Professionalism in early childhood teaching is shaped within contexts, relationships, and multiple discourses of professionalism, as well as historical and enduring maternalism. This article uses posthumanist ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to reframe professionalism as produced in relationships among human and other-than-human aspects of early childhood settings, including materials, theories ...

The draft early learning strategic plan He Taonga Te Tamaiti/Every Child a Taonga (Ministry of Education, 2018) has a goal to improve quality by regulating for 100% teachers in teacher-led services. This proposal assumes a distinct separation between teachers and parents, and between services employing professional teachers and those with ...

In this article, we discuss findings from a study of how 22 teachers in kindergartens and education and care centres in Aotearoa New Zealand spent their time at work. The teachers filled in time-use diaries, writing down details of what they did at different times over a whole working day ...

In this article I discuss how discourses of democratic early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a child’s right, and enterprise discourses of ECEC as a commodity, have constructed teachers’ work and professional identities in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past two decades. I illustrate two prevailing identity constructions of ...

What do we know about the situation of leadership in early childhood education (ECE) in Aotearoa New Zealand? What can we learn from relevant leadership research? How can we use these insights to support change processes in ECE? The release of the draft 2019–29 Strategic Plan for Early Learning suggests ...

Excursions (field trips) can provide new and exciting learning opportunities outside schools and early childhood education (ECE) centres, adding new dimensions to an education programme. This article presents the findings from two doctoral studies by Terreni (2017) and Ryder (2019). Terreni, as part of a mixed-method approach, undertook a large-scale ...

This article reviews the draft Strategic Plan for Early Learning 2019–2029 against the New Zealand Government’s obligations to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Using discourse analysis, the authors identify explicit and implicit references to protection, provision, and participation rights within the document. The analysis shows ...

Student voice makes a valuable contribution in the effort to evaluate the impact of Assessment for Learning (AfL) as it is the student learning that AfL practices seek to enhance. The authors report on a practitioner-led qualitative study involving 11 students’ perceptions of the impact of student-generated feedback practices. This ...