Abstract
This issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood has six diverse articles that consider the identity of pre-service teachers beginning their professional careers, the role of children’s voices in the early childhood curriculum, the role of parents in early childhood education, new approaches to reading, and sociocultural perspectives of play and learning.
In the first article, Sandy Farquhar and Marek Tesar report on focus group data from a study with newly qualified early childhood teachers during their first year of teaching. Their work uses the opportunity of the focus group experience to explore issues of identity that they regard as being fundamental for professional learning and support. The focus groups are conceptualised as ‘temporal ecosystems’ in which the early childhood teachers are able to make productive sense of their understandings and encounters within the group context.
Sandra Cheeseman and Jennifer Sumsion present us with ‘Narratives of infants’ encounters with curriculum: The benediction as invitation to participate’. The authors draw on Levinas’s work to consider the potential of visual narratives as a source to reveal young children’s thoughts, feelings and experiences. This enables educators to think more carefully about what we mean when we advocate children’s rights and child-centred education which have at their heart a desire to listen to children’s views and incorporate them into our policy and planning for early childhood education.
Angel Chan and Jenny Ritchie interrogate the nature of teacher partnerships with parents in the context of care and education settings in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki stresses the importance of family and culture in making education relevant to the lives of young children. Yet they note that research has shown that schools may not be inclusive of parents from all cultural groups. In their article, ‘Parents, participation, partnership: Problematising New Zealand early childhood education’, they draw on the work of Homi Bhabha and Norma González, Luis Moll and Cathy Amanti to consider the ways in which educators can be more cognisant of the diverse nature of families and be inclusive in their practices.
Natalia Kucirkova is interested in young children being engaged in reading. She suggests that early writing and authoring of e-books has the potential to increase children’s interest in writing and reading. Her work suggests that digital book-making can offer original concepts which might provide an alternative approach for future work in the area of early authoring.
In her article, Margaret Brennan asserts that caring for infants is a significant cultural activity and presents an alternative way of conceptualising the subjective and affective nature of infant care. She critiques the ‘downward’ sociological focus applied by many who advocate sociocultural approaches. She uses Vygotsky’s theoretical concept of perezhivanie to enable a consideration of subjective and affective phenomena in sociocultural pedagogies. She also contends that it can extend our understanding of the role of adult emotion in infant caregiving, and considers the methodological complexities associated with this.
In the article ‘The relations between a “push-down” and “push-up” curriculum: A cultural-historical study of home-play pedagogy in the context of structured learning in international schools in Malaysia’, Megan Adams and Marilyn Fleer explore the free-play opportunities for children in an international school in Malaysia by applying cultural-historical theory to view the everyday lives of children in their homes and at school. Their surprising results indicate that an increase in academic performance in school was associated with a change in orientation from play- to learning-focused activities in the home. This is what they refer to as a ‘push-up’ curriculum.
We have a very important colloquium in this issue written by Emeritus Professor Peter Moss and supported by a number of academic colleagues across the globe. The colloquium is entitled ‘The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International Early Learning Study: Opening for debate and contestation’. It enables our readers to read and discuss the issues related to a recent event that has gone largely unnoticed – the tender for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International Early Learning Study. The design and implementation of this new form of assessment of young children is contentious and represents another example of assessment via tests permeating all aspects of education – now coming into the early years. We ask that you read the colloquium and hope that you might send comments to Professor Moss regarding your thoughts on what is happening after you have had the opportunity to reflect on the issues raised.
There are two book reviews in this issue. The first book, edited by Arlene S Kanter and Beth A Ferri and entitled Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and Education, is reviewed by MinSoo Kim-Bossard of The College of New Jersey. The second review, by Seung Eun McDevitt of Columbia University, is of the book by Joseph Tobin, Angela E Arzubiaga and Jennifer Keys Adair entitled Children Crossing Borders: Immigrant Parents and Teacher Perspectives on Preschool.