This article describes how two critical literacy activities were successfully incorporated into an early childhood centre in Aotearoa New Zealand. The article discusses the design of the activities, how the activities worked in the classroom, and the children’s perceived learning. The article concludes that critical literacy activities with young ...

This article describes the findings of a series of qualitative research studies which explored the technologies with which children aged 3–5 years old play, the forms of learning related to these activities, and the conditions which shaped their experiences with digital resources. Three forms of learning were observed in ...

A research project in this early childhood centre investigated the (school) key competency relating to others. The teachers were particularly interested in this key competency because relationships, and the empowerment of children and families, had always been key concepts for the centre. In order to research their understanding of relationships ...

In Europe and the UK there is lively debate about when children should start school and what kinds of curriculum and pedagogical approaches are most effective in the early years. Caroline Sharp of the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) considers some of the most recent research evidence and draws ...

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 ...

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 ...

The introduction this year of the draft key competencies (paralleling the five strands of Te Whāriki) brings an exciting new development to the early childhood as well as the primary and secondary sectors. This article discusses learning dispositions and their relation to the key competencies, and suggests three ways ...

The editor of Curriculum Matters invites interested people to submit articles (essays, literature reviews, research reports, scholarship and critical comments) in the field of curriculum. The main audience groups for these articles are teachers, teacher educators, graduate students of education and curriculum theorists.

This year, 2020, has been an extraordinary year. It has seen the escalation of COVID-19 to global pandemic status, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Aotearoa New Zealand election in October (delayed by a month due to the COVID-19 pandemic) and the US Presidential election in November. These events highlight a range of issues ...