Research: 2-Curious continuous professional development

research Summary

• October 2017 to June 2019

The 2-Curious project was a co-produced training programme designed to generate new learning about two-year-old children in nursery and school settings.

The pilot project launched in November 2013. Manchester Met partnered with early years providers in the local community to develop a continuous professional development (CPD) programme to better understand the unique needs and experiences of a newly targeted group: disadvantaged two-year-olds.

In 2017, the 2-Curious project was commissioned by the Manchester nursery group Big Life Nurseries. The CPD project involved staff from across the Big Life Network which included nine nurseries and two multi-academy trust schools from across the North West and North East of England.  

The CPD programme aimed to:

• generate new knowledge about young children and their learning and development

• value practitioners’ experiences and knowledge of working with children and families and explore this in relation to theories of child development

Research methods

Comprising twelve sessions over a year, the programme developed two key strands of activities:

1. Practical workshops

Workshops brought together academics from Manchester Met and across Europe, and other early years specialists working in theatre, sound, language, spaces and places, virtual worlds, art and visual lives. They collaborated with early years leaders, managers and practitioners across the Big Life Nurseries settings to increase their own embodied, sensory engagements with objects and ideas.

The specific focus or experience that would take place in each session was left open in order to respond to the experiences provoked within the previous workshop. 

2. Reflective sessions

Classroom-based reflective sessions focussed on interrogating the practitioners’ experiences of the workshops. These discussions were layered with research and examined how the workshops were important in the light of traditional, sociocultural, neuroscientific and critical child development.

Research outputs

Academic papers

• I. Barron, L. Taylor, J. Nettleton, S. Amin (2017). Working with the cracks in the rigging in researching early childhood professional development. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. 18(1), pp.67-79. 

• I. Barron (2016). Flight turbulence: the stormy professional trajectory of trainee early years’ teachers in England. International Journal of Early Years Education. 24(3), pp.325-341. 

• I. Barron, L. Taylor Eating and scraping away at practice with two year olds. Pedagogy, Culture and Society. 25(4), pp.567-581. 

• K. Moakes (2021) 2-Curious: jarring representations of the two-year-old in transformative continuous professional development (CPD). Professional Development in Education. 

• M. Gallagher, J. Prior, M. Needham, R. Holmes (2017). Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening. British Educational Research Journal. 43(6), pp.1246-1265.