Assessing Thai early childhood teachers' knowledge of inclusive education

An ever-increasing number of children with and without disabilities are attending early childhood programmes and learning together. Early childhood inclusion considers all children with and without disabilities, and their families as full members of the early childhood community. Although many early childhood teachers accept the educational rights of children with disabilities and the core principle of inclusion – that early childhood learning programmes should provide for the needs of all the children in their centres, regardless of ability and disability, there remain significant barriers in terms of teacher professional knowledge in achieving these goals. In this article, we report a study on Thai preschool teachers' knowledge of inclusive early childhood education. Quantitative data obtained through a questionnaire were supplemented by teacher interviews. Both the quantitative and qualitative data focused on the teachers' assessment of their professional knowledge. Findings from this study can inform effective professional development programmes in preparing early childhood teachers for successful inclusive practices.     

Family strategies to support and develop resilience in early childhood

Early childhood is an important time for the development of resilience. A recently completed study has followed three cohorts of resilient children and young people living in disadvantaged areas in Victoria, Australia, through different transitions in their educational careers. This paper focuses on the early childhood cohort, where we have followed children from kindergarten/preschool into primary school. Using data gathered primarily through interviews with parents (mothers in each case), this paper presents a qualitative naturalistic sub-study that used deductive thematic analysis to explore the different strategies used by families to support their child’s resilience. Our findings highlight that resilience was a salient concept for all of the mothers in the study and each mother articulated a range of strategies they used within the family to try and support their child’s development and resilience. These strategies were constrained by the settings in which the families lived.     

Moving toward inclusion by narrowing the gap between early childhood professionals

This article investigates the relationship between early childhood education and early childhood special education in terms of inclusion by providing evidence that there is a gap between the two professions in the inclusion process, discussing the possible reasons for and consequences of this gap, and evaluating the progress that is being made to eliminate the gap. If we are to includeall young children in programs, we need to includeall educators in the discussion, planning, and implementation of the programs.     

In support of drama in early childhood education, again

Early childhood practitioners appear to be in an unending battle to legitimize the use of the dramatic arts in the classroom. Even early childhood educators who accept the value of dramatic play seldom utilize the potential of drama fully. The purpose of this article is to reinforce the value of drama and theater for young children. Dramatic play, creative drama, theater, and television—a form of drama — all have their place in the development of young children.     

Confidence in their own ability: postgraduate early childhood students examining their attitudes towards inclusive education

This study explores reflections of a group of postgraduate early childhood students in relation to their self‐reported attitudes towards inclusive education. Participant self‐reported attitudes towards inclusive education were measured using an adapted version of the Attitudes Toward Inclusive Education Scale (ATIES) and an adapted version of the Concerns about Inclusive Education Scale (CIES). Data were collected at the commencement and conclusion of a university unit focused on difference and disability. Within this unit, participants undertook individual self‐directed projects in which they identified, researched and provided recommendations to address issues of particular concern to them in relation to inclusive early childhood education. Participants’ written reflections were also examined in the context of the quantitative data in order to provide greater insight into the changing attitudes of pre‐service early childhood teachers over the course of one university semester. The findings of this provide some evidence to suggest that engaging in self‐reflection on attitudes and beliefs, along with developing practical skills for educating children of diverse abilities, may lead to more positive views of inclusive education. Furthermore, the importance of developing confidence in the ability to teach all children is highlighted through the student comments and responses to the ATIES and CIES.     

Enhancing student engagement in one institution

Student engagement is important to further and higher education institutions: it is understood to be a proxy for quality teaching and governments attach a proportion of funding to student retention and completion. Many institutions are taking part in student engagement surveys, using the data generated to initiate changes to policies and practice. This article presents an overview of literature on student engagement and quality teaching. It then briefly describes three projects in one institution in New Zealand that were designed to improve teaching and student engagement, and outlines key findings from them. The projects are then related to four of Chalmers’ five levels of quality teaching and Leach and Zepke’s six perspectives on engagement, enabling some conclusions about what Massey University is doing successfully and what more it could do to enhance student engagement. It is suggested that other institutions could use this different approach to review their current pedagogy and student engagement strategies.     

What troubles early childhood educators in New Zealand: a 20-year cross-sectional study of ethical difficulties in early childhood practice

For more than 20 years, the New Zealand early childhood (EC) sector has had guidance about how to deal with situations of ethical difficulty in daily practice through the ECE Code of Ethics. This paper reports on three surveys undertaken at 10-year intervals that sought to understand EC educators’ experiences of such situations, and how they addressed them within their EC settings. An analysis of educators’ stories of ethically troubling situations from the three data-sets traced shifts and similarities in the content reported, and in how educators responded to these challenges over the two-decade period. We situate this analysis alongside changes in the New Zealand ECE policy context during the same time frame. We argue that a connection exists between the reported situations and teachers’ responses to them, and changes within the policy and professional context of daily EC practice.     

