Implementing a Pattern and Structure Mathematics Awareness Program (PASMAP) in kindergarten

This paper provides an interim report of a large empirical evaluation study in progress. An intervention was implemented to evaluate the effectiveness of the Pattern and Structure Mathematical Awareness Program (PASMAP) on Kindergarten students’ mathematical development. Four large schools (two from Sydney and two from Brisbane), 16 teachers and their 316 students participated in the first phase of a 2-year longitudinal study. Eight of 16 classes implemented the PASMAP program over three school terms. This paper provides an overview of key aspects of the intervention, and preliminary analysis of the impact of PASMAP on students’ representation, abstraction and generalisation of mathematical ideas.

Scaffolding children’s musical creativity : a case of a kindergarten teacher in Hong Kong

Drawn from a larger mixed methods study, this case study provides an account of aspects of the music education programme that occurred with one teacher and a kindergarten class of children aged three and four years. Contrary to transmission approaches that are often used in Hong Kong, the case depicts how musical creativity was encouraged by the teacher in response to children’s participation during the time for musical free play. It shows how the teacher scaffolded the attempts of George, a child aged 3.6 years to use musical notation. The findings are instructive for kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong and suggest ways in which teachers might begin to incorporate more creative approaches to musical education. They are also applicable to other kindergarten settings where transmission approaches tend to dominate and teachers want to encourage children’s musical creativity.

“Diving into reading” : revisiting reciprocal teaching in the middle years

This paper reports on a project that was designed to support teachers to introduce reciprocal teaching and student-generated questioning in the middle years. It began as a solution to teachers expressing a concern that there was a lack of professional development related to the teaching of reading in the middle years.

Kindergarten transitions and linkages to primary school-readiness reconceptualised

Young children’s transition into school has been constructed as a time-limited period around initial school entry, a set of teacher or school practices, a process of establishing continuity of experience, a multi-layered, multi-year set of experiences and a dynamic relationship-based process. Although preparedness issues continue to be addressed, there is a trend towards more complex understandings of transition emphasizing continuity, relationships amongst multiple stakeholders, system coherence across extended time periods and enhancement of resilience and transition capital. This article, in the early years of a new century, outlines some conceptualisations of readiness and transition as they relate to diverse children’s pathways through early childhood and early school settings.

Reading nineteenth century schoolbooks online : user behavior in a digitized special collection

Special collections, because of the issues associated with conservation and use, a feature they share with archives, tend to be the most digitized areas in libraries. The Nineteenth Century Schoolbooks collection is a collection of 9000 rarely held nineteenth-century schoolbooks that were painstakingly collected over a lifetime of work by Prof. John A. Nietz, and donated to the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh in 1958, which has since grown to 15,000. About 140 of these texts are completely digitized and showcased in a publicly accessible website through the University of Pittsburgh’s Library, along with a searchable bibliography of the entire collection, which expanded the awareness of this collection and its user base to beyond the academic community. The URL for the website is http://digital.library.pitt.edu/nietz/. The collection is a rich resource for researchers studying the intellectual, educational, and textbook publishing history of the United States. In this study, we examined several existing records collected by the Digital Research Library at the University of Pittsburgh in order to determine the identity and searching behaviors of the users of this collection. Some of the records examined include: 1) The results of a 3-month long user survey, 2) User access statistics including search queries for a period of one year, a year after the digitized collection became publicly available in 2001, and 3) E-mail input received by the website over 4 years from 2000-2004. The results of the study demonstrate the differences in online retrieval strategies used by academic researchers and historians, archivists, avocationists, and the general public, and the importance of facilitating the discovery of digitized special collections through the use of electronic finding aids and an interactive interface with detailed metadata.

