Creating communities: a consortium model for early childhood leaders

The current paper describes an urban university-anchored but community-based consortium of early childhood centers and community partners in a large Midwestern US city. The goal of the Consortium is to provide professional development opportunities that include networking, coaching, and collaboration as part of a community of practice (CoP) intended to improve program quality. Our findings suggest that early childhood center directors who are part of the Consortium describe benefits consistent with a CoP, specifically in terms of connection, resources, and community. Our findings also show that sense of community is associated with deeper engagement with the Consortium and program quality rating of the member center. Implications of the findings for future practice, especially in urban settings, are discussed.     

Speech and Gesture Production Provide Unique Insights Into Young Children’s Spatial Reasoning

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old’s speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children’s Mental Transformation Tasks. Results showed that speech and gesture relevant for solving the trials (disambiguating correct choices) predicted spatial performance when controlling for age, gender, and spatial words and gestures produced. Children performed the spatial tasks well if they produced relevant information either verbally through speech or nonverbally through gesture. These results highlight the importance of not only focusing on concepts children can reference but also on how such concepts are used in spatial tasks.     

Phonics, Expository Writing, and Reading Aloud: Playful Literacy in the Primary Grades

Despite the challenges primary grade teachers face in trying to include play in an already crowded curriculum, play has an important place in reading and writing instruction. Children whose early literacy experiences include pleasurable activities are more motivated to pursue the challenging tasks associated with learning and are more likely to develop a life-long love of reading and writing. In this article, a teacher and a teacher educator make a case for the value of play in early literacy and offer examples of the ways teachers can create more playful phonics, read aloud, and expository writing experiences.     

‘Bringing Out the Best in People’: teacher training and the ‘real’ teacher

This paper explores the ways in which student teachers position themselves as teachers in primary classrooms. It focuses upon one discourse in primary teaching, which we have called the ‘real teacher’ discourse, and argues that it is mainly in terms of this that students come to understand ‘being a teacher’.     

Questions of ecopedagogy in tropical oceanScapes in the age of coral ecocide: An autoethnographic description

ABSTRACT

OceanScaping/scoping and the ecopedagogy of snorkeling are not well documented in the environmental education literature. This article focuses on the educative value of immersive saltwater experiences as pedagogical experience/s within coral reefs offshore from the tropical Australian city of Cairns. Drawing on a series of autoethnographic accounts of snorkeling journeys undertaken over the period 2015–2017, the article describes educators experiencing changes on coral reefs, temporally and spatially, during a time of reef ecocide. The author argues that offshore immersive learning enables a much deeper sense of understanding and integrated theoretical and practical ecopedagogy to unfold. However, in the Anthropocene, any discussion or practice of oceanScape ecopedagogy cannot escape the matter of marine ecocide. The professional implications for environmental educators are that if we are going to continue to educate with authenticity, then the timeliness, or not, of the antecedents and consequences of anthropogenic climate destabilization has to be front and center of every ecopedagogical discussion we have.     

The role of cognitive style in educational computer conferencing

This paper reports an investigation of the impact of students’ cognitive style on their effective use of educational text‐based computer‐mediated conferences. The research centres on an empirical study involving students from three courses run by the British Open University. Statistical analysis of the data does not suggest that cognitive style has a strong influence on student participation in the conference, but does suggest that, contrary to expectations, ‘imagers’ may send more messages to conferences than ‘verbalisers’. The data also suggest a possible link between certain cognitive styles and course completion, and that the interaction of different styles within a group, as described by Riding and Rayner's (1998 ) team roles, may have an indirect influence on task completion.