RESEARCH General Education

EARLY CHILDHOOD
New unit pulls together programs aimed at young children

Craig Chamberlain, News Editor
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

4/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has become a center of research and assistance on the education and care of young children.

Within its College of Education are more than a dozen projects focused on early childhood, with about $10 million in funding.

The projects now have been gathered under one roof, a new Early Childhood and Parenting (ECAP) Collaborative, which officially was established at the end of March.

ECAP covers a range of early childhood issues – among them disabilities, special education, gifted education, parent-child interaction, social and emotional needs, challenging behaviors, early learning and school preparation, and services and information for parents and children from a diversity of cultures and languages.

"So much development that’s critical for later life success, school success, occurs in the early years," said Susan Fowler, dean of the College of Education and a professor of special education. Those early years have been a focus of growing research attention and funding going back to the late 1980s.

And development in those first years is "very plastic," Fowler said. "Kids can move from being very normally developing to being not so normally developing" – and vice versa, and back and forth.

That’s one reason it makes sense to pull together the diverse collection of early childhood projects, already gathered within one building and often interacting, Fowler said. The collaborative also makes sense given the social trend toward more preschool children being in group care, as well as the greater emphasis on preparing children for school and literacy.

ECAP includes projects that specialize in making educational research and information accessible, to educators, parents and the general public. Since 1967, the Illinois campus has been home to the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education, now under ECAP, one of 16 clearinghouses in the federally funded ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) system.

Since 1993, the clearinghouse has been on the Web, as one of the earliest users of the new medium. That same year, the clearinghouse started the National Parent Information Network (NPIN) in a joint effort with the ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education, based at Columbia University.

"We were an information system waiting for the Web to happen," said Dianne Rothenberg, an organizer of ECAP and co-director of the ERIC clearinghouse. The other clearinghouse co-director is Lilian Katz, a professor emeritus of education and an internationally known expert on early childhood.

Rothenberg believes the formation of ECAP will bring about greater interaction, "synergy" and innovation among the projects that are part of it. "What we learn in one collaborative project informs the next one, and in a way that would never happen if the projects were far apart."
For more about ECAP and its various projects, go to http://ecap.crc.uiuc.edu/.