This project uses participatory inquiry methods with Year 2/3 students at Glenelg Primary School in Adelaide, Australia, to address a student-identified desire to learn outside more often. Through a seven-week inquiry, students selected areas around the school to explore, collected and analysed existing plant data, and delivered garden plans. The…

The teaching and learning of design technology that occurs in nature-based early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts such as nature kindergartens remains under-theorised. There is a growing body of scholarship that describes how teaching and learning occurs in these contexts as well as highlighting the benefits for young children learning…

Despite the acknowledged complexity and time pressures of early childhood educators' work, very few studies have examined the nature of this work, minute-by-minute, over the working day. This paper reports on data gathered through 10,155 time-use diary (TUD) records provided by 321 educators participating in the Exemplary Early Childhood Educators…

This article considers how teachers' encounters with a newly built learning space are complicit in the practices performed in that space. It builds on previous research into the relationship between learning spaces and pedagogical change by highlighting the acoustic aspects and how they were perceived by teachers in a primary school. Over two…

The National Quality Framework is used across Australia to drive quality improvement in early childhood settings. Unique to Western Australia, the National Quality Standard is also used in schools to improve quality in classrooms up to Year two (seven to eight years). However, the literature suggests the National Quality Standard is too broad with…

This paper presents data from interviews undertaken with teachers and parents of children who attend Australian bush kinders (kindergartens). The bush kinder approach is a recent adaptation of the European and UK forest school approaches, one that continues to gain momentum as increasingly teachers and parents come to understand the benefits…

There is a strong body of research showing associations between handwriting automaticity and children's writing performance. However, less is known about keyboarding automaticity and young students' writing performance. We investigated the relationship between handwriting and keyboarding automaticity and writing performance in both modalities in a…

Observational studies comparing child outcomes in early care and education classrooms of differing quality are often confounded by between-child differences. A within-child design, tracking children across contexts, can identify the effects of quality with less confounding. An analysis of Australian children (N = 1128, mean age 5 years, 48%…

Recent research indicates that teachers have the predominant role in organising early childhood classrooms in Australia. Not much is known about the involvement of children in organising the kindergarten classroom in Queensland, Australia. There is even less research that considers how the play equipment, utensils, resources and the classroom…

In this research, feminist post-structuralism and queer theory were used to examine Australian early childhood educators' views on children's gender identity development, and the content on gender in the Australian Government's Early Years Learning Framework. The methodology and study design were based upon qualitative phenomenological research…

The first year of university, also known as the first year experience (FYE), is a crucial time for students as they learn a range of new practices that enable them to study and pursue a discipline or profession of interest. The function of this transitionary time however in relation to providing both a successful transition into university as well…

Children's writing development is a matter of concern for Australian and other education systems. Factors related to the nature of writing as a literate skill, school writing pedagogy, and diminishing role of writing in a screen-dominant environment may account for this educational concern. What happens in a child's writing when immigrant parents…

Children's transition to school has been widely investigated, but most studies do not clearly define its starting point. By drawing on the cultural-historical concept of the social situation of development, and selecting 'role adjustment' as the unit of analysis, this paper seeks to clearly define the starting point of children's transition to…

Australian children from regional, rural and remote (RRR) areas exhibit lower educational outcomes than their peers in metropolitan areas. The mechanisms driving the comparatively poorer educational outcomes of children in RRR areas, however, are not well understood. This paper proposes and tests two sets of factors that may be responsible for…

Evidence shows that when young children's diverse language heritages are valued and supported, there are benefits for their linguistic and conceptual development, their sense of identity and their learning. However, there are few early learning settings in Australia which nurture young children's bilingual repertoires. And, while it is well…