Susan Krieg

The Australian Early Years Learning Framework: learning what?

Early childhood education and care have assumed importance in many government policy agendas. This attention is often accompanied by calls for greater accountability regarding the anticipated learning outcomes for young children. In Australia, the expected learning outcomes for children aged birth to five years are outlined in the recently published Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). In this article, the author examines the relationship between the EYLFs outcomes and subject area or content knowledge. The article draws from post-structural and social constructionist understandings of knowledge as unfinished, contestable and contextual. The author concludes that it is not content knowledge itself that is problematic, but it is the way the child and teacher are often positioned in relation to that knowledge that constrains the potential for effective teaching and learning in the early years. The author suggests that revisiting traditional assumptions about content knowledge extends and develops many of the ideas about teaching and learning that are identified in the EYLF, and opens up new identity positions for both children and early childhood educators.

The Professional Knowledge that Counts in Australian Contemporary Early Childhood Teacher Education

Australia is typical of many western countries where the provision of quality early childhood services has become a government priority. The government initiatives in Australia include repeated demands for ‘well-qualified’ early childhood educators. As a result of these demands the pre-service preparation of early childhood educators is under intense scrutiny. This scrutiny raises many questions regarding the knowledge base considered to be essential for early childhood educators and leads to further questions about who has the authority to produce this knowledge. This article explores these questions by firstly examining some of the ways Australian early childhood teacher education is situated within the current knowledge environment. This is followed by a discussion regarding the debates about what early childhood educators ‘need to know’. The third section of the article traces some of the historical features of Australian early childhood teacher education, for the author argues that contemporary questions about ‘which’ knowledge is to be included in early childhood teacher education are best understood alongside their historical precedents. The article concludes by considering the implications of the debates for contemporary early childhood teacher education and suggests that a way forward involves reconsidering the traditional binary between theory and practical knowledge.

Novice teachers' work: constructing ‘different’ children?

Developing a teacher identity is an ongoing and multifaceted process. In part, the process involves finding a voice amid the clamour of other, often contradictory, voices and complex conditions in which teachers find themselves. Drawing from a larger study of teacher professional identities, this paper explores how two beginning early childhood educators talk about what it means to teach. The paper focuses on how these novice teachers position themselves, and are positioned, by their understandings of the ‘child’. This focus on children is particularly relevant to understanding teacher identities for in educational contexts, teachers and children are inextricably linked – they are part of a relational pair. Using critical discourse analysis as a way of examining interview data, I discuss how a discourse of the ‘normal’ child constructs particular identity positions for children and the adults who work with them.

Access, quality and equity in early childhood education and care: A South Australian study

While much is known about the factors related to student performance beyond Grade 3 less is known about the factors that are related to student performance in early childhood education and the early years in primary school. As part of the ‘I go to school’ project in South Australia, this study tracked children attending integrated preschool/childcare centres – known as Children’s Centres – as they made their transition to school. Results indicated that children who attended early childhood education programs that were of higher quality – as characterised by higher staff qualifications and a greater range and more engaging childrens activities – showed a greater gain in cognitive development than children who attended lower quality programs. Findings also suggested that children who benefitted the most from attendance in these programs were children from backgrounds of greater social disadvantage than children from less disadvantaged backgrounds.

Identity and Knowledge Work in a University Tutorial.

In the contemporary university the large classes associated with many core units mean that tutorials are often taken by many part‐time sessional who are typically employed on a casual basis, paid an hourly rate and not paid to attend the lectures. Given this situation, unit coordinators are often responsible for another phase in curriculum development, namely constructing written tutorial plans that outline the tutorial processes and explicate some of the central ideas and knowledge from the lectures. These plans are designed to be informative for the tutors as well as providing a guide for the teaching and learning in the tutorials. In this paper, using analytical tools made available in Critical Discourse Analysis, I analyse a written tutorial plan as an example of a university curriculum text. The analysis opens up new ways of seeing these texts and for reviewing and critiquing my university teaching practice.

