“We’re More Than a Daycare”: Reported Roles and Settings for Early Childhood Professionals and Implications for Professionalizing the Field

Early Childhood Education Journal - In the US, recent efforts have focused on professionalizing the field of early childhood. One way to indicate professionalism is through the terms used to...     

Editorial: Looking Back,Facing Forward

With thanks for excellent service to departing co-editor Becky McKay Johnson, this is the first Informatics Education column under the sole current editor. A retrospective analysis of past columns identifies several major themes over the past six years. Different meanings for the term “informatics” are explored, and potential new areas for future Informatics Education columns are proposed.     

The Physical Organization as Equivocal Message

This study expands our understanding of the importance of physical organizational space and the relationship between physical and social structure by emphasizing and demonstrating how social structure is physically contextualized. I examined the impact of a building designed specifically to enhance communication and creativity among workers and discovered that users of the building experienced the facility very differently than the designers intended. Specifically, employees struggled to reconcile their experiences with the new facility across five problematic themes: transition, openness, finances/layoffs, management, and the building itself, with the building serving a core, unifying function. The results are discussed in terms of how organizational physical space affords opportunities for material space use that may be unforeseen by designers. Workers’ values and the impact of multiple stressors played key roles in the negative reactions to the new facility. J. J. Gibson's theory of affordances is used to explain the degree to which building design as equivocal message can predetermine communication outcomes.     

Cultural Identity Tensions in a Post-Acquisition Organization A previous version of this paper was presented as a “Top Paper” at the annual convention of the International Communication Association,New Orleans,May 2004.

This study examines the problems associated with cultural integration in the aftermath of a corporate acquisition. Based on focus groups and one-on-one interviews with members of a post-acquisition organization (PAO), the results reveal three identity tensions used by organization members to reconcile conflicting pulls toward identification and disidentification: collaboration/competition, assimilation/autonomy, and consensus/command. Findings indicate that members across the four sites of the PAO reconcile these identity tensions differently, resulting in more evidence of disidentification at the two sites that had been acquired by the larger organization, than at the other two sites which had been long-standing locations of the acquiring organization. Implications are discussed relative to cultural and identity issues during periods of organization mergers and acquisitions.     

Text features and preschool teachers’ use of print referencing

Storybook features, such as linguistic richness and print salience, potentially influence how a teacher references print. This study addressed two research questions: (1) to what extent does the linguistic richness and print salience of children's storybooks relate to teachers’ use of print referencing? and (2) to what extent is there an interplay between storybooks’ linguistic richness and print salience when predicting teachers’ use of print referencing? Fifty‐seven teachers participated in a whole‐group read‐aloud intervention while including print‐referencing behaviours. Researchers analysed teacher videos in order to (1) document teachers’ use of print referencing and (2) document the storybook's linguistic features and print salience. Results indicated that print salience is highly positively related to teachers’ use of print referencing. Also, the constructs of Print Salience Metric (PSM) and total words predicted teachers’ use of print referencing, and the interaction between PSM and mean length of sentence was significant for storybooks with moderate and high PSM scores.     

Bi-directional dynamics underlie the complexity of talk in teacher–child play-based conversations in classrooms serving at-risk pupils

This study examined the transactional, utterance-by-utterance dependencies in the syntactic complexity of teachers’ and children's talk during small-group conversations in preschool classrooms. The sample included 39 teachers and select children in their classroom, which targeted enrollment to children experiencing documentable risk factors. Patterns of sequential dependencies demonstrated a bi-directional interdependence in teachers’ and children's complex syntactic use, whereby both teachers and children appeared sensitive to each other's use of complex syntactic forms. Teachers’ use of complex syntax increased the likelihood that children's adjacent utterance would contain complex syntax; similarly, children's use of complex or simple syntax increased the likelihood that teachers’ adjacent utterance would mirror their syntactic level. Associations were small to moderately large in strength, but varied across individual classrooms. The findings point to complex, bi-directional relationships underlying the complexity of talk within the classroom language environment.     

The Effectiveness of a Large‐Scale Language and Preliteracy Intervention: The SPELL Randomized Controlled Trial in Denmark

The present article reports results of a real‐world effectiveness trial conducted in Denmark with six thousand four hundred eighty‐three 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds designed to improve children's language and preliteracy skills. Children in 144 child cares were assigned to a control condition or one of three planned variations of a 20‐week storybook‐based intervention: a base intervention and two enhanced versions featuring extended professional development for educators or a home‐based program for parents. Pre‐ to posttest comparisons revealed a significant impact of all three interventions for preliteracy skills (= .21–.27) but not language skills (d = .04–.16), with little differentiation among the three variations. Fidelity, indexed by number of lessons delivered, was a significant predictor of most outcomes. Implications for real‐world research and practice are considered.     

Making a Change: The Effects of the Leadership Role on School Climate

School is a very important element of society. Students and teachers learn many lessons, academic and otherwise, that influence their personal well-being and academic success. Often, however, school does not provide the positive learning or working environment that is most beneficial for our students and teachers. As a first year principal, Pepper realized that a more positive school climate was the key to confronting many of the challenges in the school where she worked. Through an autoethnographical approach supported by her personal journals, Pepper's experiences are described as she witnessed the negative effects that an authoritarian leadership style had on school climate and, subsequently, the morale and success of students and teachers within the school setting. As she made the change to a transformational leader, she came to realize that this leadership style had a more positive effect on the learning and working environment. Her change in leadership style and guidance, with input from teachers, staff, students, parents, and community members, resulted in the school becoming a more positive, caring place to learn and work for everyone involved. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Academic employment decisions and gender

This study explored gender differences in the reasons why academics accept or reject offers of faculty positions. Using both open-ended questions and rating scales, 115 academics in the early stages of their careers who had accepted or declined/resigned university positions between 1986 and 1989 were interviewed. Contrary to suggestions in the literature, few significant gender differences emerged. In particular, family needs were a major consideration for both men and women. Responses revealed that both female and male academics who accepted positions generally were influenced most strongly by the academic reputation of the department and university, the compatibility of the appointment with the needs of family members, including dual-career relationships, and the attractiveness of the job offer, especially the length and type of contract. Male rejecters showed a similar pattern while female rejecters focused primarily on family needs and the job offer. Opportunities for personal development, support for research, the job market, teaching assignments, and geographical location were generally less influential for all respondents. Salary and discrimination were cited least frequently as factors underlying employment decisions. The results imply that academic recruiting for both female and male faculty members can be best enhanced by emphasizing the quality of academic life in the department and university, accommodating the needs of family members, and offering greater job security in the form of longer, tenure-track appointments.