Analyzing teacher narratives in early childhood garden-based education

Learning gardens can provide dynamic learning and developmental experiences for young children. This case study of 12 early childhood teachers explores how teachers describe (1) learning across numerous school readiness domains and (2) how to support this learning by promoting opportunities for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Participants worked at a university-affiliated early education program with a learning garden in the midwestern United States. Data included 19 narrative, photo-elicitation interviews during two growing seasons. Iterative qualitative analyses informed the creation of a Gourd Tee-Pee Model that describes learning across multiple domains and integrates self-determination theory into early childhood garden education. This framework can inform the design and evaluation of early childhood garden education programs.     

Early means early: understanding popular understandings of early childhood development in South Africa

Scientific and policy advances are putting early childhooddevelopment (ECD) at the center of efforts to improve humandevelopment. This study was undertaken to understand whatknowledge and attitudinal barriers exist that 25 hinder the full-scaleroll-out of services for the youngest children and their families.We used anthropological methods honed by the FrameworksInstitute to plumb beliefs about early childhood development amongmembers of the public and implementation and policy stakeholders,and compare those with the findings from ECD research. Whilemembers of the public and stakeholders agree on the importance ofECD, as demonstrated in other country settings, a major barrier todirecting services to the youngest children is a perceptual tendencyto ‘age up’. That is, to consider learning and other important skillsas being acquired in the pre-school rather than infancy period.Communication strategies that incorporate debate are neededto give full effect to the ECD and related policies, especiallyaround the topics of prioritizing the youngest 40 children, physicalpunishment, child rights, and the pervasiveness Q5 of threats toECD arising from poverty and disadvantage.     

Renovating early childhood education pedagogy: a case study in Vietnam

Since 2003, the Vietnamese government has prioritised curriculum reform efforts and commitment to improving the quality of the national curriculum. The Vietnamese early childhood education renovation has encountered considerable changes and challenges, particularly in the area of pedagogical approaches. Many early childhood teachers continue to favour direct instruction over more appropriate teaching practices for early childhood. This paper reviews the implementation and renovation of the revised curriculum over the past 10 years in Vietnam, and examines the changing realities of early childhood teachers' work to explore ways to implement and sustain changes in pedagogy in Lam Dong Province, Vietnam. The paper explores how changing societal expectations and the changing educational philosophies and resultant pedagogy have impacted on the beliefs and practices of early childhood teachers. The teaching profession, as a whole, is facing ongoing change and challenge; not only are ongoing educational reforms redefining teachers' work, but increasing teacher attrition and turnover also creates problems for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Lam Dong province. The paper concludes with suggestions for areas for future research in Vietnam in the field of ECEC.     

Schematising activities in early childhood education

The purpose of this study was to determine the importance of introducing schematising to children in early childhood and to determine whether schematising can be taught to children. This was done using a longitudinal, quantitative study with a quasi-experimental design (N = 133). In this study, the use of schematising was taught to an experimental group of children to determine if it is possible to realise significantly improved results in schematising tasks for an experimental group in comparison to a control group of children who were not taught schematising. Pupils in the experimental group demonstrated significantly better results on schematising, which cannot be explained by maturation. In our future research, we will investigate the mathematical performances of these experimental and control groups in the next grade of the primary school curriculum.     

Principles under pressure: student teachers' perspectives on final teaching practice in early childhood classrooms

Global concerns about what constitutes an appropriate curriculum and pedagogy for young children inevitably raises questions for teacher educators and the content of teacher education programmes. These concerns have been particularly visible in England following recent policy initiatives and the resultant ‘academic shovedown’ and ‘high stakes’ performativity culture in schools. Against this background, this article reports on a qualitative study of student teachers' experiences of their final teaching practice, identifying pressure from a range of sources to deliver a more formalised curriculum than they were prepared for in their university-based courses. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner among others, we consider the socio-political and -cultural sources of pressure linked through human agency, and the implications of these for teacher educators. The study argues that student teachers of young children may be faced with cognitive and emotional dissonance between the content of university-based training on the one hand, which promotes a developmentally appropriate, play-based approach in keeping with the Early Years Foundation Stage (the statutory curricular framework in England), and the reality of pedagogical practice in early years settings on the other.     

More than a shortage of early childhood teachers: looking beyond the recruitment of university qualified teachers to promote quality early childhood education and care

In Australia and internationally, government policies aim to increase the supply of early childhood teachers and thus improve the quality of early childhood education and care services. In this paper, we suggest that such a policy-quality trajectory in Australia is not as straightforward as policy discourses suggest. From industrial relations and broader policy contexts, we argue that the early childhood profession is a profession on the margins and that this marginalisation complicates efforts to enhance numbers of early childhood teachers. Mindful of this marginalisation, we draw upon preliminary findings from a study exploring the motivations, beliefs and expectations of mature age postgraduate students to highlight practical issues pertaining to students and early childhood teacher education programs that further complicate policy drives to increase the supply of early childhood teachers. We propose that the success of such policy drives is dependent on a comprehensive addressing of the complexities raised in this paper.     

