Early Childhood Folio 13 (2009)

From 2005–8 the Mangere Bridge Kindergarten Centre of Innovation research project investigated the transition between early childhood education and school. The research team developed and researched a range of strategies for supporting children’s learning as the children and their families “crossed the border” from early childhood education to school. This article summarises some of the key findings from the project.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can open up amazing possibilities for early childhood learning, extending children’s worlds and helping them to expand and explore their thinking. Or, it can be an expensive way to teach the same things in the same way as before. Ann Hatherly argues that it’s not the hardware and software that matter, but how teachers use it.

Jeanette Clarkin-Phillips and Margaret Carr examine how establishing a Parent Support and Development Centre at a kindergarten strengthened relationships with families and created new learning opportunities for children, parents and whānau.

Wadestown Kindergarten’s Centre of Innovation project investigated multimodal literacies and their roles in communicative competence and meaning. This article explores the powerful insights into children’s literacies that emerged from finding out about the “funds of knowledge” families hold about their child.

Effective professional development can provide strategies, tools and resources that motivate teachers to make changes for the benefit of children’s and teachers’ learning. This article considers a model of professional development based on distributed leadership. Characteristics that teachers found valuable in enabling them to practise distributed leadership, and the impact on their teaching teams, are examined through teachers’ stories.

In the 1940s New Zealand government reports and policy about early childhood education were written with the assumption that parents were part of a nuclear family consisting of mother, father and children; an assumption that excludes or marginalises families with lesbian or gay parents. Alex Gunn looks at how official writing has changed over time to encompass a wider view of “parent”.

This article describes the journey of a Māori early childhood centre towards an assessment framework that embeds Māori epistemologies, ideas of valued learning and cultural norms and understandings.

It was her own three-year stint as head of The University of Auckland’s School of Education that really sparked Viviane Robinson’s interest in leadership. “That sort of experiential, gut-level feeling for it gave me a much stronger sense that there was more to be said about what leadership involved.” Professor Robinson is an organisational psychologist, so she had long been interested in how organisations tick, how they learn and how they deal with mistakes, as well as in the communication… Read more

In the first edition of Politics in the Playground, Dr Helen May chronicled the ups and downs of early childhood in postwar New Zealand, including both periods of significant growth and change. She deftly wove an historical and cultural narrative of attitudes, ideas, events, campaigns, personalities and policies related to early childhood education (ECE), which she referred to as “the see-saws, swings and roundabouts in a seeming playground of political, educational and social… Read more