PARS playwork – the pro-child profession
One year on from our first ‘experimental’ 2020 conference, we are very much looking forward to our second PARS playwork conference on International Children’s Day! John Bertelsen, the first playworker at Emdrup, talked about the importance of adults being ‘pro-child’ on adventure playgrounds, which gives us our theme for this year’s conference: PARS – the pro-child profession. In many ways this theme reflects the PARS journey over the last twelve months. As a result of the fantastic energy and support generated by last year’s conference, the growing international PARS community has spent the last 12 months working on the professionalisation of PARS. This means helping those outside the PARS community to recognise our distinctive approach to working with children as legitimate, by adopting a coherent set of shared values, methods, knowledge and practices, on both an individual and group level within the PARS community. This has included setting up administration and assessment teams, becoming an NCFE Award Centre, launching our new PPP4 NCFE accredited qualification and expanding our international training team to 19 PARS Licensed Trainers, working in 9 different countries and delivering PARS training in 5 different languages.
For PARS 2021 we’ve invited academic and practitioner experts from around the world to help us think more about two key questions for professionalising PARS playwork:
- What does it mean to be ‘pro-child’?
- What does it mean to be a profession?
Pars 2021 is 12 hours of fascinating approaches to these two questions from diverse practical and theoretical perspectives, from Iceland to Mongolia, from China to Russia, from USA to Australia, and an awful lot of places in between! We welcome anyone interested in the PARS approach to working with children to join us for….
- Presentations from PARS practitioners and trainers around the world on how they are putting PARS into practice
- Round table discussions on our key questions with expert academics, practitioners and policy makers
- Presentations on the theory of being pro-child by international scholars in areas such as children’s rights, childism and historical perspectives on childhood.
- Presentations on the practice of being pro-child by international scholars in areas such as reflexivity, risk-taking and the Play Cycle
…and much more! You can download the conference programme here and find out more about the sessions and individual speakers below.
PARS 2021 is an online, 12 hour conference and is open to anyone interested in the PARS playwork approach to working with children.