Supporting cooperation and caring through large group experiences

Cooperation and caring are best taught within a group as it promotes connectedness, collaborative effort, and relationship building.

Worrying and anxiety are some of the biggest mental health problems facing children today

People often assume children have no worries or nothing to be stressed about. However, children, like adults, do worry about a range of things. There may be times during periods of stress or change when children worry more intensely about things than usual.

Rich and purposeful mathematical knowledge of mothers and children in a Torres Strait Islander community

This paper focuses on a pilot study that explored the situated mathematical knowledge of mothers and children in one Torres Strait Islander community in Australia. The community encouraged parental involvement in their children’s learning and schooling. The study explored parents’ understandings of mathematics and how their children came to learn about it on the island. A funds of knowledge approach was used in the study. This approach is based on the premise that people are competent and have knowledge that has been historically and culturally accumulated into a body of knowledge and skills essential for their functioning and well-being (Moll, 1992). The participants, three adults and one child are featured in this paper. Three separate events are described with epiphanic or illuminative moments analysed to ascertain the features that enabled an understanding of the nature of the mathematical events. The study found that Indigenous ways of knowing of mathematics were deeply embedded in rich cultural practices that were tied to the community. This finding has implications for teachers of children in the early years. Where school mathematics is often presented as disembodied and isolated facts with children seeing little relevance, learning a different perspective of mathematics that is tied to the resources and practices of children’s lives and facilitated through social relationships, may go a long way to improving the engagement of children and their parents in learning and schooling.

Living in a broken world : how young children's well-being is supported through playing out their earthquake experiences

The therapeutic value of play can be shown in spontaneous play situations following children’s experiences of traumatic events. Following the events of the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand in 2010 and 2011, an investigation was conducted of how children used the earthquake event as a catalyst in pretend play with peers and in discussions with teachers. Supporting children’s well-being is a focus area in New Zealand early childhood education as it is a strand of the national curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education [MoE], 1996). In this article, children are observed engaging in pretend play episodes and with Learning Story books to explore personal reflections of the earthquake, prompting the children to make reference to things being ‘broken’ and needing 'fixing.' Analysis shows how the content of the pretend play experiences helped the children to come to terms with their experiences. Affording children time and interactional opportunities to play out and discuss traumatic experiences contributes to the psychological well-being of participants following a traumatic event.

Challenges of elementary science teaching: an Australian perspective

This chapter profiles research that has explored the role of affect in the teaching of science in Australia particularly on primary or elementary science education. Affect is a complex set of characteristics that relate to the interactions between an individual’s knowledge and emotional responses to a stimulus. Thus, there are many dimensions and theoretical frameworks that inform our understanding of how and why people behave in particular ways.

(Im)moral bodies : intersex and auto/biographical documentary

In this paper I question the representation of and ethical responsibilities to young people with intersex (hermaphroditic) conditions in documentary film, and explore the creative practice challenges working with bodies with intersex, embedded in the production of a feature auto/biographical documentary entitled Orchids. Bodies with intersex conditions are often presented as abject, in need of ‘fixing’ during infancy and early childhood, undesirable, and incapable of desire. Seen through the lens of experience and memory, Orchids takes a personal coming-of-age narrative and reconfigures understandings of the (im)moral body in the light of its transformative potential. Just as practice research challenges the dominant hegemony of quantitative and qualitative research, my creative work positions itself as a nuanced performative piece, and through its distinctive distillation and celebration of a new form of discursive rupturing discovers the intersex voice.

Looking yonder : a model of arts engagement with teacher artists and professional artists in Queensland Schools

Since 2007 Kite Arts Education Program (KITE), based at Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), has been engaged in delivering a series of theatre-based experiences for children in low socio-economic primary schools in Queensland. KITE @ QPAC is an early childhood arts initiative of The Queensland Department of Education that is supported by and located at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. KITE delivers relevant contemporary arts education experiences for Prep to Year 3 students and their teachers across Queensland. The theatre-based experiences form part of a three year artist-in-residency project titled Yonder that includes performances developed by the children with the support and leadership of Teacher Artists from KITE for their community and parents/carers in a peak community cultural institution. This paper provides an overview of the Yonder model and unpacks some challenges in activating the model for schools and cultural organisations.

A state-wide systems approach to embedding the learning and teaching of sustainability in teacher education

Education systems have a key role to play in preparing future citizens to engage in sustainable living practices and help create a more sustainable world. Many schools throughout Australia have begun to develop whole-school approaches to sustainability education that are supported by national and state policies and curriculum frameworks. Preservice teacher education, however, lags behind in building the capacity of new teachers to initiate and implement such approaches (ARIES, 2010). This proposed project seeks to develop a state-wide systems approach to embedding Education for Sustainability (EfS) in teacher education that is aligned with the Australian National Curriculum and the aspirations for EfS in the Melbourne Declaration and other national documents. Representatives from all teacher education institutions and other agents of change in the Queensland education system will be engaged in a multilevel systems approach, involving collaboration at the state, institutional and course levels, to develop curriculum practices that reflect a shared vision of EfS.

Using digital technologies at home

Internet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone, and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children’s everyday practices with mobile technologies.

Going online : young children and teachers accessing knowledge through web interactions

Children accessing and using internet-connected technology is a relatively recent phenomenon, and rapidly having an impact on their experiences and activities in homes and early childhood classrooms. Technology refers to devices such as computers, smart phones and tablets - many capable of being connected to the internet - and the products, such as websites, games, and interactive stories (Plowman and McPake, 2013). These activities can be played, created, watched, listened to and read, and incorporated into traditional everyday activities. This article provides suggestions for strategies for teachers to consider when incorporating technology into early childhood education.

Talk about a YouTube video in preschool : the mutual production of shared understanding for learning with digital technology

Much of what is written about digital technologies in preschool contexts focuses on young children’s acquisition of skills rather than their meaning-making during use of technologies. In this paper, we consider how the viewing of a YouTube video was used by a teacher and children to produce shared understandings about it. Conversation analysis of talk and interaction during the viewing of the video establishes some of the ways that individual accounts of events were produced for others and then endorsed as shared understandings. The analysis establishes how adults and children made use of verbal and embodied actions during interactions to produce shared understandings of the YouTube video, the events it recorded and written commentary about those events