Advocating for children’s rights in early education is an important role for teachers. This role has many challenges, not least of which is understanding what children’s rights are and how they can be used effectively to support children’s learning. This article reports on how teachers in an early care and education centre advocated ...

This article explores the pedagogy of New Zealand early childhood teachers who have consciously adopted ideas from the early childhood programme of the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. It follows the learning experiences of children involved in a project investigating cows, milking and dairy processing that emerged from children’s interests related to Chinese New ...

The transition into early childhood education is a big step for children and their parents. It can help a child settle in if one teacher becomes their “primary caregiver”, giving them someone to relate to and the parents someone to communicate with. This action research project looks at one centre’s “key teacher” system and ...

Education settings are one of the key points of contact new migrants have with their host society, so the way early childhood teachers negotiate multiculturalism is important. This article is based on a study from Australia, one of the most multicultural nations on Earth. It examines how, in implementing equality by treating new-migrant families ...

Heteronormativity is pervasive and ongoing in most societies. New Zealand, despite its comparatively liberal laws in relation to sexual orientation, is no exception. The effects of such attitudes, values and prejudices extend into education and, by default, into curriculum. Findings from a study including student and staff online surveys, a ...

This article deals with the philosophical issue of epistemology, or knowledge theory, in education as related to forms of learning, teaching methods and assessment in the language arts classroom, specifically reading instruction. The article details two common forms of curricular knowledge emerging from the essentialist and instrumentalist epistemological clusters; the ...

Visual arts education has long enjoyed a place in the New Zealand curriculum. Institutional endorsement of the value of visual arts learning for all children has maintained its status as a core subject in schools, a secondary schools examination subject and as specialist courses in colleges of education and schools ...

Through the use of fictionalisation, a narrative inquiry tool that allows for the “trying on” of future possibilities, I survey the state of the US curriculum field in the aftermath of Schwab’s “practical”. I note that the theory–practice binary, which Schwab explicated in the 1970s, morphed into a highly convoluted ...

In this review of the English area of the New Zealand curriculum, the spotlight is focused on the grammar teachers in primary schools are expected to know and understand in order to effectively teach and assess literacy. It is suggested that, despite some professional development in the 1990s during the ...