Leading otherwise: using a feminist-poststructuralist and postcolonial lens to create alternative spaces for early childhood educational leaders

The recognition of the importance of quality programmes and services for very young children is evident in the political agendas of many countries around the world. This focus has been accompanied by increasing recognition that effective leadership in early childhood programmes makes a positive difference to the outcomes for children, families and communities. Research into early childhood leadership, however, has not kept pace with the changes that are occurring within the field. In this paper, we argue that characteristics of the field including the feminized nature of the field, diverse settings, staffing, policies and purposes of early childhood education require a different conceptual framework than what currently exists. Because we live and work within highly gendered and raced discourses, it is difficult to find a space to reflect on the meaning(s) of leadership for contemporary early childhood educators that is not informed by existing (and often Western masculine) knowledge(s) about who a leader is and what a leader does. This paper draws from the work done by feminist poststucturalist and postcolonial theorists and seeks to further discuss how dominant constructions of educational leadership can be troubled and reconceptualised in ECE contexts.

Involving parents in early childhood research as reliable assessors

ABSTRACT This paper reports findings in relation to one aspect of the ‘I Go to School’ research project carried out in South Australia which tracked children attending integrated pre-school/childcare centres as they made their transition to school. Eight centres participated in the study involving 347 children. In order to measure some of the outcomes of the children’s participation in integrated early childhood programmes, parents and teachers completed questionnaires regarding some aspects of the children’s cognitive and social development in the year the children turned four and then again in the term they started school at age five. The researchers were thus able to ascertain some of the changes that had occurred in the children’s development during their participation in early childhood programmes. This paper reports on the comparison between parent and teacher judgements of particular aspects of the four-year-old children’s cognitive development at one point in time. The analysis presented here compares the teacher and parent/carer judgements from a subsection of the Child Development Inventory). This comparison led to the conclusion that parent ratings of particular aspects of their four-year-old children’s cognitive development were reliable and relatively consistent when compared with those of teachers.

Assessing young children’s learning: Using critical discourse analysis to re-examine a learning story

THE CURRENT POLICY CONTEXTS of many countries demand that early childhood educators are able to articulate their practice in new ways. For example, the need to assess and report positive learning outcomes in multiple ways to policy-makers, families and educational systems is a feature of contemporary early childhood education and care. This theoretical paper introduces a multi-dimensional framework to support the assessment of young childrens learning and then provides an example of how modified tools drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be used to effectively examine these dimensions of learning. CDA is a multidisciplinary methodology that integrates the study of language with a consideration of wider social practices. It offers a perspective from which to examine how ways of thinking, speaking, acting and being are drawn from, and also contribute to the particular discourses that are made available within social institutions (in this case, early childhood centres). CDA focuses on how language establishes and maintains social relationships and identities. This paper provides an example of how some of the tools made available in CDA can enhance assessment practices with young children. It is argued that CDA enables early childhood educators to re-examine young childrens learning in new ways. The processes outlined in this paper have the potential to inspire early childhood educators to embrace assessment as an opportunity to articulate, celebrate and communicate young childrens ways of knowing in new ways.

Transformative Curriculum: “I Felt like an Artist”

Contemporary early childhood teacher education is situated in a knowledge and policy environment where on the one hand preservice educators have the opportunity to connect with unlimited knowledge sources and, on the other, are expected to conform to standardized outcomes. This situation is compounded by increasingly inequitable learning outcomes for children in many countries. In this paper, we argue that this context demands different ways of teaching and learning in early childhood teacher education and that in order to address increasing inequity, preservice educators must experience a transformative university curriculum. This paper uses the example of an arts topic, with a particular focus on music, to examine ways of positioning preservice educators that open up, rather than restrict opportunities to reconceptualize early childhood curriculum. The authors examine data from curriculum documents and student reflections in order to discuss the intended (planned), enacted (implemented) and experienced university curriculum.

Why Don't You Get a Life?

The stories we tell about life in centres and schools reflect the drama that is played out in the lives of teachers and children. In choosing and creating these narratives, researchers select, interpret and read the multiple possibilities of the situations they see. The texts they create are constructed through a process in which the researchers position and voice are fundamental. The texts themselves can be read in multiple ways. In this paper I explore the relationship between research and researcher, using stories as a springboard for my discussion. The two stories reconstructed in this article reveal multiple identities at play.