Alexandra C. Gunn

Supporting inclusion in early childhood settings: some possibilities and problems for teacher education

Aotearoa New Zealand, like other countries, has legislation and policies that support inclusion and promote the participation of all children and families in early childhood education. We might expect therefore to see a culture of inclusion resonating through policy and practice in early childhood settings. There are early childhood teachers who support such legislative and policy goals, who are committed to inclusion, and who are developing more inclusive early childhood services. Yet, it is also evident that discrimination and exclusion is experienced by many. Teacher education plays an important role in supporting inclusion and assisting teachers’ development of knowledge, skills and attitudes that will support them to teach all children. In this paper, we write as a group of teacher educators and demonstrate the challenges we took up to move beyond traditional approaches to inclusive education and to open up theoretically and practically diverse possibilities for thinking and doing inclusion differently in early childhood teacher education.

Even if you say it three ways, it still doesn’t mean it’s true: The pervasiveness of heteronormativity in early childhood education

Heteronormativity, the concept that heterosexual sexuality is an institutionalized norm and a superior and privileged standard, is held firm when discourses of gender, sexualities and family form converge. In a study of heteronormative discourses in the context of early childhood education, teachers shared accounts of practices where genders, sexualities and family form were troubled and troubling. An analysis of these showed the repetitive distribution of the statement, heterosexuality is/as normal, and therefore illuminated the pervasiveness of heteronormativity in work with young children and families. This article makes visible the ways heteronormativity is achieved in early childhood education along these trajectories and asks, in whose interests is the (hetero)norm being preserved?

Constructing the academic category of teacher educator in universities’ recruitment processes in Aotearoa, New Zealand

An examination of recruitment materials and interviews with personnel involved in the employment of teacher educators to positions in university-based New Zealand initial teacher education (ITE) courses reveals three constructions of teacher educator as academic worker: the professional expert, the dually qualified, and the traditional academic. However, this study’s analysis shows how these constructions allow universities to pursue a bifurcated approach for the employment of teacher educators, an approach that maintains binaries within teacher education and hinders development in the field. Furthermore, as the spectre of a major cultural shift in the provision of New Zealand ITE arises, the extent to which the professional expert and traditional academic constructions of teacher educator might serve the scope of work required of postgraduate ITE going forth is questioned.

The changing work of teacher educators in Aotearoa New Zealand: a view through activity theory

ABSTRACT The study of recruitment practices for teacher educators (TEs) in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) universities reveals the academic category of TE constituted along three related trajectories: a professional expert (not required to research), a traditional academic (not required to hold a teaching qualification or teacher’s practicing certificate), and one who is dually qualified, to teach (as a registered NZ teacher) and to research. It is the dually qualified type of TE who can service the full scope of university-based initial teacher education (UBITE). Recent recruitment practices have, however, focused on employment of professional experts and traditional academics. Drawing from document analyses and interviews, we present a picture of changing work for TEs. Our study argues that policy environments and universities’ responses are changing the objects, rules, and divisions of labour in UBITE. We comment on the evolution of initial teacher education in NZ, its likely trajectory, and its potential for development.

Interactions and Learning: Overview and Introduction

This book considers the place and utility of interactions as a basis for learning in early years education and care. Of increasing interest to scholars and practitioners of early education, interactions are an important aspect of process quality that can give us insights into how and why learning is supported or hindered in the early years. In the broad sense, this book is concerned with understanding how we might recognise educational environments that foster learning and support pedagogical practices based upon quality human relationships and interactions between children, people and things in early childhood education. We are interested in exploring: what is it in relationships between children, families and professionals that sustain learning and development in early years? How are interaction partners affording each other opportunities for learning or working together to advance learning? How can educators in the early years take insights from interaction research into practice and improve the quality of pedagogical practices?

Shaping Gender Relations in Early Childhood Education: Children’s Interactions and Learning About Gender

There are many theories about how one gets their gender and what this may mean for how people live their lives. Developmental texts typically present a range of psychological theories for sex differences, gender, or sex stereotyping and are replete with explanations for why children do the gendered things they do. In the West and until the late twentieth century and the rise of feminism, psychologists regarded the development of quite strictly governed gender roles and beliefs in children as a healthy expression of so-called normal gender development. With renewed interest in the study of genders however and an increased awareness that in fact, at the extremes of continua of so-called normal gender development, social expectations are not necessarily healthy and supportive of an individual’s wellbeing, views on concepts of gender roles and gender development have begun to change. A diversity of explanations for why children do their gender the ways they do now sits alongside each other and give rise to people’s different conceptions of gender and its development in early childhood.

