Revealing the research ‘hole’ of early childhood education for sustainability: a preliminary survey of the literature

In 2007, Environmental Education Research dedicated a special issue to childhood and environmental education. This paper makes a case for ‘early childhood’ to also be in the discussions. Here, I am referring to early childhood as the before‐school years, focusing on educational settings such as childcare centres and kindergartens. This sector is one of the research ‘holes’ that Reid and Scott ask the environmental education community to have the ‘courage to discuss’. This paper draws on a survey of Australian and international research journals in environmental education and early childhood education seeking studies at their intersection. Few were found. Some studies explored young children’s relationships with nature (education in the environment). A smaller number discussed young children’s understandings of environmental topics (education about the environment). Hardly any centred on young children as agents of change (education for the environment). At a time when there is a growing literature showing that early investments in human capital offer substantial returns to individuals and communities and have a far‐reaching effect – and when early childhood educators are beginning to engage with sustainability – it is vital that our field responds. This paper calls for urgent action – especially for research – to address the gap.     

Curriculum Material

Abstract

The kibbutz is an authentic component of Zionism and Zionist ideology which contributed to the establishment and strengthening of the State of Israel in its early years. A steady decline in the status of the kibbutz in Israeli society and various crises that it underwent triggered this study which set out to locate and describe Zionist education curricula in kibbutz high schools. The study, using a qualitative framework, included two intensive case studies and a survey of 21 schools. The findings in these schools through 1990s showed no existing formal Zionist education curricula but did uncover various extra‐curricular activities which kibbutz educators attributed to the subject. The hidden agenda of these activities shows that Zionist education is considered part of the political and ideological strengthening of the kibbutz during troublesome times. The pupils, who lack general knowledge and close encounters with the ideological foundations of Zionism and Judaism, are given a mixture of scepticism, universal humanistic values and criticism of their heritage. These findings are interpreted through the concept of critical approach to curriculum theory and the idea of the semi‐legitimate in normative systems. Kibbutz educators are themselves ambivalent towards kibbutz values and at the same time struggle to preserve their unique way of life in troubled times.     

Fixing contradictions of education commercialisation: Pearson plc and the construction of its efficacy brand

ABSTRACT

This paper explores some of the fundamental contradictions related to the commercialisation of education and how Pearson plc – ‘the world’s leading multinational education company’ – is trying to overcome these challenges through discourse and semiotics. Pearson’s Efficacy Framework is a semiotic-calculative device created to measure the impact of educational products and services sold by the company. This paper examines the ways in which the efficacy programme and tools developed by Pearson represent a type of ‘social fix’ intended to resolve contradictions linked to education commercialisation by demonstrating the ‘measurable impact’ and ‘outcomes’ resulting from its educational products and services and communicating that to customers, shareholders, policymakers, state managers and partners. Efficacy will be analysed as it relates to a hegemonic ‘knowledge brand’ in the making in education that is being actively promoted and appropriated by Pearson. Pearson, therefore, aims to construct a corporate brand and reputation around efficacy based on legible measures of performance, which this paper argues is in response to risks and contradictions associated with the commercialisation of education.     

‘A new discovery’ of Charles Hoole: method and practice in seventeenth-century English education

This article offers the first modern explication of the educational writings of Charles Hoole (1610–1667), arguing that his writings offer significant insight into the educational aims and methods of school instructors in seventeenth-century England. From attending to the needs of slow learners, to promoting learning games, to emphasising that children should be treated as rational actors, Hoole’s A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660) fused theoretical expositions on the aims of education with practical recommendations to schoolmasters on how to succeed in these aims. Hoole’s writings, as well as the earlier humanist pedagogical treatises of his peers, demonstrate that early and mid-seventeenth-century schoolmasters were already discussing and potentially implementing a number of educational initiatives that historians have traditionally credited to John Locke and later eighteenth-century educational theorists.     

