The "Child Care in Practice" Conference took place on October 15, 2016, in Newry, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. The theme of the one-day conference was "Celebrating Diversity" and included keynote addresses and workshops. This article includes summaries of some of the speaker presentations that day, including: (1) Evolving…

The aim of this paper is to report on barriers to ICT integration in teaching practices from the perspective of early childhood teachers. Six early childhood teachers from a combined private school in Queensland participated in this study. Individual interviews explored the ICT tools used in early childhood programs and the barriers to integration…

Starting from the point of view of how the articulation and examination of personal values, beliefs and attitudes can stimulate the process of better understanding and the development of professionalism as well as the development of professional identity of preschool and primary school teachers, the main aim of this study was to explore the…

The early years are significant in optimising children's educational, emotional and social outcomes and have become a major international policy priority. Within Australia, policy levers have prioritised early childhood education, with a focus on program quality, as it is associated with lifelong success. Longitudinal studies have found that high…

Drawing on both extensive professional and deeply personal experience, Sarah Werner Andrews' vision of working with children carries profound respect and love throughout her guiding insight. She shares an understanding of those children who are the most challenging and provides a framework that allows us to embrace these and all children.…

The United States of America is known to be one of the most culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse countries in the world. With this comes the increasing diversity among school populations, making multicultural education necessary at all levels of education while integrating a culturally inclusive world-view into all areas of the curriculum.…

This paper explores the challenges of working with non-native speakers of English, on areas pertinent to the successful education of trainee teachers of young children in Lithuania. The challenges faced were numerous, as the two week programme was not specifically related to the young child's education, covering subjects such as quality assurance…

This multiple case study utilizes interviewing, shadowing, classroom observation and document review to investigate holistic educators' perspectives on essential outcomes of holistic education, how desired outcomes are supported, perceived self-efficacy and perceived likelihood of success. Participants include kindergarten and upper elementary…

This paper presents a study carried out in a nursery and primary school in order to ascertain the level of self-assessment undertaken by teachers with respect to their educational processes using the "ACADI" instrument, "School-based self-assessment of diversity awareness from an inclusive approach." The objective was to…

The research presented in this paper focuses on the cognitive diagnostic strategies that prospective elementary mathematics teachers (PTs) use in their reflections of one-on-one diagnostic interviews with children in grade one. Thereby, it responds to the detected lack of knowledge regarding qualitative facets of diagnostic proceeding in interview…

Teacher education programs are typically seen as innovative models of teaching, but how do teacher educators stay current in methodologies that reach diverse and underserved students? This study documents the initial teaching concerns of seasoned teacher educators (PK-8th grade), across areas of study, and followed them across two years as they…

Recent research findings indicate that using multiple metaphors in multimodal learning experiences are effective teaching approaches in early years mathematics. Using a social semiotic lens this paper reports on eight early years teachers' perceptions of this approach whilst engaging in a small collaborative professional learning group. This group…

Sustained shared thinking (SST) has been identified in the Teachers Standards (Early Years) (2013) as contributing to good progress and outcomes by children. In this paper, I define SST and discuss the outcomes of a study of practitioners' understandings of SST, its challenges and benefits. Writing frames, questionnaires and focus group interviews…

This report is based on an exploratory case study of a private multilingual preschool language program that integrated a Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) project into the curriculum of five/six year-old children whose native language(s) is/are Russian and/or Tatar. The purpose of the study was to reveal teachers' and parents' perceptions…

We explore early childhood teachers' lived experiences learning and teaching mathematics with young children, adding finer-grained context and detail to broader research descriptions. We interviewed ten early childhood teachers in a university laboratory school about their mathematics training, classroom mathematics curriculum, who controls their…