Reading places

In this chapter I explore how a critical approach to reading pedagogy has evolved over time in South Australia. I start with a brief review of the groundbreaking work of Jennifer O’Brien in the early 1990s in which she adapted feminist post-structuralist approaches for early childhood classrooms. O’Brien showed that young children can and do take an analytical position with respect to reading when tasks are framed in ways that draw their attention to representation and relationships in texts. Then, drawing from a range of empirical research projects, I discuss how a semiotic approach to reading can be productive for thinking about critical and inclusive literacies. I touch briefly upon how and why we incorporated children’s reading of environmental print into the 100 children go to school project. I then outline the ways in which we have capitalised on the notion of reading places in several projects to work with primary school children and their teachers.

Critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4–9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious and in-depth reading for learning are explored. School and teacher features which allow for the development of sophisticated pedagogical repertoires and space for critical reading comprehension, without losing the complexity of curriculum offerings, are outlined. How one experienced middle primary teacher operates strategically, ethically and critically in supporting her ESL students to learn to read is illustrated. The teacher’s work is situated within the complex accountability demands faced by classroom teachers. This was accomplished by a teacher whose pedagogical repertoire has been assembled across a career teaching in low-SES high ESL communities in a school with a balanced literacy program and high level of collegial support. Risks for schools and teachers whose circumstances work against their capacities for prioritisation and strategic decision-making are identified and discussed.

Ethnography in the kindergarten:examining childrens'play experiences

This paper describes an ethnographic study completed within a kindergarten environment with the view of gaining insights into the development of new technology for young children. Ethnography within HCI has primarily focused on studies of work practices. This project explored the effectiveness of ethnography in supporting the design of playful technology for a constantly changing, creative, and (sometimes) messy environment. The study was effective in drawing out patterns in observations and as such provides useful suggestions for the development of technology for kindergarten settings.

Constituting the teacher of reading in contemporary Australian literacy debates

This chapter documents the history of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy and the subsequent fate of the figure of the teacher, in terms of how the inquiry has acted to background the teacher and bring new figures into prominence. The classroom teacher is being moved out of a central role of authority in literacy education, in spite of claims about the importance of the teacher in parts of the report. Authority is now being placed in the figure of the scientific researcher who decides what the best techniques are, and develops diagnostic tools that the teacher must use in order to decide which of the techniques to apply. Specialist literacy teachers, well “trained”by these experts, are needed to ensure that teachers do what the experts recommend (evidence-based practice). Thus, the classroom literacy teacher becomes a cipher for applying expertly designed techniques and tests.

How to tell the difference between a positive image and a stereotype: reading Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

This paper intervenes in critical discussions about the representation of homosexuality. Rejecting the ‘manifest content’ of films, it turns to cultural history to map those public discourses which close down the ways in which films can be discussed. With relation to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it examines discussions of the film in Australian newspapers (both queer and mainstream) and finds that while there is disagreement about the interpretation to be made of the film, the terms within which those interpretations can be made are quite rigid. A matrix based on similarity, difference and value provides a series of positions and a vocabulary (transgression, assimilation, positive images and stereotypes) through which to make sense of this film. The article suggests that this matrix, and the idea that similarity and difference provide a suitable axis for making sense of homosexual identity, are problematic in discussing homosexual representation.

The cradle of whose civilisation? : reading the Theseus myth in Riordan’s Percy Jackson and Ottley’s Requiem for a Beast

This paper considers the functions of Greek mythology in general and the “Theseus and the Minotaur” myth in particular in two contemporary texts of adolescent masculinity: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series (2005-2009) and Matt Ottley’s Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music (2007). These texts reveal the ongoing flexibility of mythic texts to be pressed into service of shoring up or challenging currently hegemonic ideologies of self and state. Both Riordan and Ottley make a variety of intertextual uses of classical hero plots in order to facilitate their own narrative explorations of contemporary adolescent men ‘coming of age’. These intertextual gestures might easily be read as gestures of alignment with narrative traditions and authority which simultaneously confer “legitimacy” on Riordan and Ottley, on their texts, and by extension, on their readers. However, when read in juxtaposition, it is clear that Riordan and Ottley may use classical mythology to articulate similarly gendered adolescence, they produce divergent visions of nationed adolescence.