Fröbels ‘Tageblätter’

The German‐born educator Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) is well known worldwide as the founder of the kindergarten system. His writings on educational play and games as well as his main work – the Menschenerziehung (1826) – have been translated and widely read. Froebel wrote educational texts as well as more than 1700 letters and journal entries or ‘Tageblätter’. Froebel’s formal writings have been published, as have about half of his letters. But most of Froebel’s journals have not been published, even though they are very important for the understanding of his theory of education. The present report intends to fill this gap. The text will present the research problem and reconstruct the history of the research on Froebel’s journals. The structure of the archival conservation of the journals is described and, finally, some of the journals are mentioned with the focus on autobiography. These journal entries reflect Froebel’s self‐image and an extensive spectrum of formal quality. As a whole, the article provides a broad view of this third sector of Froebel’s intellectual work.     

Return to the crossroads: Maritain fifty years on

Abstract:

Writing a little over a decade ago of developments in educational philosophy, R. F. Dearden remarked on the dearth of alternative approaches to that of conceptual analysis which predominated, at least in Anglophone cultures, at that time. One possible avenue of enquiry which he identified as conspicuously absent in this respect was the development of a distinctively Catholic approach to problems of educational philosophy, observing that a work of the mid‐war years, Maritain's Education at the Crossroads (1943), appeared to be well nigh the only modem effort in this direction. More than a decade on from this, in a climate no longer exclusively dominated by conceptual analysis – indeed, in which there is unprecedented interest in a wealth of different schools, traditions and approaches to philosophy of education – Dearden's remarks about the absence of a distinctively Catholic perspective still apply. In the following essay, therefore, the authors have undertaken, via a critical analysis of Maritain's educational speculations of half a century ago, to try to discern some of the principal issues and considerations which would need to be addressed in the interests of identifying a distinctively Catholic educational philosophy.     

西部连片特困地区普惠性民办幼儿园教师队伍建设的现实困境与突围路径

教师是教育扶贫的先行者,西部连片特困地区的特殊域情彰显了普惠性民办幼儿园教师队伍建设的独特价值。通过对六盘山M片区7县38所普惠性民办幼儿园的调研,我们发现西部连片特困地区普惠性民办园教师队伍面临先天"营养不良"、专业成长空间被挤压、教师队伍士气低落、"旅客"式流动现象严重等诸多问题。为此,要打破"所有制身份"的体制桎梏,提高普惠性民办园教师获得感;推进普惠性民办园"非营利性"转向,消解教师队伍建设的机制障碍;实施普惠性民办园"质量提升计划",助推教师队伍内涵式成长;引导教师找回迷失的"精神世界",唤醒教师的内在专业发展动能。     

“I'm Not Teaching English,I'm Teaching Something Else!”: How New Teachers Create Curriculum Under Mandates of Educational Reform

This study presents how beginning teachers create and teach an English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum in urban schools in the context of an educational reform movement driven by mandates such as Common Core State Standards (CCSS), high stakes tests, and prescribed curricula. They serve in schools with each using unique and individual curricula due to frequent administrative turnover and reorganization. Through the use of participants' classroom writings, interviews, and records of their classroom teaching, this study presents that the participants are neither teaching the content they wish, nor able to use pedagogies they see as effective. They experience confusion about the nature of the curricula imposed on them which differs significantly from their understanding of the ELA curriculum. The curricula they teach has little to do with either personal understandings of ELA, or how it is presented it in their educational coursework.     

Dyslexia and oral reading errors

Thomson was the first of very few researchers to have studied oral reading errors as a means of addressing the question: Are dyslexic readers different to other readers? Using the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability and Goodman's taxonomy of oral reading errors, Thomson concluded that dyslexic readers are different, but he found that they do not resemble beginning readers. Thomson's study and his use of miscue analysis is re‐evaluated, both in relation to the educational and political climate of the time – which was hostile to the concept of dyslexia – and in the light of research and social developments since then. The study of oral reading still has value today, both for the teacher and the researcher, provided its limitations as a technique are fully appreciated.     

