Martin Needham

Sticking and tipping points: a case study of preschool education policy and practice in Astana, Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT This article presents a case study exploring how national guidance for kindergartens in Kazakhstan was interpreted in practice. Document analysis of the State Education Standards of Preschool Upbringing and Education, together with stakeholder interviews and observations of six Astana kindergarten settings, illustrates how competing perspectives on preparing children for school can both promote and limit opportunities for child-led activity in early education. The article considers postcolonial and neocolonial pasts and their potential to influence the present, identifying potential sticking points that may limit change processes. The article suggests processes for building locally grounded praxis in order to create tipping points where child-initiated pedagogy could become a more frequent feature of practice.

Filling big shoes

As the newly appointed editor and associate editor of the International Journal of Early Years Education, it gives us great pleasure to introduce this double edition. At this point we would like to pay tribute to our predecessor and our dear friend Dr Penny Munn. An exceptional academic, her energy, commitment and vision for the journal ensured it retained its status as a forum of excellence for researchers and practitioners to debate the theories, research, policy and practice which sustain effective early years education world-wide. Modest and self-effacing with a good sense of humour, I believe she would enjoy the fact that it will take two of us to try to fill her shoes. We are comforted, however, by the support we have received from Tarryn Robertson, the editorial assistant who worked so closely with Penny and is now proving invaluable. We believe she would be pleased with the quality and scope of papers included in this double edition. At this juncture we are reminded that the journal seeks to offer a comparative perspective on early years research and major new initiatives in the care and education of young children. Since its inception the journal has carried reports and research articles which evaluate and highlight innovative practice throughout the international community. These core aims are closely reflected in this edition which includes papers reporting findings from projects which offer young children an opportunity to engage in, for them, a unique musical experience, address cultural differences in the development of early maths skills, examine aspects of shared thinking between young children during a computer based literacy task and explore social and emotional learning in the classroom. Differing in foci, the authors of the papers included in this edition share a commitment to a rights based approach to research involving children and vulnerable groups. As Smith (2011, 11) notes, in the past the voices of children, particularly young children, have often been ignored. Although there is an enormous body of research on children, much of it failed to give voice to children’s views on matters that affect their lives. In this edition authors report findings from their interactions with children. In essence, the children’s experiences are faithfully reported using their words rather than inferred or interpreted by the researcher. By way of example, Hallam interprets children’s art work by considering the spontaneous utterances which lead to the creation of the drawing itself. This approach offers a departure from the received wisdom which adopts an analytical approach to the study of children’s drawings. Informed by conversation analysis, the conversations that took place during teacher/pupil interactions were recorded and analysed. The results from this small scale study suggest that some teachers may convey the message that to be successful, children must follow instructions and produce work inline with teacher expectations. The limitations this places on pupil creativity are discussed. International Journal of Early Years Education Vol. 19, Nos. 3 4, September December 2011, 189 192