Challenges towards a child-centred mindset at the nursery

The research aims to explore and describe strategies and actions for supervising and supporting the staff transition towards a practice of progettazione, recognizing the challenges they have addressed. The topic follows other similar research, such as Greaves and Bahous (2021) and Kinos et al. (2016). Progettazione, inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach (Rinaldi, 2009), states the centrality of the child in the educational planning process. The National Orientations (2022) encourages services to embrace and develop this perspective, by considering the pedagogical project as a research action (Fortunati & Catarsi, 2012), enhancing an intentional action that considers the educational event's complexity and the opening to the unexpected (Martini et al., 2015). The research follows a constructivist approach (Guba & Lincoln, 1989), that builds knowledge by exploring the meanings that subjects handle while interacting within an specific historical-cultural context. From a qualitative approach, document analysis, interviews and a focus group (Cohen et al., 2018) will be used to reconstruct the views of practitioners and pedagogical coordinators. Participation in research is under a voluntary basis, given informed consent, where anonymity is guaranteed. The data will be shared with the participants. Preliminary findings indicate that the greatest challenge to face is a change of the educators mind-set from an approach focused on children's educational goals to one that reads the needs of children expressed in their daily interactions. A child-centered mindset is a precondition for the integration between education and care, as stated in the European Quality Framework.