This article examines the Japanese historical concept of nature in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Through modernisation, Japan was infused with Anglo-European philosophy. However, Japan's pre-modern concept of nature differed from that of the West or modern Japan and latently affected the Japanese modern educational system. The concept…

There are histories describing in detail the development of early childhood education (ECE) around the world, yet not enough is known about this in the Middle East and the information on the origins of ECE in Iran is scarce and fragmentary. This article is the first of its kind to present an overview of the main developments rendering possible the…

Early childhood instruction is a significant milestone in the development of a child. Educators, psychologists, and other school experts have developed materials and methods to make instructional practices more inclusive. During the process of educational reform, specialists in the field of education were confronted with epistemological concerns.…

Visual evidence offered by a set of previously unexamined photographic images taken at Stanmore Public School in Sydney, Australia in 1919 informs this paper which considers the images' purpose, construction, content, use, and reception. It endorses arguments that visual evidence combines with other sources to tell a richer history, and that…

How do assumptions about where children naturally belong reinforce colonial productions of the human? This paper presents research from a study examining how North American Waldorf educators navigated the colonial legacies of common-sense understandings of childhood. I focus on the ideas about childhood that emerge in a belief that Waldorf…

The public discussion of education consistently emphasizes school failure. To better understand this rhetoric, we tracked its appearance in five prominent print outlets from 1984 to 2016. By distinguishing between arguments about local schools and the nation's schools, we found that discussions of "failing schools" surged first as a…

Decades of research conducted worldwide has resulted in a taxonomy for word problems involving additive situations. Research published in the 1980s found that U.S. curricula only exposed first-grade students to a small subset of the easiest types of word problems. Widely adopted curriculum standards in the United States call for first-grade…

Decades of research conducted worldwide has resulted in a taxonomy for word problems involving additive situations. Research published in the 1980s found that U.S. curricula only exposed first-grade students to a small subset of the easiest types of word problems. Widely adopted curriculum standards in the United States call for first-grade…

This paper brings together the ideas of three writers from the 1880s who argued for an enhanced status for history in the school curriculum. Although there is superficial agreement between the writers in calling for history to develop children's citizenship and patriotism, each conceives these values differently. Focusing on the teaching of…

The "statewide system of support," a feature of Congress's 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provided an organizational framework for a "managerial" approach to school improvement that was accelerated in No Child Left Behind (2001). When Congress temporarily flooded states with economic…

Adolescent problems in Hong Kong have brought questions about their moral development and mental health to light. Moral education for preschool children will be strategically important to address these issues because applying early educational interventions to preschool children will effectively enhance their personal development. This article…

This article examines the life of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten in the 1840s. It describes how the kindergarten and its impact in Germany and the United States. It spread at the international level of education because German kindergarten teachers relocated it to other countries when it was banned in Germany. In the years from…

The purpose of the present study was to examine possible shifts in the presence of academic vocabulary across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core reading program. The authors examined seven program years dating from 1962 to 2013 and computationally determined four categories of academic vocabulary (science,…

Changes in U.S. textbooks indicate that U.S. first-grade students in the Common Core era were exposed to a wider variety of word problem types than students in previous generations were. We compared the performance of U.S. first graders in the Common Core era with that of previous generations in solving 11 types of additive word problems to…

The following paper continues the previous part, and examines the influence of crystallography on Fröbel's conception of mathematics. In this part we focus on yet unpublished material. These unpublished notes of Fröbel underline the visual transfer of drawing and images of crystals, mainly developed by Haüy, which were widespread at the turn of…