Meaningful leadership development opportunities are rare for those working in the New Zealand early childhood education sector. What difference can they make to leadership practice? This article describes the experiences of participants in a study that used a blend of ICT and face-to-face sessions to support leadership learning. For the participants, this approach resulted ...

Advocating for children’s rights in early education is an important role for teachers. This role has many challenges, not least of which is understanding what children’s rights are and how they can be used effectively to support children’s learning. This article reports on how teachers in an early care and education centre advocated ...

This article explores the pedagogy of New Zealand early childhood teachers who have consciously adopted ideas from the early childhood programme of the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. It follows the learning experiences of children involved in a project investigating cows, milking and dairy processing that emerged from children’s interests related to Chinese New ...

The transition into early childhood education is a big step for children and their parents. It can help a child settle in if one teacher becomes their “primary caregiver”, giving them someone to relate to and the parents someone to communicate with. This action research project looks at one centre’s “key teacher” system and ...

Education settings are one of the key points of contact new migrants have with their host society, so the way early childhood teachers negotiate multiculturalism is important. This article is based on a study from Australia, one of the most multicultural nations on Earth. It examines how, in implementing equality by treating new-migrant families ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.