Using participatory observations accompanied by video and audio recordings, this article investigates how negotiations about play scripts evolve during play in two Waldorf kindergartens. In particular, this study aims to examine how child-initiated play can contribute to the development of basic democratic skills in early childhood. The concept of…

Conflict situations occur in daily life in kindergarten. Often children find solutions by negotiations and compromises, but sometimes they also can use physical force against each other. The focus in this article is kindergarten practitioners' interventions in conflict situations when children use physical force and do not stop when they are told.…

This qualitative case study research explored children's social disputes in one New Zealand kindergarten. The disputes typically related to the possession of resources and space. "First possession" was found to be significant, hence the name of this article. The notion that children have to experience "possession" and…

Previous work has provided evidence that both merit and social relationships guide resource distribution in children. However, no prior studies have addressed the question of how children as third-party distributors balance the 2 factors when they are in conflict with one another. Two studies tested 7-year-old Chinese children's allocation of 3…

The purpose of this paper is to exemplify a "grass-roots" change based on Dewey's experimental progressive education model employed in the "Bridge over the Valley" bilingual school, a Palestinian-Arab and Jewish school in Israel. In order to identify the progressive "approach" underlying this change, the…

In Croatia, a radical change appeared in education in 1995. The Ministry of Education and Science of Croatia approved and funded the research project entitled "Information and communication competences of educators" that consisted of two parts: theoretical, study of the available literature on the communication competence of teachers in…

Several authors consider high and frequent conflicts between friends during childhood as a serious risk for subsequent conduct problems such as generalized physical aggression toward others (e.g., Kupersmidt, Burchinal, & Patterson, 1995; Sebanc, 2003). Although it seems logical to assume that friendship conflict could have some negative…

In this paper, we adopt Bernstein's notion of the pedagogic device to serve as a framework for explaining conflict and change in the field of literacy education across the past few decades, particularly in England, the USA and Australia. Following an overview of the pedagogic device and related constructs, we examine the relationship between the…

This paper analyses how textbooks deal with the issues of education for democratic citizenship encompassed within the European framework and Spanish educational reforms. The sample comprised the 24 individual texts in social science, natural science, and technology for 6-12-year-olds. This paper delimits and defines the six themes for analysis:…

Educating for peace at the primary level is more critical now than ever before, as our students struggle to choose and emulate the models of peace education that stand before them. Continuously facing a sensationalized picture of war, students must not learn from the media generated models that stand before them in a time of war. Instead,…