Mentoring is highly valued to support teachers' professional growth. Yet little is known about mentors' experiences and roles in supporting early childhood education teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. This study sought to fill that gap by asking mentors how they foster teachers' capacity, as well as the barriers and enablers they have experienced…

Critical pedagogy has the potential to create transformation experiences within early childhood settings, as educators open up children's worlds to explore fairness, equity, and democratic participation across issues of interest and relevance to young children. Using a critical inquiry framework, informed by the work of Paulo Freire, teachers from…

An expansive view of care is vital to understanding children's sense-making of their care experiences in early childhood education. Yet, scant literature explores how toddlers enact and express understandings of care in their play with objects and others. This article identifies play situations where toddlers enact and express understandings, and…

In response to growing attention to young children's citizenship, and recent calls for critique of Western discourses and practices, we explore the movement of Western 'pioneering' pedagogies of early childhood education (ECE) and their localisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. Employing a poststructural positioning, and theoretical devices drawn from…

Recognising children as active and competent citizens holds promise for early childhood research and pedagogies worldwide. Researchers in China have not previously explored young children's citizenship in detail. The project that is the focus of this article sought to address this research gap. Moss' critical approach and Chen's "Asia as…

This paper presents a narrative case study of an innovative Froebelian approach to professional development, implemented in a large Nursery School and Family Centre in southern England undertaken as part of an extended programme of research and development funded by the Froebel Trust from 2021-2024 which was trans-national, including two early…

The early childhood sector in New Zealand has a long-held tradition of free play and child-led pedagogy, influencing visual arts approaches with young children. However, alongside learning through play, New Zealand's sociocultural curriculum highlights the active role of the teacher and intentional pedagogy. This article explores the practices and…

The complex and fluid nature of knowledge is a key dimension of the early childhood curriculum and of early childhood teaching and learning. Such complexity adds to the already complex and dynamic work of an early childhood teacher. With a dynamic view of knowledge in mind, this article reports on research with a team of early childhood teachers…

Although both love and care, as teacher quality and teaching practice, are a common relational dimension of early childhood teaching, the two terms have different denotations in the professionalism discourse. Adopting a two-phase design, data collection of this study includes thematic synthesis of systematically selected literature and expert…

This article argues that mentoring relationships between student teachers and lecturers can be enhanced when lecturers participate in personal critical reflections of their role and practice. Current literature acknowledges the need for successful practice-based mentoring and assessment relationships, with students stating these relationships…

This collaborative project explores the nature of teacher-child sustained shared thinking (SST) in two kindergartens. SST involves teachers engaging with children in play, working together in back and forth conversations that provide opportunities to discuss, explore, and think about everyday experiences, problems or challenges in an inquisitive…

Pedagogical documentation is practised in early childhood centres all over the world as a means to gauge the learning and development of children. From the point of view of teachers, however, documentation must compete with numerous other tasks. This paper explores the strategies teachers employ in order to integrate documentation into their…

This adaptable guide invites kaiako to rethink approaches to engaging tamariki, re-envisage the teacher/learner dynamic, revise old habits, and reconfigure learning environments to acknowledge and embrace cultural differences. Kaiako can use the Hikairo Schema several times over, drawing on their previous experiences to inform and to develop new…

Although there has been considerable research on the distinction between categories of relational and physical aggression, very little is known about the difference in nature of these behaviours. This study presented early childhood educators (N = 123) and parents (N = 112) with common relationally and physically aggressive behaviours, to…

In this article I discuss how discourses of democratic early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a child's right, and enterprise discourses of ECEC as a commodity, have constructed teachers' work and professional identities in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past two decades. I illustrate two prevailing identity constructions of teachers emerging…