Measuring equity in educational effectiveness research: the properties and possibilities of quantitative indicators

There has never been a published discursive review of equity measurement methodology in educational effectiveness research, though the literature on equity is growing. This paper sets out several indices that have the potential to measure it in terms of pupil attainment or in terms of how far a school (or group of schools) is from having a ‘fair’ proportion of its success attributable to a ‘fair’ proportion of its student population. The paper explores the principles and properties of three relatively simple metrics (the Range Ratio family of measures, the Coefficient of Variation and McLoone's Index) leading to two complex measures (Theil's T and finally to the Gini-based Attainment Equity Index). The paper investigates the warrant that the measures have (or do not have) for measuring equity by exploring them in a theoretical way so that their strengths, provenances and presumptions reveal themselves, and concludes with a discussion – the first of its kind in educational effectiveness research – on their desirable characteristics and properties. Worked examples from 2009 to 2011 UK pupil attainment data are presented in the Notes by way of worked illustrations, as are another two indices: the Variance of the Logs and the Atkinson Index.     

The Art of Straying: Benjamin on Distraction and the Informal Education of the City

In this article, Tyson E. Lewis argues for an alternative form of educational attunement beyond attentiveness. Discourses and practices of schooling emphasize being attentive as a primary educational virtue. This emphasis casts distraction as either the negation of attention or its deterioration. In either case, distraction lacks educational use and, as such, must be overcome through the cultivation of attention. Yet this approach to the question of attention versus distraction misses how distraction contains within itself a different kind of educational potentiality, a different kind of educational attunement. In an attempt to carve out space and time for distraction, Lewis turns to the writings of Walter Benjamin who offers up a more complex view of distraction than is presently found in educational philosophy. In particular, Benjamin argues that cities are not only places of negative forms of distraction (as mere diversions), but also places for cultivating productive distraction in the form of an open and alert attunement to new ways of experiencing and perceiving the relationship between world and self. Cities, for Benjamin, become educational spaces that teach lessons in a distracted form of life, the culmination of which is the creativity expressed in what he refers to as “the art of straying.”     

Lost in diglossia? (Un-)doing difference by dealing with language variations in Swiss kindergartens

ABSTRACT

Language policy in German-speaking Swiss kindergartens recently has been subject to change. While dialect traditionally was spoken to kindergartners, the use of High German has been established to promote the integration of migrant children and equality of opportunity. In this contribution, we look at how kindergarten teachers translate the new diglossic language policy into language practices. Drawing on data from an ongoing ethnographic study, we examine four logics of language use concerning when to speak dialect or High German. As teachers’ use of language differs not only according to situations and pedagogical sequences but also due to children’s social and migrant backgrounds, we ask – drawing on the theoretical concept of (un-)doing difference – how different linguistic addressing reflects (and affects) children’s positions in the social order.     

MacIntyre,rival traditions and education

This paper critically discusses MacIntyre's thesis that education is essentially a contested concept. In order to contextualise my discussion, I discuss both whether rival educational traditions of education found in MacIntyre's work – which I refer to as instrumental and non-instrumental justifications of education – can be rationally resolved using MacIntyre's framework, and whether a shared meaning of education is possible as a result. I conclude that MacIntyre's synthesis account is problematic because the whole notion that there are rationally negotiable ways in which to compromise or harmonise opposing justifications of education found in instrumental and non-instrumental forms of education is troubling – the reason being that these are cultural disagreements about human flourishing that are not neutral-free, and due to a lack of care distinguishing between the common uses of the term ‘education’, and its looser usages to mean something like school learning that embraces a range of aims and goals that are often incompatible. In this light, it is argued that the contestability card has been unnecessarily overemphasised, and brings to our attention the complex ways in which we interpret education and what it means to be educated.     

