This article seeks to examine critically South African early child development (ECD) in order to uncover some of the challenges that lie ahead in creating a more equitable future for its youngest ...children. An investigation of play and learning within varied ECD contexts, using observation and interview, is presented. The social constructionist approach adopted allowed exploration of play and learning from the perspectives of a range of stakeholders. Three themes, role of play, sources of inequality and barriers to play, are interrogated. The role and contribution of the concepts of readiness, needs and play to maintaining unequal treatment of vulnerable children are identified. The possibility that these concepts may serve as mechanisms to reproduce social and cultural inequality is considered.
Provision of education for children under five has recently become a political concern. At the same time, this relatively small field has been attracting increased research attention, with many early ...years practitioners seeking routes to initial and higher degrees. This book offers essential guidance for researchers and newcomers to the field, outlining opportunities in research as well as useful, sensitive and appropriate methods for researching childhood education.
This paper presents the results from the second phase of a case study exploring home-school relationships in Cyprus based on parents’ perspectives. Interviews with parents indicated that they ...understood that home-school co-operation might benefit children’s attainments, emphasising the family’s role in education and in formation of character. Parents confirmed that current home-school relationships were limited to parents’ meetings and routine communication with teachers. Many parents however emphasised that the nature of home-school relationships depended upon the teachers’ approach and suggested that teachers should initiate more contact and increase the frequency of meetings. Many parents also appeared to be critical of other parents who were seen to create problems and not accept teachers’ views. This suggested that improvement of home-school relationships would be challenging and could vary from a parent to parent. The relationship between school culture and orientation of the family to that culture is not straightforward and mediated implicitly through the child’s social behaviour and academic achievement. The current situation in Cyprus suggests that school teachers’ bring two key constructs to home-school relations: one relates to children’s conduct, character and manners; the other to learning, acquisition of knowledge and academic attainment. Where there are concerns about either of these, teachers regard it as the parents’ responsibility to address them. Parents meanwhile acknowledge the dominant role of teachers in defining the home-school relationship and accept that the nature of the relationship depends upon the parent as well as the teacher. However, they would welcome more opportunity to renegotiate this role.
This article uses autoethnography as the method of inquiry to explore definitions and contexts of early childhood education leadership. This affords a new space between the subjective and objective, ...the autobiographical and the cultural, to write in a way that lies between literature and the social sciences. Against a backcloth of scientific and cultural change, five turning-point moments are identified that link personal social circumstances to continuity and change in conceptions of leadership and management, particularly in the early childhood education sector. Modernist hierarchical and more recent subjective or postmodernist models are considered along the way. It is concluded that there is a role for theory in both guiding and interrogating practice. If leaders’ conceptions are to be better informed by knowledge of contrasting and competing theories, then through a process of praxis, critical awareness may increase. This depends, however, on access to the training and development that early childhood education professionals do not currently enjoy.
A review of evidence on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the early years was commissioned by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency. Views of ...practitioners, parents and children were obtained and practitioner ICT audits completed. Most young children grow up in media-rich digital environments in which they actively engage. Family members and practitioners are positive and actively promote use of ICT through ongoing socio-cultural practices. There appears to be a gap between children's access to and use of ICT at home and in early years settings, and between state-maintained and non-maintained sectors. Training implications are marked. Cost of purchase, maintenance and replacement of age-appropriate digital technology remains a challenge and the development of active pedagogy to maximise benefits of technological advances must generate imaginative solutions.
This case study attempts to capture the way gender is constructed and experienced in the social world of the nursery school. It presents findings from a staff survey, structured and unstructured ...observations of one male's and one female's professional practice and one-to-one interviews with children aged three to four years. Despite practitioners' reported intentions to challenge traditional notions of gender, construction of traditional gender distinctions was not problematised by staff and was upheld by comments of children. Children appeared to construct themselves in terms of gender stereotypes and were offered only limited alternative gender positions by the male and female practitioners.
Many surveys and interviews have elicited male practitioners’ views about gender balance in the early childhood education and care workforce, and few have explored in depth the context to such work ...choices, whether economic, cultural, social or personal. A life history approach was employed to provide a retrospective account by six early childhood education and care professionals of their lives and some of the influences on these. They varied in job role, in organisation that employed them and in their ages ranging from 20 to 60 years. Being at different stages of their life course, some had lived through considerable societal change in education, job choice, attitudes and values. The life history approach also offered a means to explore broader questions about their professional development, links between life and work that rose above the individual voice to represent the profession that participants had chosen.
The aim was to investigate the policy-to-practice context of delays and difficulties in the acquisition of speech, language and communication (SLC) in children from birth to five in one local ...authority within the context of Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological model. Methods included a survey of early years practitioners (64 responses), interviews with 11 early years practitioners and observations of 9 children in the context of their early years settings. Policy texts revealed a growing consensus on the importance of early learning and development, the centrality of language and early intervention. Practitioner survey and interview findings indicated confident practice in relation to early identification, assessment and support, despite minimal initial professional training in SLC and virtually none for children with English as an additional language. Greater use of specialist assessment tools and alternative communication systems was made in specialist than mainstream settings. Observation showed considerable variation in the organisation of staff, groups, activities and interactional patterns with more targeted, short and intensive adult-led activity in special settings that led to less child-initiated interactions and private 'self-talk', characteristic of large-group free play of mainstream settings. Challenges and opportunities of generalist and specialist provision are discussed.
Current policy guidance stresses the need for early identification of obstacles to learning and appropriate intervention. New standards for learning (Early Years Foundation Stage) place personal, ...social and emotional development (PSED) as central to learning and development. This paper reports a survey and follow-up interviews with early years practitioners on early identification and intervention of young children with difficulties in PSED. As previous research with primary and secondary colleagues has shown, practitioners find low-level disturbance occurring most frequently. Although aggressive behaviour (hurting others, kicking, hitting and biting) is a concern, not attending or listening and immature social skills (lack of sharing and turn-taking, and inability to relate to other children) is a bigger challenge. Practitioners report a range of strategies for formally teaching relevant skills but point to the greater challenge of supporting recent immigrants where different cultural and social norms need to be understood.
Early childhood (EC) leadership literature indicates few theoretically based studies identifying and testing different models and characteristics of leadership. Objectives were thus to identify, ...describe and analyse what leadership meant to key EC participants; to consider roles, responsibilities and characteristics; to investigate core components; to capture practice and judge how it was understood and enacted. A case-study approach used 12 sites and multiple data-gathering methods: questionnaires; interviews; and in-depth ‘day in the life’ video vignettes. Participants described their organizations as hierarchical in structure and traditional in strategic decision-making, yet collaborative in culture and operational functioning. Variation in leadership, management and administration patterns across settings indicated multiple leadership roles in diverse EC settings. Principal components analysis revealed that those with postgraduate qualifications favoured ‘leaders as guides’; those with professional heritages other than teaching leaned towards ‘leaders as strategists’; those with NVQ qualifications tended towards ‘leaders as motivators’; those with postgraduate qualifications also valued ‘leaders as business oriented’. New models of leadership are thus worthy of consideration. Leaders acknowledged difficulty in standing back and reflecting, recognizing an essential aspect of leadership was ongoing thinking and decision-making, inaccessible unless they ‘talked-aloud’ whilst engaging in professional practice. This suggests a need to increase self-understanding and alternative routes to problem-solving.
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