What constitutes a quality centre or an effective teacher cannot be assumed to be globally the same and beliefs about quality invariably support dominant ideologies. For example, in the New Zealand early childhood education context, teacher-child ratios and group size are seen as two of the criteria used to ...

When children in Aotearoa New Zealand begin school at 5 years of age they take with them a wealth of learning. For the majority of children transitioning from early childhood education to school this learning has been documented in portfolios. In many cases, and for many reasons, these portfolios are ...

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In a self-managing school system where localised curriculum decision-making prevails, this study asks the question “How were the geography and science senior secondary school curricula influenced by the Canterbury earthquake series?” Drawing on an ecological framework of teacher agency, the study ...

The changing media landscape of the Internet has created a diverse environment for learning about global and national current events. Keeping up with the news is difficult and can result in students feeling overwhelmed by having to absorb so much information from so many sources. The argument is presented ...

This article relates Korean parents’ stories of their children’s transition from primary to secondary school and identity struggles on entering secondary school. Mystified by the loss of a characteristically invitational culture at primary school, and without salient role models to provide ideas of who they might become, some students ...

This article explores the way in which a teacher educator worked with a group of undergraduate student teachers to use social sciences as a vehicle for developing three key competencies. While the study is primarily practitioner focused, it does include student perspectives of the learning process. The argument is ...

This article reports how two first-year student teachers have used their initial teacher education programme experiences in science education to gain a better understanding of The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) and its overarching science strand, the Nature of Science. These student teachers demonstrate how they would ...

National developments in curriculum and pedagogy have prompted interest in the ways that teachers plan for teaching. Preservice teachers are at a particular point in their teaching journey, yet little is known about how they go about planning for long-term student learning. This article discusses results from a study ...

The scientific management of compulsory education in Aotearoa New Zealand has been well documented and it appears that it is being extended to early childhood education (ECE). Using the language of scientific management as a default language for describing the purpose and function of education is a key means ...

This study explores how the stories of two teachers’ classroom practice intersect with current policies relating to primary mathematics education in New Zealand. It is identified through this study that fully enacting policy in mathematics holds challenges for the participant teachers, particularly owing to the incoherence of policies relating ...