Christian Winterbottom

‘Seen but not heard’. Practitioners work with poverty and the organising out of disadvantaged children’s voices and participation in the early years

ABSTRACT Living in poverty disadvantages young children reducing school readiness. ‘Pedagogy of listening’ can potentially support resilience remediating against poverty’s negative effects. Little, though, is known about how early childhood education and care (ECEC) practitioners work with children in poverty and the attainment gap between such children and their peers remains significant within England and the US. This article reports research using a mixed methodology which explored these issues in localities across both these countries. We argue a dominant technocratic model of early years provision in these contexts creates normalisation and diversity reduction. This, and austerity measures, stymie pedagogical space and practice organising out listening to children in poverty. We suggest this may help explain why the attainment gap remains so stubbornly resistant to reduction across these countries.

Does Accreditation Matter? School Readiness Rates for Accredited versus Nonaccredited Child Care Facilities in Florida's Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten Program.

Accreditation is a widely accepted indicator of quality in early education and includes many of the components cited in broad conceptualizations of quality. The purpose of this study was to examine whether kindergarten readiness rates differed between Florida child care facilities that were and were not accredited by any relevant national association or by the three Gold Seal Quality Care–approved associations as defined in Florida statute. To examine this, the authors looked at child care facilities licensed by the Florida Department of Children and Families and participating in the state Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten program in the years 2007 through 2010. Of the 4,322 facilities in this study, accreditation was not associated with better school readiness when children were tested in kindergarten in any years except 2007. The number of students who were deemed kindergarten ready was not different for accredited versus nonaccredited facilities in Florida. These results suggest that although accreditation may be a worthy goal for child care programs to pursue, it may be insufficient to affect child outcomes.

Empowerment through pedagogy: positioning service-learning as an early childhood pedagogy for pre-service teachers

Over the past decade early childhood education (ECE) teachers have faced increasing pressures to implement standardised tests in order to secure external validation and funding. In response, many teacher education programmes now focus heavily on positivistic training approaches, as opposed to more developmentally appropriate pedagogies [Winterbottom, C., & Lake, V. E. (2013) Cultivating leadership and responsibility in children. Exchange, 5, 36–39]. In this study, we examined the effectiveness of an alternative, service-learning training approach based upon constructivist principles in Ohio. Specifically, 120 students in a university teacher education programme participated in semester-long service-learning group-based projects. Post-project assessments indicated remarkably positive student reactions to their experience in ways that relate to important pedagogy-related goals. We conclude with a recommendation to incorporate service-learning methodology into teacher training programmes.

Evidence-Based Practices: Providing Guidance for Early Childhood Practitioners.

ABSTRACT Early childhood education represents a pivotal opportunity to improve the developmental trajectories of young children, and evidence-based practices (EBPs) are scientifically proven to improve these outcomes. Furthermore, federal law mandates that early childhood practitioners implement EBPs. However, because EBP has not been clearly defined in early childhood education, and it is sometimes conflated with the related, but distinct, approach of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP), many early childhood educators struggle with how to identify which practices are evidence based, developmentally appropriate, both, or neither. In other fields related to education, professional organizations provide explicit guidelines for identifying EBPs. Here, the authors review guidelines from professional and government organizations and provide suggestions for how the field of early childhood education might develop its own guidelines. Furthermore, the authors propose a framework for how their field might maintain a dual emphasis on EBPs and DAP. Specifically, the authors call on researchers, content experts, and practitioners to collectively develop criteria for identifying and evaluating EBPs and DAPs, and then widely disseminate these criteria through websites, reports, and conferences to assist practitioners as they select EBPs that will promote optimal learning and development.

Reconstructing teacher education: a praxeological approach to pre-service teacher education

Praxeological-learning has emerged as a potential theoretical framework that has considerable potential to support and improve teacher education preparation programs. This article presents a study with participative research on early childhood with four groups of students. In response to new twenty-first century Teaching Standards and enhanced field experiences, pre-service teacher (PST) education candidates at a regional campus in the Midwest engaged in academic praxeological-learning, which offered the opportunity to increase content mastery and reinforce pedagogical skills through authentic experiences. Results indicate that students participating in this type of learning believed their experiences contributed positively to pedagogical skill development, self-actualisation, and social and moral development. The impact on our teacher education program and the relevance of these findings for training the next generation of educators is discussed.

Redefining Early Childhood Epistemology: Exploring Service-Learning Pedagogy in an Early Childhood Context

Over the last decade, the early childhood (EC) landscape has changed dramatically in the United States. With the implementation of the No Child Left Behind legislation (2002) and more recently with Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standards, the EC field has been grappling with conceptualizing different pedagogies to use in the classroom to support the changing landscape. In this chapter, we explore the use of a cascading model of service-learning pedagogy on a regional campus of a large mid-western university in the U.S. and posit strategies which pre-service teachers (PSTs) and institutions have used in their classroom settings. Moreover, through case study approaches, we call on the voices of the PSTs to elicit their perspectives of how they would implement service learning in their early childhood classrooms. The chapter ends by offering practical solutions for instructors of pre-service teachers on how to successfully integrate and implement service learning in the classroom and in the field.

National accreditation and its role in early education: An analysis of Florida’s Gold Seal Quality Child-Care program and licensing standards

This article reports on the first Florida statewide assessment of the Gold Seal Quality Care program, accreditation, and the relationship with licensing violations. This study analyzed the differences between the Department of Children and Families Gold Seal–Accredited facilities and nonaccredited facilities by comparing the facilities and the number of class violations a facility received for noncompliance of licensing standards from 2007 through 2010. Class I violations in all 4 years were not statistically significant; however, the p-value for Class II and III violations in all 4 years was p < 0.05; therefore, we concluded that accreditation does make a difference in relation to Class II and III violations and that accredited programs are of a higher quality than nonaccredited programs.