Education for sustainability in higher education; Early Childhood Studies as a site for provocation,collaboration and inquiry

Fifteen years after they were created, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have reached their expiration date. The United Nations asserts that surveys conducted in September 2015 suggested that only 4% of the UK public had heard of the MDG’s. The renewed focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer opportunities for higher education institutions (HEIs) to work alongside students to create a shared and contextualised awareness of sustainable development within Early Childhood Education. This aim is pertinent for those students studying Early Childhood Studies (ECS) degrees with the potential goal of working with babies, young children and their families. The research was situated within a paradigm of critical educational research to establish a shared understanding of sustainable development within a newly validated BA (Hons) ECS programme at a HEI in the Northwest of England. Visual provocations were used as a pedagogical intervention to present a disorientating dilemma, critical reflection on personal perspective and an examination of world views. Findings suggested that visual methodologies supported students to appreciate the ambiguity and contested limits of knowledge, and to draw upon wider sources related to moral and ethical principles and to established rights and responsibilities.     

Shared reading as a practice for fostering early learning in an Early Childhood Education and Care centre: a naturalistic,comparative study of one infant's experiences with two educators

Early childhood educators are encouraged to read with infants, yet little is known about the educator–infant book‐focused interactions that occur in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centres. This study provides a systematic linguistic analysis of the naturally occurring interactions between one focal child Charlie (aged 21 months and 13 days) and two of his educators, as they each engaged in shared reading with Charlie and one or more of his peers during a typical day in his infant room. While both educators engaged in shared reading for pedagogical purposes, the meanings realised in their talk differed in subtle ways, providing Charlie and his peers with tacit and sometimes contradictory messages about how to make meaning from words and pictures. One educator's proportionally greater use of mental processes and polar questions construed shared reading primarily as an interpretive activity, while the other educator's proportionally greater use of WH questions and directives construed shared reading primarily as an instructional activity. Differences were also observed in Charlie's verbal participation during the two shared readings. The findings reveal how educators, through their own talk, create particular contexts in which infants may or may not participate during shared reading experiences.     

Assessing the impact of a program designed to develop sustainability leadership amongst staff members in higher education institutes: a case study from a community of practice perspective

This study focuses on the impact of a sustainability leadership development program (SLDP) designed to develop staff members as leaders who encourage sustainability practices within institutions of higher education (IHE). Using the framework of community of practice (CoP), we explored the program’s contribution by interviewing 16 staff members who had attended the program. At the individual level, we found that the SLDP provided participants with opportunities to learn from and with other members of the CoP and to engage them in debate about the various meanings of ‘sustainability’, increasing their environmental awareness and their environmental involvement within the IHE’s community. At the institutional level, the SLDP disseminated the college’s socio-environmental mission statement, increased its administration’s commitment and involvement, served as a platform for addressing local socio-environmental problems and initiated an Education-for-Sustainability (EfS) activists’ network. However, the participants indicated that the SLDP had limited impact on the environmentalism of other staff members and that the on-going mentoring and support from the college administration was insufficient. This study highlights the importance of such EfS professional programs to the development of both staff members and entire institutions as sustainability leaders. It also suggests ways to increase staff involvement in institutional EfS discourse.     

Narratives of Learning from Co-editing,Writing and Presenting Stories of Experience in Self-Study

In this self-study, we look at the contribution made towards our professional learning through an aspect of teacher education work that is not commonly featured in the research literature: exploring the implications of our work as co-editors of an international collection about teacher educators’ journeys of professional becoming. Through this self-study, we argue that this type of work is valuable to individuals and institutions in relation to its impact on the professional learning and career development of teacher educators. Adopting a narrative approach, we examined our experiences of co-editing the book and the associated activities such as conference presentations, to understand how this influenced our professional learning and identity as teacher educators. Findings include having a stronger sense of the evolution of our professional selves over time and greater insight and awareness of our strengths and uncertainties. A clearer perspective on our own career development and professional becoming was evident, and many parallels could be drawn between our experiences of professional becoming and those of the chapter authors in the edited book. We conclude that while activities such as book editing do not usually count in institutional metrics as outputs, they are nonetheless a significant opportunity for professional learning and make a contribution to knowledge and to teacher education practice, and should be recognised as such by institutions and colleagues.     

Professional learning of observers,collaborators, and contributors in a teacher-created online community in Korea

This study investigated professional learning taking place in a teacher-created online community. In particular, this aimed to explore how teachers at different levels of participation learn in an online community. The results showed that teachers usually began as observers, reading others' postings and using contributors' teaching resources, and moved to collaborators, posting their comments on teaching resources and discussing their problems with other teachers, and then to contributors, sharing their teaching resources with other teachers and providing information, advice, and help to other teachers. As they participated in the online community at different levels, teacher learning took place in multiple ways including learning through tryout, collaborative problem solving, and critical reconstruction. Yet, not all teachers moved toward full participation in the online community. The majority of teachers remained as observers and their lack of participation in the negotiation of meaning constrained teacher learning. For the online community to be a fertile ground for teacher learning, more emphasis needs to be placed on the collaborative construction of knowledge and the transformation of shared practice, rather than the transmission of knowledge and the dissemination of good practice.