About Us
The Seneca ECE Lab School is a community teaching school supporting the School of Early Childhood Education at Seneca College. We opened our doors in 1969, two years after the ECE Program began at Seneca College. In 1992, the Lab School moved to its permanent site in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, also known as Seneca College’s Newnham Campus. We are a site for teaching and learning often referred to as a model school for the ECE students at Newnham Campus, serving as a primary site for observation, research and field practicum.
We have been committed to professional learning, reflective practice and building a shared community, where all members are free to pursue interests and the holistic development of themselves in relation to others.
The Lab School explores current pedagogical approaches, theories and practices to support emerging curriculum, environmental design in the processes for learning and living well together. We co-create pedagogies that are situational and contextual to our setting and on the land in which we are guests. We respond and nurture our relationships and our interconnections with the land and more-than-human world.
We co-create an environment that honors children as capable and confident learners. We hold a strong view of the child as a protagonist in their own learning; learning with and together with others, land, materials and self. When the environment acts as the third teacher, the children become researchers and builders of theories. They initiate learning experiences through the exploration, investigation, and in relation with quality materials, themselves and others.