Gardening with grandparents: an early engagement with the science curriculum

In many cultures, elders are revered within the extended family as a source of wisdom gained from long experience. In Western societies, this role has been marginalised by changes in family structure, and grandparents' significant contribution to children's upbringing often goes unacknowledged. A research study with families of three‐ to six‐year‐olds in East London reveals how grandparents from a variety of cultural backgrounds passed on knowledge about growing fruit and vegetables to their grandchildren through joint gardening activities. Children learned to identify different plants, and to understand conditions and stages of plant growth. Grandparents from Bangladesh introduced children to a wide range of fruits and vegetables, and concepts were reinforced through bilingual communication. Analysis shows that these intergenerational learning encounters fostered children's scientific knowledge in ways that supported and extended curriculum work in the early years.     

Teacher professional standards to support teacher quality and learning in Estonia

In the modern world, teachers are expected to be ‘learning professionals’ who constantly expand their knowledge and skills and share both practical and theoretical insights in a community of colleagues. Teacher professional competence‐based standards could be an instrument to support teachers' professional learning if they are integrated with broader assessment and evaluation frameworks and if their evaluation, professional development and career advancement are in line with the standards. In Estonia, teacher professional standards were first developed in 2005. Currently, they support initial teacher education, the evaluation of teacher competences and the design of continuous professional learning. They also allow teachers to progress to the senior teacher and master teacher qualification level. According to our findings, the standards are successfully used to design pre‐service education and award certificates at the end of the studies. However, they do not support building the teachers' career ladder and only in some schools do they support planning of professional learning. In this article, we give an overview of the changes in the professional standards of teachers in Estonia and analyse why they have not found the desired degree of use in teachers' career advancement and professional development in the school context and why they have not had a significant effect on teacher status in society.     

‘Seeing the light.’ Personal epiphanies and moving towards interpretivism; a researcher’s tale of exploring teacher pedagogic practice

Arguably an essential element of a doctoral study is to establish and acknowledge a philosophical worldview. As part of this, researchers need to engage with and challenge their assumptions about the nature of being, the nature of knowledge, and what can be known. Only then can methodological designs, approaches to data analysis, and relationships between researchers and participants be established and situated within a particular research paradigm. Contextualised within a PhD study concerning teacher pedagogic practice, this paper describes the process of abandoning a positivist worldview in favour of interpretivism. The paper describes the process of developing an ethnographically inspired methodology combining practice theory [Kemmis, S., and P. Grootenboer. 2008. “Situating Praxis in Practice.” In Enabling Praxis: Challenges for Education, edited by S. Kemmis, and T. Smith, 37–64. Rotterdam: Sense] and constructivist grounded theory [Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory. A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage] to study teacher pedagogic practice. The methodological framework is shared to enable others to use it to provide fresh opportunities to look at specific educational settings in order to explore, understand and enhance teacher practice.     

Children's knowledge of astronomy and its change in the course of learning

This study examined the nature of 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children's (n = 113) knowledge of astronomy and the process of knowledge change during learning. Children's pre-existing knowledge was assessed by questions and drawing tasks. About half of the children were taught elementary concepts of astronomy in small groups and afterwards all participants’ knowledge was assessed again. Most children could be categorized as having fragmented astronomy knowledge and the proportion of non-scientific models first proposed by Vosniadou & Brewer [Vosniadou, S., & Brewer, W. F. (1992). Mental models of the Earth: A study of conceptual change in childhood. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 535–585] was no greater than could be expected by chance. Children seemed to acquire factual information rather easily and therefore early instruction should introduce the core facts related to the topics. Some children over-generalized new knowledge very easily, indicating that the materials used in teaching may promote the development of non-scientific notions and that those notions must be addressed promptly to avoid the development of coherent non-scientific models.     

‘Testing,testing, testing… can you hear me?’

This article draws on material that formed part of a project entitled ‘Sustaining Pupils’ Progress at Year 3'¹. One area that emerged as significant early in the project was the practice and the place of assessment. The project found a high increase in testing and other forms of assessment during Year 3 designed in part to facilitate progress. This article poses the question of whether we can learn from hearing what pupils have to say about their experience of assessment and concludes that, given the language with which to discuss and understand the processes they experience, children's views can indeed be of value as schools focus on ways to sustain learning     

Re-visioning Action: Participatory Action Research and Indigenous Theories of Change

This article observes that participatory action research (PAR), by nature of being collaborative, necessitates making explicit theories of change that may have otherwise gone unseen or unexamined. The article explores the limits of the reform/revolution paradox on actions and theories of change in PAR. Citing examples from two recent youth PAR projects on educational issues, the author submits that when met with such a paradox, one can only move to a new vantage point. Four alternative vantage points, drawn from Indigenous epistemologies, are illustrated; they are sovereignty, contention, balance, and relationship.

The Effect of Verbal and Visuo-Spatial Abilities on the Development of Knowledge of the Earth

Difficulties in students’ understanding of the spherical model of the Earth have been shown in previous studies. One of the reasons for these difficulties lies in beliefs and preliminary knowledge that hinder the interpretation of the scientific knowledge, the other reason may lie in the low level of verbal and visuo-spatial abilities. The study aims to investigate the effect of verbal and visuo-spatial abilities, but also that of preliminary knowledge on the later development of the knowledge of the Earth in school. 176 schoolchildren (96 boys and 80 girls) from five schools were tested; the mean age of the children during the first interview was seven years and eight months. All students were interviewed twice – in grades 1 and 2, before and after they had learnt the topic in school. Factual, scientific and synthetic knowledge was assessed. The facilitative effect of visuo-spatial and verbal abilities and preliminary factual and scientific knowledge on students’ knowledge of astronomy after having learnt the topic in school was shown. In contrast, the hindering effect of synthetic knowledge was not found.