The value of international links

* International links are valuable because they help practitioners to reflect on their own values, assumptions and ways of looking at children. This point is vividly made by a Swedish practitioner, whose experiences are recounted by Gunila Dahlberg, Professor of Education at the Stockholm Institute. The practitioner was shocked to come into an Italian school and discover a great heap of plastic toys like He-Man and My Little Pony, rather than the highly valued wooden educational toys of a typical Swedish nursery. The Italian 'pedagogues' then explained that this was the start of a project on modern fairy tales, arising...