Using Insights from Interactions Research to Improve Policy and Practice in Early Childhood Education

The study of human development and learning in the West has broadened its focus across the twentieth century from a position that largely privileged the individual human subject as separated from the world and effected by its influences, to one where human subjectivity and the world are mutually constitutive; where experience is mediated by cultural tools; and through which over time, we can see the expansion of human learning and activity as interdependent (Bronfenbrenner and Ceci 1994; Rogoff 2003; Vygotsky 1978). It is no longer possible or desirable to view people as separate from culture and to ignore the reciprocal influences of people and culture. This is a major factor in why studies into interactions between children and their worlds are of growing interest to researchers, educators and policy makers alike. In the context of early childhood education in New Zealand for instance, we see this in the view of children as increasingly capable of and competent to direct their own learning as they draw from and shape what happens in the early childhood service (Ministry of Education 2004/2009). Concurrently, formal learning theories have expanded across the late twentieth century to account more clearly for the ways interactions between people, places, and things within an education setting invite and sustain learning (for example, the shift from individual cognitive constructivism to social-constructivism, and social-situated views of learning and associated theories like for instance, community of practice, (Snyder and Wenger 2010)). From a sociocultural perspective learning experiences lead developmental growth and change; communication between people, in deliberately planned places, with particular things is of paramount importance to learning. As educators in early childhood education have begun to take up these ideas with more vigour around the world understanding interactions and the learning that comes from them is of growing importance. Hence the critical need for research and scholarship into learning interactions and educational practice in the early years.

The Spectre of Standards in Aotearoa New Zealand Early Childhood Education and Care

In this chapter we argue that the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, and its subsequent mandating in law negates any imposition of standards upon learning outcomes of New Zealand early childhood education. However, the New Zealand charter scholl movement, including a 2015 request for proposals for charter schools for the 0–8 years age-range poses a threat to this position. We describe how and why New Zealand has advocated a standards free approach in early childhood educationand we question policy objectives that counteract this stance. Our chapter situates standards in the context of neoliberal education policy and asks what the spectre of standards in the early years might mean for practice going forth.

Children's Use of Objects in Their Storytelling

Children’s academic achievements are often measured by their levels of literacy and numeracy where a considerable amount of interest has been given to these specific learning domains. Narrative skills feature prominently in children’s later literacy in American and New Zealand research (Griffin et al. 2004; Reese et al. 2010). For instance, Reese et al. (2010) demonstrated that the quality of children’s oral narrative expression in the first 2 years of reading instruction uniquely predicted their later reading, over and above the role of their vocabulary knowledge and decoding skill. Stuart McNaughton’s research in South Auckland (McNaughton 2002) has also emphasised the value of narrative competence for future literacy practice while illustrating the different styles of storytelling and reading across different cultural communities. When children narrate experiences and story-tell, they engage in cognitive, affective and social experiences and explorations that extend beyond simple conversation – opportunities to understand the social world – and one’s place within it arises (Bruner 1991). Narratives are recognised as essential to both autobiographical memory and identity (Wertsch 2002; Bruner 2002; Szenberg et al. 2012). Classic studies remind us of the autonomy of children in developing their own cultural routines through mutual negotiations and storying (Sutton-Smith 1997 p.171) and the powerful combination of adding affect to cognition using story (Egan 1997; Vivian Gussin Paley 2004). In short, narrative competence is a valuable outcome in its own right.

Methodologies for researching cultural diversity in education: international perspectives. Edited by Geri Smyth and Ninetta Santoro

Methodologies for researching cultural diversity in education: international perspectives, edited by Geri Smyth and Ninetta Santoro, is a valuable new edition to the education research literature. Designed to help researchers and research consumers understand complexities when researching in education settings replete with rich cultural diversities, the book showcases methods and conceptual tools that each of the contributing authors have deployed in recent work across countries within Europe, in Canada and Australia. Recognising the pivotal relationship between researcher and the researched, the book inquires into ethical and methodological issues of researching in culturally diverse sites of education. It will find audience with established education and social science researchers and beginners, as well as students of research methods. For those seeking to make use of research for educational development and improvement, the book supports readers’ and consumers’ interpretive work as they make sense of ethics of the self and other, in their own pursuits of socially just outcomes in education. Chapter 1 provides Joke Dewilde an opportunity to discuss ‘discursive shadowing’ as a method in a study of bilingual teachers’ collaborations with others in the context of Norwegian compulsory education. Noting that bilingual teachers engage in a great deal of travelling in their work: between schools, classrooms, age and curriculum levels, a method that would capture and work positively with that movement was developed. Research participants’ constant states of movement produced movement in the researcher, bringing both parties to episodes of joint movement and common reflection about the everyday. Dewilde argues that by moving with the research participant teachers in the study, the data were not fixed to formal meetings and joint lessons, but rather produced of the complex, multifaceted and sometimes unexpected interactions and locations of the teacher’s workday. As such, a richer account of the complexities of bilingual teachers’ work in Norway was produced. The often-considered questions of insider/outsider relations in social and educational research coupled with the affordances and restrictions of institutional ethics guidelines provide the subject matter of Clea Schmidt’s work in Chapter 2. Reflecting on a criticalparticipatory-action-research collaboration with immigrant teachers in Manitoba Canada, Schmidt asks us to consider notions of expertise and knowledge ownership as they intersect with the pursuit of equity and rub up against researchers’ institutional policies concerning research ethics. By engaging with critical-participatory-action-research, a researcher is forced to not pre-determine and fix the scope, questions, methods and practices of the research endeavour – instead these are negotiated in situ, with the researched, and in relation to the inquiries the parties to the study wish to follow. A British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 64, No. 1, March 2016, pp. 119–138