Abstract
Transformative (adj.) – Causing a major change to something or someone, especially in a way that makes it or them better
This edition of Global Studies of Childhood represents a unique opportunity for translational research to be shared with researchers and practitioners. Our topic of ‘Transformative pedagogies in early childhood’ can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Living, as we do, in the second decade of the 21st century, in a world that is vastly different from what it was last century, one would naturally expect education and schooling to have been transformed so that citizens can be prepared for life in the new era. Accompanied by notions such as lifelong and lifewide learning, we expect our workforce to be ready to take up the challenges of new industries. There are calls for an agile workforce and for increased levels of collaboration, use of creativity and imagination and being able to come up with innovative solutions to complex problems with new and dynamic ideas and strategies. Are schools enabling this type of experience for our students?
Transformation implies a different way of doing things. Yet if we think about schooling – how much has changed? Certainly, there are new technologies in schools but how are they being used? Are they reinforcing heritage curriculum which were conceptualised in previous times, or are they being used to generate new ways of thinking and doing? How do we realise our potential? Do new technologies replace the need for human interactions? What new ideas do we have … and what things are no longer necessary for us to learn and retain when we can access them online at our individual bequest?
In this volume, we start to think about new ways of being and how we ‘do’ learning. We are all acutely aware that what is different about learning in the 21st century is that it is multimodal and that we need to be able to reconcile living in real and virtual worlds and doing things differently. What does transformational learning look like? What pedagogies and curriculum can be used to inculcate new learning that is relevant to the lives of young children today? The articles in this edition consider some of the issues and share them with us in order to broaden the discussion about what effective teaching and learning might look like in our schools today.
Arvanitis begins the discussion in a study with Preservice teacher educators in Greece. She contends that transformative education involves the use of reflexive pedagogies. Being reflexive involves moving between modes of learning and being aware of the flexible and dynamic ways that teaching and learning are inter-related. Arvanitis contends that teachers become reflexive practitioners by taking into account a range of diverse teaching pedagogies and then designing new syntheses of learning/teaching repertoires that are relevant to the context in which they find themselves with their students. This requires new ways of thinking and doing and Arvanitis uses the Learning by Design framework (Kalantzis and Cope, 2012) to scaffold their thinking and planning in new and dynamic ways.
The second paper by van Haren and Kiddy provides an empirical example of new learning in a classroom that utilises the pedagogies as knowledge processes approach characterised in the Learning by Design framework. Preschool and kindergarten children (aged 5 and 6 years) learn about ‘giving’ and the environment in teacher-designed learning modules. The action research project that accompanied this work involved careful observations of students’ learning and also an analysis of work samples. The teachers noted that they felt that the students were more empathic, collaborative and felt more connected to their environment as a result of experiencing the learning module. They felt that a significant factor was that the children were engaged in authentic learning contexts which then improved literacy outcomes as well students becoming more serious advocates to protect their environment. The study also found that parent involvement increased as the children became more enthusiastic and strong connections were made between the schools and the wider community as a result of working on the project.
In the third paper, Yelland and Gilbert lament that while ‘pockets of innovation’ illustrate the ways in which transformation is possible in schools, systemic changes are limited in a global context that is dominated by high stakes testing and the neo-liberal agenda. Their paper explores the potential for change in a project that incorporated the use of iPads in a kindergarten context in Victoria, Australia (4- to 5-year-olds). The data from the project supports the notion that new technologies offer possibilities for new learning by enabling young children to embark on investigations and explorations that were not possible in previous eras. Thus, they illustrate the potential of tablets to encourage playful explorations for investigating, reflecting, making meaning, knowledge building and communicating ideas to shared audiences.
Dana Frantz Bentley asks the question, What does it mean to engage in transformational learning with young children? Bentley shares her child-centred, emergent curricular experiences in her early childhood classroom with us. She frames transformation around the ‘having of ideas’ and contends that ideas are the essential ‘technology’ in children’s lives. With rich vignettes of kindergarten learning, she chronicles and analyses children’s idea-having processes and describes the pedagogies that enable it. Her teaching focuses on children’s talk, questioning, critique and negotiation. Bentley carefully shifts us away from notions of traditional technologies, looking closely at the transformational learning inherent in children’s collective having-of-ideas.
Hatzigianni also asks us to think beyond the traditional use of digital technologies in the early years of education. She asks for a consideration of the broader societal implications of technology use and incorporates the Freirian notion that education has the power to transform lives in this quest. She suggests that while new technologies have the potential to significantly alter the everyday practices adopted in the early years curriculum experience, we need to think creatively about how this might occur. Hatzigianni proposes that projects underpinned by a critical or postmodern framework are useful to understand the complex times that we live in.
Teachers need to be supported to engage in transformation of our schools. Fotopoulou and Ifanti asked teachers what they thought about professionalism and professional development in the 21st century. The teachers regarded their work as being multidimensional and complex. Professionalism and professional development was regarded as being central to preparing them to creatively transform their educational contexts and extending their career as well as reinforcing their students’ efforts in the learning process. Their findings underline the coherence between teachers’ professionalism and professional development with the notion of transformative learning and the collaborative support needed to enable the process to succeed.
Finally, we have a book review of Encounters with materials in early childhood education by Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind and Kocher (Routledge: New York and London, 2017; 92 pp. ISBN 9781138821460) by Paulina Semenec, a Doctoral Student at the University of British Columbia, in Canada. This is also timely and relevant to this edition as it considers the transformative ways in which we might regard the materials that we encounter in learning scenarios everyday.
The papers in this edition provide a starting point to think about transformative pedagogies that work to engage young children in being passionate about their learning and new discoveries. They also cause us to reflect on our practices in order to become more aware about the ways in which we might be able to challenge traditional and taken for granted ways of doing our work. We live in complex and challenging times and there has never been a better opportunity to try and do things differently and learn from the experiences of others in the ‘field’. In this way, we will build our knowledge base of empirical examples and share what works so that others might take from them and adapt to their own contexts based on their local knowledge.