) supports teacher development of in-depth content knowledge to support child outcomes. The ACCESS Curriculum is based on the belief that children are unique, capable individuals who are able to construct their own knowledge. It is grounded in early childhood research and theory, and knowledge of early childhood development. |
ACCESS is framed by the seven significant areas of development: social, emotional, language, cognitive, physical and health, motor, aesthetic and approaches to learning including executive functioning. The curriculum affords children the opportunity to grow in their understanding of their worlds through extended investigations. Topics for investigations are determined through observation of the children's interests, the topic's relevance to the children, opportunity for direct investigation, readily availability of resources, ease of representation through a variety of media, and ability to support children's development and learning of age appropriate content. This emergent form of curriculum allows children, through structured and unstructured play/active learning, to process and reflect upon their experiences as they develop in a community of learners. Through the use of ACCESS, learning is supported by ongoing program evaluation and individual assessment. Aggregated authentic assessment provides for an in-depth understanding of the children and their learning thus enabling ACCESS to be a living document, a curriculum used to meeting individual and group needs.
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