Teaching through assessment: reconsidering the transfer problem through a convergence of technology and assessment in early childhood teacher education

This article considers the impact of the ‘transfer problem’ from a personal perspective. Drawing on experiences in teacher educator as preservice teacher, a practicing educator and later a preservice educator the author examines how she has seen and experienced the transfer problem and the potential for teacher education to enact a separation between theory and practice. The convergence of technology and assessment is presented to argue a case for a pedagogical approach used by the author referred to as ‘teaching through assessment’. The approach is theorised drawing on concepts from cultural-historical theory including, leading activity, learning activity and reflection to describe the potential for technology to appropriate a range of forms and functions that make it suitable for reconsidering how the transfer problem might be approached in teacher education classrooms.     

Brokering to support participation of disadvantaged families in early childhood education

This paper discusses findings from an evaluation of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's Early Childhood Education (ECE) Participation Programme that targeted local areas where there are high numbers of children starting school who have not participated in ECE. The aim of the programme is to increase participation of these low‐income ‘priority’ children in ‘quality’ ECE. In this paper, two policy initiatives and features that supported participation in ECE are analysed. Engaging Priority Families (EPF) involves a coordinator working with families to encourage ECE participation, home learning and a positive transition to school. Targeted Assistance for Provision (TAP) grants are intended to increase local supply by helping establish new services and child spaces in communities where they are needed. The study used mixed methods: data on enrolments, surveys of Participation Programme providers, interviews with programme staff, surveys of families engaged in each initiative and interviews with a small group of families. The results show that cost, availability and cultural relevance of ECE services are the main barriers to participation of ‘priority’ families. Through brokering, both initiatives helped address complex social issues faced by the families by connecting families with health, housing and social agencies, and brokering understanding of ECE. The results support the argument that national policy initiatives and local actions can help address inequities in participation in ECE associated with socioeconomic status.     

The social experience of early childhood for children with learning disabilities: inclusion,competence and agency

This paper tells of the social experiences of three four‐year‐old children with learning disabilities as they negotiate their daily lives in their homes and early education settings in England. We apply a social model of childhood disability to the relatively unexplored territory of young children and use vignettes drawn from video observation to explore the interactive spaces contained in settings with different cultures of inclusion. Using a multimodal approach to the data we show the nuanced ways in which the children enact their agency. We explore the relationships between agency, culture and structure, and argue that children with learning disabilities are active in making meaning within social and relational networks to which they contribute differently depending on the barriers to doing and being that each network presents. Thus, the paper provides an original use of the notion of distributed competence.     

Models of supervision in early childhood programs: Implications for training

Many child care directors inherit their role of supervisor without having had adequate training or experience. Given the wide disparity in the field with respect to staff preparation, child care directors, in their role as supervisors, are called on to develop, train, evaluate, and appraise child care workers on a daily basis. The literature in the field suggests that there are common threads among supervisory models in early childhood and that directors of child care programs can benefit from in-service training that specifically addresses their supervisory functions. “The most difficult part of my job as Director is trying to get my staff to change certain practices.” Director, Church Preschool Program “I don't feel comfortable with my role as evaluator; I guess I don't like telling people they're doing something wrong.” Director, Day Care Center     

Purposeful pauses: teacher talk during early childhood mathematics activities

This paper describes how early childhood teachers' incorporation of pauses raises the quality of talk-in-interaction during play-based mathematics activities. Responses of both children and teachers are shown to be more contingent and expansive when conversations include protracted pauses than during interactions in which pauses are largely absent. Pauses provided children with opportunities to initiate topics and facilitated more equitable access to discourse moves for children. By pausing before responding to a child's conversational gambit, teachers gained opportunities to assess children's demonstrated numeracy-related skills and understanding, and could thus provide authentic, individualised scaffolding. Pauses were not necessarily silent: a pause in an interaction with one child could be used strategically to model the learning interaction with a second child before returning to the first child in order to continue the discourse sequence.     

Teacher support and math engagement: roles of academic self-efficacy and positive emotions

The current study assessed 869 elementary school students in China using self-report questionnaires, to examine the multiple mediating effects of academic self-efficacy and positive academic emotions (enjoyment and relief) in the relations between teacher support and academic engagement (cognitive, behavioural and emotional aspects) within a math class. The results indicated that teacher support exerted a direct and significant impact on the three aspects of math engagement. Both academic self-efficacy and enjoyment mediated the relations between teacher support and the three aspects of math engagement, whereas relief did not mediate such relations. Moreover, teacher support affected math engagement through multiple paths from academic self-efficacy to both enjoyment and relief. Relief displayed a smaller effect on the three aspects of math engagement than enjoyment did. However, we did not find substantial difference in the underlying mechanisms of different aspects of engagement. Limitations and educational implications were also discussed.