Nurturing ‘buds of development’: from outcomes to opportunities in early childhood practice

The current future-focused, outcomes driven early childhood policy climate presents a danger that early years pedagogy will lose sight of the ‘present’ child. Increasingly policy support for early childhood education is built around an emphasis on preparing children for school and positioning it as a key element in enhancing society through preparing future citizens to become productive members of society. The measurable outcomes discourse, in emphasising product, renders invisible the critical contribution of the processes of everyday practice to children’s development. To challenge and counteract the strong outcome discourse early years professionals must have confidence in their pedagogy. However, research suggests that those working in the early years may lack the language and strategies for supporting their educational practice. Using the bio-ecological model of development and drawing on the capabilities approach this paper calls for a shift in policy and pedagogical discourse from measuring competencies towards enhancing capabilities, from assessing outcomes towards providing rich, day-to-day learning opportunities. Such a shift in narrative could weaken the neo-liberal, outcome language of early childhood policy and refocus on supporting an early childhood pedagogy that would explicitly reflect current understanding of what is most beneficial to children’s development and well-being and provide a powerful potential for change.     

Voices of Identity in a Chicana Teacher’s Occupational Narratives of the Self

The research area of teacher narrative inquiry has identified links between the personal and professional identities of teachers. Although teacher narrative inquiry takes narrative texts as its data, insufficient attention has been given to the functions of narratives as forms of discourse that are utilized in the construction of identity. In the present study, the concept of narrative identity guided the analysis of a Chicana teacher’s personal experience narratives. The analysis of six narratives told during interviews conducted across a year’s time examined how the voices in the narratives, communicated through reported speech, represented the relational, discursive, and ideological social worlds within which the Chicana teacher’s occupational identity was shaped. The reported speech in the Chicana teacher’s narratives quoted the voices of significant Others, such as her family members and the parents of her students. The Chicana teacher’s narratives crafted her response to the tensions and challenges that these voices represented to her emerging occupational identity as a bilingual education teacher. In her narratives, the Chicana teacher also constructed continuity across the distinct phases of her occupational identity as a bilingual teacher that included transitions from college student, to novice bilingual teacher, to experienced bilingual teacher. René Galindo is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado at Denver and has a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. His recent publications on language policy, bilingual education, and immigration politics have appeared in the Harvard Latino Law Review, The Journal of Latinos and Education, and Latino Studies.     

Mathematics education and learning disabilities in Spain

In the first part of this article, we describe the basic objectives of the math curriculum in Spain as well as the basic contents, teacher resources, and obstacles perceived in mathematics instruction. Second, we briefly describe the concept of learning disabilities (LD) as they are currently defined in Spain. As stated in the recent educational reform, a student with LD is any student with special educational needs. The emphasis is placed on the educational resources that these students need in order to achieve the curricular objectives that correspond to their age group or grade. Third, we comment specifically on the educational services model and the evaluation and instructional procedures for students with math learning disabilities. Finally, we describe some lines of research that have appeared in the last few years in Spain that have led to the development of new evaluation and intervention procedures for students with LD in computation and problem solving.     

Enhancing problem-solving expertise by means of an authentic, collaborative, computer supported and problem-based course

Instructional designs, embedding learning in meaningful contexts such as problem-based learning (PBL) are increasingly used for fostering expertise to prepare students for the demands of the future workplace. However, cognitive outcomes of these curricula in terms of expertise outcomes are not always conclusive. Based on the instructional implications resulted from research in the field of expertise development in general and in PBL curricula more specifically, we constructed and implemented a refined PBL design. With this redesign, we aimed for a more advanced level of (a) knowledge acquisition and use, (b) reasoning directionality, (c) diagnostic and problem solving accuracy. The aim of the present research was to compare the outcomes of a ‘traditional’ and a ‘refined’ PBL learning environment. For that purpose we measured the effects of the redesign on the students’ expertise profile. An experiment was conducted in a second year course on International Marketing. In the study 75 students participated. Using a multidimensional coding scheme, constructed on the basis of results of expertise research, we analysed students’ problem-solving performance. The results of this analysis indicate hat the experimental students outperformed the control students in various aspects of expertise when analyzing the problem: The experimental group demonstrated a more extensive use of domain-specific concepts and inferences, more inductive reasoning, and both diagnoses and solutions of higher quality.     

Avoiding communication barriers in the classroom: the APEINTA project

Education is a fundamental human right, however unfortunately not everybody has the same learning opportunities. For instance, if a student has hearing impairments, s/he could face communications barriers in the classroom, which could affect his/her learning process. APEINTA is a Spanish educational project that aims for inclusive education for all. This project proposes two main accessible initiatives: (1) real-time captioning and text-to-speech (TTS) services in the classroom and (2) accessible Web-learning platform out of the classroom with accessible digital resources. This paper presents the inclusive initiatives of APEINTA. Also an evaluation of the into-the-classroom initiative (real-time captioning and TTS services) is presented. This evaluation has been conducted during a regular undergraduate course at a university and during a seminar at an integration school for deaf children. Forty-five hearing students, 1 foreign student, 3 experts in captioning, usability and accessibility, and 20 students with hearing impairments evaluated these services in the classroom. Evaluation results show that these initiatives are adequate to be used in the classroom and that students are satisfied with them.     

Spanish Bilateral Initiatives for Education in Latin America

The research presented in this article concerns la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional (Spanish Agency for International Cooperation—AECI) and its growing presence in Latin America since the late 1990s. The aim is to evaluate the transformative potential that bilateral funding can have on educational reform in the region. The article starts with a brief history of Spain’s past and present strategies for educational initiatives in Latin America, and then it focuses on three of AECI’s successful projects: basic and adult literacy; gender mainstreaming in development projects; and multicultural and bilingual education. The article explains the effectiveness of Spanish-sponsored projects in Latin America and compares their strategies with those of other bilateral and multilateral donors, such as PREAL. The article concludes by analysing multi-sectoral development efforts that are the foundation of educational strategies sponsored with Spanish funds, based on the grounds that elimination of poverty will not result from projects that focus exclusively on the individual or the family, but rather from those at the community level. AECI’s efforts are directed at cultivating internal capacities already present in the communities through training human resources and deploying financial resources.     

Learning the hard way: Need for Cognition influences attitudes toward and self-reported use of desirable difficulties

We investigate the relationship between Need for Cognition (NFC), attitude towards and self-reported application of different desirable difficulties in self-regulated learning. Students with a higher NFC should be more appreciative and prone to use desirable difficulties because of a match between the learner’s attributes and the learning task requirements: cognitively effortful learning conditions will be preferred by students with a higher propensity for cognitive challenges. Supporting our hypotheses, we show that indeed a higher NFC positively relates to attitudes and use of different desirable difficulties (Study 1–2), especially to self-generating of materials and predictions, but weaker and inconsistently to interleaving/spacing and self-testing/practicing. While self-generating of contents and predictions loaded on one factor, and interleaving/spacing together with self-testing/practicing loaded on another factor, this two-factor structure was reliably obtained for self-reported use, yet for attitudes a one-factor structure did fit. Most importantly though, the observed relationship between NFC and different desirable difficulties could neither be explained by high school graduation grade, indicating academic competence (Study 1), nor by academic self-concept as one’s perception of one’s academic abilities (Study 2). Results are discussed within an information-processing framework related to implications for desirable difficulties as learning strategies.