The selection of practitioners will depend on whether a project emphasizes caring for children in centers or educating and supporting parents and other caregivers. If the emphasis is on education and support to parents, practitioners should relate well to other adults and have knowledge of how adults learn as well as basic knowledge about how children develop.
If the emphasis is on caring for children in centers, experience suggests that the community should have a hand in choosing who will take care of its children. At the same time there should be agreement on the criteria for selection. These criteria should include:
- Love for children. This criterion may be the most important of all. One way of assessing whether candidates have this quality might be by success in bringing up their own children.
- Literacy. Without literacy it would be difficult to manage the administrative demands that inevitably fall on a practitioner, whether in a center-based or home-based project. But a center with several staff could include nonliterate mothers. Education can bring with it greater appreciation for the activities associated with children's mental development, and it eases the job of training. But more important than a particular level of education may be the ability to communicate.
- Cleanliness and good health. These criteria are too often overlooked.
- A sense of organization. A preschool teacher or a madre educadora (a mother who is both a childcare provider and an educator, who is not a certified teacher but may have acquired some training outside the official system) must be more than a simple guardian of children-the job requires organization.
- Knowledge of the community and trust of the community members. Experience shows that there is an advantage to selecting caregivers from the community who both know the community and have its trust. Where an indigenous culture and language are dominant, this may be particularly important.
Omitted from these primary criteria for selecting caregivers is formal training in early childhood development. Where there are trained and certified early educators and caregivers, they should usually be selected. But if that means assigning teachers to work in cultural contexts that are foreign to them, it may be wiser to select and train local people. This position runs counter to that of most professional organizations and some unions, and could be a barrier to mounting a project. The position of professional groups should be felt out early on. In addition, discussions should be held about how a project could draw on the talents of formally trained teachers and supervisors even if many of the practitioners will be people without formal training.
One method that has been used to strengthen selection is to choose for initial training more people than can be employed as caregivers (or promoters or educators) at the outset. Those in charge can then see how well each person does during the training before making a final selection. People who are not chosen provide a reserve that can be drawn on later if needed. This method of ensuring a good selection clearly carries extra costs. But if the result is more effective practitioners and less turnover, the costs may be justified. Another technique combines local and external selection: the community selects several candidates, one of whom is then chosen by the program implementers.
