The articles in this edition of Early Childhood Folio are likely to generate thinking that challenges taken-for-granted practice and beliefs. They all draw on research within early childhood settings.

In a year of unprecedented events in New Zealand’s history, in which I was to lose people close to me and in which I saw firsthand the toll taken on my hometown community of Greymouth and my current place of residence, Christchurch, I cannot reflect on this year in curriculum ...

The Ministry of Education is endeavouring to build an education system that is responsive to the challenges of the 21st century. This includes revising the school curriculum and a major investment in programmes of research and development. This paper examines the discourses relating to diversity and education that have become ...

Since the introduction of senior social studies for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA ) in 2002, some progress has been made towards developing a unique identity for the subject. This progress has clarified a number of unresolved tensions relating to the nature and purpose of social studies, which ...

In New Zealand the majority of students attend schools that reflect the dominant mainstream context, yet these schools include indigenous Māori and learners from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. By building on contemporary cultural knowledge and students’ own experiences, the arts have the potential to enhance educational outcomes for a ...

This paper conceives history in the New Zealand curriculum as a curriculum problem. In exposing this problem, history’s identity is thrown into question. I outline a motif of disturbance in light of my professional experiences of history curriculum and assessment policy shifts (1990s to 2010). From a critical pedagogy stance ...

This paper explores views of mathematics that have been offered in parliamentary exchanges over the past two decades. It makes connections between the development of mathematics curriculum and the political and ideological arrangements in which curriculum is nested. In tracing how school mathematics debates in parliamentary sessions are set within ...

This paper views key competencies through a sociocultural lens to discuss the role they have played as agents of change in The New Zealand Curriculum and their as yet unrealised potential to stimulate further change. It draws on several exploratory studies to describe broad types of action and change which ...

In November 2007, changes to the New Zealand curriculum were published, with an expectation that schools would fully implement these changes by February 2010 (Schagen, 2011, p. 1). Among the changes were aspects that encouraged greater recognition of an entrepreneurial orientation. We set out to gauge the understanding preservice teachers ...

The official New Zealand curriculum as it pertains to social sciences embodies tensions between newer transformative and older transmissive agendas for education, and in its disciplinary divisions. This article explores the mixed messages in the curriculum for teaching and learning within social sciences. I argue that tensions in the curriculum ...