Marilyn Fleer

Supporting Scientific Conceptual Consciousness or Learning in ‘a Roundabout Way’ in Play‐based Contexts

Little change has been noted over 10 years of research into teacher knowledge and confidence to teach science in the early and primary years of schooling. There is a significant body of research demonstrating that early childhood and primary teachers lack confidence and competence in teaching science. However, much of this research blames the victim, and offers little analysis for the systemic reasons for teachers’ confidence and competence in science education other than a lack of science knowledge. This paper reports on a study that examined teacher philosophy and pedagogical practices within the context of an analysis of children’s concept formation within playful early childhood settings. Through teacher interviews, video recordings of science play, and photographic documentation of children’s science activities in one rural preschool, it was noted that teacher philosophy about how young children learn is a significant contributing factor to learning in science. It is argued that teacher philosophy makes more of a difference to children’s scientific learning than does teacher confidence to teach science or knowledge of science. The study also shows that without a mediational scientific framework for using materials in play‐based contexts, children will generate their own imaginary, often non‐scientific, narratives for making sense of the materials provided.

'Conceptual Play': foregrounding imagination and cognition during concept formation in early years education

The international trend to increase the cognitive achievement of early childhood children has generated a need for better understanding how concept formation occurs within play-based programs. Yet the theories of play for supporting early childhood professionals were originally not conceptualized with this need in mind. In this article, concepts from cultural-historical theory are used to theorise how imagination and cognition can work together in play-based programs to support concept formation. This article theorises at a psychological level how both cognition and imagination work in unity and develop in complexity, with imagination acting as the bridge between play and learning. A dialectical view of imagination and cognition is foregrounded, and through this a new theory of play, named as conceptual play, is introduced. It is argued that conceptual play will help teachers to work more conceptually with children in their play-based programs.

Children's Development as Participation in Everyday Practices across Different Institutions

Children participate in different institutional collectives in their everyday life. Home, school, and kindergarten are the institutional contexts that most children share. Although there are variations between home practices and school practices, they collectively share a common core framed by societal conditions. In drawing upon Vygotskys (1998) theory of the social situation of development and Hedegaards (2009) theory of development conceptualised as the childs participation within and across several institutions at the same time, it has been possible to examine how school practices influence home practice and the childs social situation of development. A case study of an Australian childs participation across different institutions (family and school) was undertaken to capture and analyse the dynamic processes through which development was afforded. In the case study there was a large disjunction between institutional practices of the home and school that the child had to negotiate. Due to teacher knowledge of only the childs relation to the school institution, and not the home institution, the affordances for development and the childs changing relations to his environment, were invisible to the educators in this study. The findings suggest foregrounding an understanding of childrens development as changes in childrens activities and thereby changing their relations to reality across institutional practices in order to support a broader view of development in early childhood education.

Working Technologically: Investigations into How Young Children Design and Make During Technology Education

Technology education in the early years in Australia is a newly defined curriculum area. A growing amount of resource development has occurred to support technology teaching in schools. However, only a limited amount of research into technology education for children aged three to eight years has taken place. This paper presents the findings of a pilot study which investigated the planning, making and evaluating activities of children when engaged in technology education whilst in childcare. In particular, young childrens ability to design, and then use their design for making was examined.

Theorising Play in the Early Years

Th e book provides an indepth examination of classical and contemporary theories of play, with a focus on postdevelopmental perspectives and Vygotskian theory. Marilyn Fleer draws on a range of crosscultural research in order to challenge Western perspectives and to move beyond a universal view of the construct of play. Culture and context are central to the understanding of how play is valued, expressed and used as a pedagogical approach in early childhood education across the international community.

The Cultural Construction of Child Development: Creating Institutional and Cultural Intersubjectivity.

Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, early childhood education has moved beyond European communities and become institutionalized in countries such as Australian, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore. At the same time, many European countries have experienced migration, and now have broadly based culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Although early education has continued to evolve over time, some fundamental principles about the nature of learning have remained static. In drawing upon cultural‐historical theory, this paper seeks to make visible early childhood institutional practices that may no longer be relevant, particularly when western theory and middle‐class practices are not representative of the culturally and linguistically diverse communities they serve. In this paper, an alternative model of child development is offered that takes into account and values the diversity of children’s cultural experiences.

Children's alternative views : alternative to what?

The assumptions implicit within Western science education research and practices are considered in this paper. It is argued that it is Western science which underpins science teaching and that other world views, e.g. those constructed in Aboriginal cultures, are not foregrounded. The notion of alternative views positions knowledge construction in other cultures in ways which disallow different world views or understandings to emerge. Alternative implies alternative to Western science.

The Science of Technology: Young Children Working Technologically

Technology education in the age band 5 to 11 has received relatively little research attention over the past ten years. With the exception of data documented by eminent scholars such as Anning (1994; 1997), Jane (1995), Solomon and Hall (1996), and Roth (1994) only a small amount is understood about how children work when designing, making and evaluating with a range of materials, information, systems and tools.This study sought to examine childrens feelings, experiences and design ideas and to document the interplay between their designs (regardless of when this occurred in the design, making and evaluating cycle) and what they actually did. The findings make a small contribution towards our understandings of the complexities associated with how children aged 5 to 11 think and act technologically whilst in schools.

Emotions in Imaginative Situations: The Valued Place of Fairytales for Supporting Emotion Regulation

Fairytales represent a long-standing cultural practice used by early childhood teachers for supporting childrens social and emotional development. Yet contemporary practices see governments demanding a more academic curriculum. In drawing upon cultural-historical research, we theorise how fairytales help children to collectively develop emotion regulation, where the unity of emotions and cognition are foregrounded during the telling, retelling, and role-playing of fairytales, allowing for a dynamic interplay between interpsychological and intrapsychological functioning. We suggest that fairytales have a valuable place within early childhood programs because they introduce emotionally charged imaginative situations which we believe support childrens emotion regulation in group care situations.

“Visual Vivencias”: A Cultural-Historical Tool for Understanding the Lived Experiences of Young Children’s Everyday Lives

The aim of this chapter is to present a theorisation of “Visual Vivencias” as a method for studying children aged 3 years and younger and, through this, contribute to a new cultural-historical understanding of early childhood research. We specifically introduce a case example that took place in a Mexican family in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, as part of a wider project reported elsewhere (Quinones, 2011).