Practitioners’ reflections about children’s achievements through their experiences in early childhood education and care settings

Practitioners’ reflections about children’s achievements through their experiences in early childhood education and care settings

Professor Valerie Sollars is a full-time resident academic member of staff at the Faculty of Education, at the University of Malta. She lectures and supervises undergraduate and post-graduate students who are pursuing studies and research in early childhood education and care.

Valerie has a long career in the field of early childhood education. In the local context, she has been responsible for introducing undergraduate studies in the field, thus raising the profile of the profession. She was also the coordinator of an international Master degree programme in ECEC which was offered jointly with other European universities and institutions. She is the author of a number of policy documents which have contributed to shaping the profession and was the main contributor to the writing of “The Early Years Cycle” in the National Curriculum Framework (2012).

Following her initial teacher education studies at the University of Malta, Professor Sollars studied at McGill University in Montreal, Canada as a Commonwealth scholar and subsequently pursed doctoral studies at the Royal University of Manchester. Within ECEC, her areas of interest and research include policy development; emergent literacy; language pedagogy in early years and quality issues. She has published scholarly articles in several journals and has presented her work at various international conferences and teacher-training meetings, including Bulgaria, Lithuania, Turkey, Scotland, Greece, Belgium, Austria and Norway. She has also delivered keynote presentations and organised several language-related projects and workshops with the European Centre for Modern Languages in Graz, Austria.

Professor Sollars was the Dean of the Faculty of Education between 2007 and 2015, becoming the first female Dean in the history of the University of Malta.