Music is ever-present in early childhood but does not feature strongly in the national curriculum framework -- The Early Years Learning Framework in Australia or in the intentional practice of educators in early childhood education and care settings. This is mainly due to a lack of knowledge and confidence or self-efficacy to engage musically with…

Three Australian Government reports released between 2011 and 2017 highlight a child development theory-practice gap in Australian early childhood initial teacher education. This qualitative study explores what informs university lecturers' teaching of child development theory in tertiary programmes. Grounded in Interpretative Phenomenological…

Early childhood teachers are well-positioned to maximise preschoolers' development in oral language and emergent literacy; both of which are vital predictors of academic success at school. Research investigating their pre-service training in language and emergent literacy remains limited. This issue is addressed in the present study, with the…

Teaching about gender-based violence involves dealing with a form of difficult knowledge and as such calls for substantial emotional, political and pedagogical labour on the part of educators. In this paper, we discuss how we have drawn on theoretical perspectives offered by Judith Butler, along with the Deleuzian notion of affective assemblages…

While educators, curriculum authors and policy makers alike are influenced by assumptions about parents' dis/approval of gender and sexuality diversity, both generally, as well as specifically in relation to this topic's appropriateness for K-12 classrooms, little empirical data is available to support these assumptions. What data does exist…

University websites and internet search engines were used to locate information about literacy units addressing early reading instruction offered in Australian primary and early childhood teacher preparation programs. Data concerning course organizational details, the content of literacy units, and the qualifications and research interests of unit…

There is an identifiable gap between Australian government policy aspiration and curriculum guidance found in the content of the renewed Australian Curriculum (2018) that has been designed to support the cross-curriculum priority (CCP) of "Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia." We have employed an inductive, interpretative research…

The present study aimed to empirically evaluate the knowledges, attitudes and perspectives of pre-service teachers towards Indigenous peoples, and to identify relationships between student learning experiences and student knowledges, attitudes and preparedness to work with Indigenous peoples, at one Australian university. The project was part of a…

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen…

Drawing on a Participatory Action Research (PAR) study that was undertaken in two Australian preschool settings this article examines strategies that support the pedagogy of teaching for social justice and outlines how these strategies raised critical consciousness of both preschoolers (aged three to five years) and early childhood educators to…

In Australia, the growth in the provision of early childhood services for very young children aged birth to three years has placed increased demands on pre-service teachers as new policy stipulates the need for qualified early childhood teachers. While many teacher education programs offer early childhood courses, they have traditionally had a…

Religion, like Superhero discourse, is a contested topic of question and debate in early childhood education. This article draws on data from a small ethnographic study that took place in a long day care centre in Sydney Australia. The study examined how children negotiated their "identity work" in the context of popular culture. In this…