幼儿园游戏化教学策略探究

教育游戏作为一种新型教育模式,在幼儿园得到了广泛的应用。教育游戏不仅可以吸引幼儿的注意力,提升教学质量,使游戏在幼儿教育中得到更好的运用,还可以激发幼儿的思维能力,让幼儿在游戏过程中获得知识,使学习更加有趣。文章基于教育游戏在幼儿教育中的重要性,对幼儿园游戏化教学策略进行探讨。     

Ages and ages: the multiplication of children’s ‘ages’ in early twentieth-century child psychology

This paper explores the trend, between 1905 and the late 1920s in UK and US child psychology, of ‘discovering’, labelling and calculating different ‘ages’ in children. Those new ‘ages’ – from mental to emotional, social, anatomical ages, and more – were understood as either replacing, or meaningfully related to, chronological age. The most famous, mental age, ‘invented’ by Alfred Binet in the first decade of the century, was instrumental in early intelligence testing. Anatomical age triggered great interest until the 1930s, with many psychologists suggesting that physical development provided a more reliable inkling of which grade children should be in than chronological age. Those ages were calculated with great precision, and educational recommendations began to be made on the basis of these. This article maps this psychological and educational trend, and suggests that it cultivated a vision of children as developmentally erratic, worthy of intense scientific attention, and enticingly puzzling for researchers.     

Exploring the interplay of cultural capital,habitus, and field in the life histories of two West African teacher candidates

This paper captures the life histories of two West African pre-service teachers pursuing their education in the United States. Based on a larger study examining the life histories of 45 undergraduate pre-service teachers, these narratives focus specifically on international student experiences in the US. Grounded in Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, capital, and field, the life histories of Bakar and Selma illustrate how their capital and habitus become contingent on the field(s) (i.e. sites, time, and agents within a specific context) in which they are situated. The narratives of Bakar and Selma captured their early educational experiences, teacher preparation practices, and future possibilities as they moved in and out of different fields where the exchange of capital occurred, which then led to restructuring and/or de-valuerization of certain habitus. The experiences of Bakar and Selma heighten our awareness of the capital and habitus deployed in a variety of contexts – fields – in the US and elsewhere. We conclude by incorporating discussion focused on working with international teacher candidates.     

Confucian revival and the hybrid educational narratives in contemporary China: a critical rethinking of scale in globalisation and education

ABSTRACT

Today China witnesses a renaissance of classical studies and Confucian Academies across the nation. With an estimated 10 million children attending Confucian kindergartens, classes, and schools, cultural heritage has increasingly become a new marker of social distinction. At the same time, Confucian tradition is often associated with excessive testing, competition, and academic burdens that continue to hinder China's educational innovation. Disenchanted with state-run schools, many urban middle-class families turn to alternative schools that use imported pedagogies such as the Waldorf, Montessori, and Reggio to cultivate a better future for their children. In reform-era China, Westernisation coexists with a return to tradition to produce a fascinatingly complex cultural-pedagogical terrain. This paper examines such curiously hybrid educational narratives to understand the idiosyncratic features of Chinese educational globalisation and offer a critical perspective to rethink the concept of scale in comparative education research.     

In a practical mood: Studying for a profession in the changing kibbutz

The influence of recent social and economicchanges in the Israeli kibbutz on the prolongedstage of youth was examined with respect tohigher education. The young people on thekibbutz of the late 1990s appear lessmoratorial and more instrumental about theirfuture and commence higher education earlierthan in previous age cohorts. When starting tostudy, their educational and professionalprospects are crystalized as those of thenon-kibbutz student. Most of them opt foracademic, degree-granting studies, but a higherpercentage than among the general populationprefer vocation-oriented colleges to theresearch oriented universities. In choosingfields of study, they prefer more appliedstudies like engineering, social services andpractical arts and are less likely to choosesciences and the humanities. De-communalizationand economic instability of the kibbutz,inadequate preparation in kibbutz high schoolsfor the competitive admission to theuniversities, exposure to a restricted range ofoccupations during adolescence, and lack of acultural tradition supportive of elitiststudies may explain this practical mood, moresalient among kibbutz women.