Formative assessment and effective use of data to support student learning are key components of practice in early childhood (EC) centres. Although Trinidad and Tobago has developed an impressive EC care system, to decrease the achievement gap which international studies have shown to be significant in core subjects, educational planners must…

We might call this decade the era of early childhood. In the US, federal and state governments invest in the creation of public pre-kindergarten (preK) programs and create standards that articulate goals for practice and benchmarks that can be used to evaluate success. How have these trends provided a context for the evolution of preK curriculum?…

This article focuses on the impact of the physical environment and construction of play culture in kindergartens. Based on a case study, we explore employees' perception of indoor physical environment and children's play. The findings revealed that gender is interwoven in the physical environments and materials. Children's play practices are…

Most research in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, in Greece and internationally, focuses on children's relationships with their early years practitioners, but evidence regarding young children's role in the formation of these relationships is limited. This paper focuses on 10 children, under the age of three, recognizing…

In this paper, a case study of an international partnership between two universities, one in Australia and the other in China, is presented. The internationalisation of early childhood degree programmes in Australia is reasonably new and there is limited literature on the subject. This study evaluates a Sino-Australian partnership of a joint…

This research aimed to explore children's play in relation to gender stereotypes and beliefs and practices of educators in preschool settings. A feminist poststructuralist approach framed the design of the research and data were collected in two settings through predetermined categories of play during periods of spontaneous free play. The question…

This case study explores how opportunities for critical, place-based education can be eclipsed by the decontextualized curricula and pedagogies inherent in neoliberal, standards-based early education reforms such as universal pre-kindergarten that contain some progressive elements. Following Schwab (1973), we explore the roles of teachers and…

Within the United States, publicly funded pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) is a borderland of teacher practice--somewhere between early childhood and Elementary approaches to pedagogy. For pre-K teachers, this can mean negotiating many different, and oft-competing conceptions of what curriculum and practice should look like in order to support the…

Background/Context: Early childhood education joined the standards movement in 2002 with the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative (Brown, 2007), with advocates arguing that standards were a tool for creating more continuity and coherence in PreK systems (Bowman, 2006; Kagan 2012). Critics posed concerns about a perceived poor fit between…

This paper explores dance as literacy. Specifically, it examines qualitative case study research findings and student examples from a dance artist-in-residence that explored curricular content using dance as its primary mode of enquiry and expression. Throughout the residency, students constructed meaning through their dance experiences in dynamic…

Multi-digit subtraction is difficult for students to learn. The purpose of this study is to explore how second-grade students communicate their understanding of double-digit subtraction through the use of manipulatives/tools. This qualitative study reports on six case studies of second-grade students where clinical interviews were the main source…

This article describes a dual-case study that was conducted to examine the effects of The Tools Approach on kindergarten students' use of and interest in informational text. Children in one teacher's kindergarten classroom during two subsequent years participated in a writing intervention which included learning about text features, conducting…

Research indicates that adult sensitivity to psychological states (both the adult's and the infant's) will affect the security of attachment yet the teacher's internal state has received little attention in infant care. "Perezhivanie" is a sociocultural concept that presents affect and intellect as a unit rather than separate elements.…

"Working theories" encompass children's theorising about the social and material worlds. This article looks explicitly at power relations involved in pedagogy around children's working theories by focusing on the teacher's control of what and whose working theories get unpacked and extended. From an analysis of four cases from early…

Intercultural competence among educators has long been recognised as important, especially in contexts characterised by growing and shifting cultural diversity such as Australia. However, the capacity to be interculturally competent has only recently been enshrined in teacher standards in Australia, and research into this field among early…