Preparing for educare: student perspectives on early years training in Northern Ireland

Preschool provision in Northern Ireland is government funded and quality assured in all statutory sector settings (nursery schools and units) and in many voluntary/private sector settings (playgroups and daycare facilities). However, three unresolved policy issues continue to divide the sectors: the choices between a teacher or pedagogue role model, graduate or vocational level training, and a competency or reflective model of training. This paper aims to explore the reflections of a sample of students from both graduate and vocational early years training courses on the content and effectiveness of their training in order to inform the broader early years professionalism debate. The design of the research combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, with the data collection methods consisting of questionnaire survey (n = 282) and semi‐structured interviews (n = 22). Findings reveal broad agreement on the part of students, literature and government policy on the essential elements of early years training content; however, weaknesses in all training courses are detected in regard to preparation for significant areas of professional practice.     

Telling transgression: a bridge between contract and carnival in making student services policy

This research paper seeks to re-frame student services policy-making by providing traditionally-aged university students with a speaking position in the formulation of the contractual arrangements that affect them and bind them into adulthood. My involvement as a student services educator, policy-maker, and researcher is the unifying thread throughout this inquiry. The ambiguous context of adulthood for first year students within the historical and interlocking categories of social contract and medieval carnival provides the theoretical framework. These categories provide the basis of my critical narrative inquiry into transgression: my autobiographical remembrances of the contract-carnival interplay of student drinking in a Canadian university; and my reconstruction of a dialogically-generated drinking story from my research site in a UK university. This critical narrative inquiry supports my conclusion and action plan for inclusive, dialogical policy-making that engenders the telling of transgression through stories of carnival. I further conclude that the student services educator must take leadership responsibility for initiating this policy-making intervention that bridges carnival and contract, and that provides occasions for first year students to narrativize adulthood.