In New Zealand there is currently no one definition of what it means for a child to be categorised as “gifted and talented”. The very notion of “giftedness” is in itself unclear, with teachers holding varying levels of understanding. This is problematic, making identification complex and pedagogical decision-making ad hoc ...

The multicultural nature of early childhood services in New Zealand is highlighted by the statistical reality that 22 percent of children are Māori, 7 percent are Pasifika, and 11 percent are Asian and other non-European/Pākehā ethnicities. Multicultural early childhood education has become a vital practice underpinning educational reforms. This is ...

Children are constantly trying to make sense of their world. Working theories—one of the key learning outcomes of Te Whāriki—are constructed, adapted, and enriched in children’s lives as children experience the world around them and interact with others. This article presents findings from a study that investigated teacher strategies that were used ...

This article discusses aspects of the journeys and emergent thinking of teachers/kaiako in the three Māori immersion/bilingual early childhood services that participated in the Whatu Kākahu—Assessment in Kaupapa (Philosophy) Māori Early Childhood Practice study. Through the exploration of kaupapa Māori assessment approaches, the services worked to reclaim and reframe Māori ways of knowing and being ...

Parent–teacher partnerships are critical to enacting the principles of Te Whāriki: relationships, family and community, empowerment, and holistic development. Our project used “funds of knowledge” as a theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical tool to explore partnership connections for children between the contexts of home and centre. This article discusses teachers’ experiences of visiting children’s ...

Curriculum commentators have identified well-documented participatory pathways for key competency development. However, there is a paucity of New Zealand research that takes a poststructural view of how competencies play out in classroom discourses. It is the contention of this article that, rather than learners ‘having’ agency to transfer competencies from ...

This article reports on the views of secondary school music teachers in relation to curriculum content in New Zealand. We know very little about music teachers’ response to the cultural and educational changes of recent times and how these changes are being reflected and managed in their curriculum decision making ...

The social phenomenon that is “identity” appears to have gained prominence in the landscape of New Zealand educational curriculum during the three decades of curriculum development, review, and change that began in the 1980s. While the term identity is a recent addition in national curricula, the concept of identity has ...

New Zealand has guidelines for education outside the classroom (EOTC) that support schools to take advantage of the community and environment beyond the school gates and thereby bring the national curriculum alive. While teaching and learning are the main focus for EOTC, safety is another paramount principle of EOTC programmes ...