Goal: The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e.,…

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and…

It is broadly admitted that social contexts of reasoning may prompt children and adolescents to improve the quality of their reasoning. However, it is not clear how this quality may be assessed when it comes to arguments expressed within oral interactions in diverse settings (whole-class or small-group discussions) by students of different ages…

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education has been actively implemented around the world recently. ICT curriculum in schools is intended to improve students' programming-oriented thinking rather than to train them as programmers. The core of ICT education is 'computational thinking'. Computational thinking is taking an approach to…

This book provides significant information regarding the policies and provisions for early childhood teacher education programs in universities in fourteen different countries. Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is expanding rapidly across the globe with unprecedented numbers of children attending EC centres, requiring the investment in…

In this paper we grapple with the ways in which real-world issues directly impact children's lives and ask "what else" gets produced through encounters with children's global news media, specifically within the contexts of the United Kingdom and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with storytelling and worldling practices as a means to open…

This article presents a summary of a research project conducted in the UK and Taiwan, examining how two groups of primary aged children responded to the same set of drama lessons designed around a traditional Chinese story, "The Water Ghost" (in Chinese, ??). The authors summarise both the story and their research methodology before…

In a recent keynote speech Paul Standish noted "there is agreement in judgments. But how the response to those judgments is realised is always cultural" (paper presented to PESA Conference, Taiwan, 2012, p. 2). Making judgments about what constitutes "crisis" for children is not necessarily agreed universally, though clearly…

Because professionalism in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is measured by standards relating to caring, men in the field are often held to expectations associated with female behaviors. This research examines the tensions arising from this encounter and explores alternative solutions which male ECEC workers around the world have…

This comparative study explores the verbal communication between museum educators and young children, based on principles of developmental psychology. In early developmental stages, when student learning is greatly dependent on verbal communications from the teacher, observation skills may be developed through purposeful instruction. Through the…