Case study: Gayle Blackburn, University of Sunderland

“Hi everyone, my name’s Gayle Victoria Blackburn and I am a senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland. We have been using the siren videos across all of our modules, so from year one right the way across to year three. We have also embedded them into our very unique program, which is the Early Childhood graduate practitioner competencies.

They are so useful, the Siren videos, because it allows us to bring to life a lot of the parts of our lectures and our seminars. It allows students to see practitioners at work, in practice. It allows students to evaluate that practice and think about how they can use the skills that they’ve looked at on the Siren videos and how they can take them into their placement which is what I’ve been using on my Early Childhood graduate practitioner competencies program.

It also allows students to actually see child development in action because it allows them to follow children across the range of Siren videos library. It allows them to see different children and see them develop, and also see how their development is promoted and supported by the different adults who are working with them.

It also allows our students to see how children interact with others, how children have attachments formed with the practitioners and other members of staff and how their needs are met. So again, these are invaluable for our students to see, because sometimes the students on the Childhood Studies program might not have actually had any practical experience of working in the setting. So being able to access the videos gives the students an idea of what a setting is going to look like, how children can be supported and how their development can be promoted appropriately.

We’ve used the Siren videos also on the Child Development assessment module where students observe the children on a range of videos that they could choose which videos they observed because we have access for our students so they can access the videos whenever they want, at a time that’s convenient to them. They had to observe the children and they had to reflect on those children’s areas of development and also then link those areas of development to relevant theorists and reflect on that as well. So it brought the assessment to life and also it meant that our students had the chance to see how development is supported in a setting. We have also used the Siren videos on our observation and assessment modules.

So again, the students have been able to observe children and they have been able to carry out and practice the range of observation methods, which again, is invaluable for these students when they go out into a setting and they then, they may have the chance to observe children in a setting and they’ve had the practical experience by being able to use the same video clips. They could observe the children, record the observations using a range of observation methods, and then also reflect on them and then make links to the appropriate early learning goals as well.

So absolutely invaluable that the Siren videos are being absolutely invaluable, and we have used them across all year groups, and it’s great for the students as well, because they can access them when they want, at a time that’s convenient to them, and they can make notes on these, and then dip into them when they feel the need to. So it has been really, really useful to be able to access these videos as and when we need to.”