The findings of a recent Teaching and Learning Research Initiative project. Researchers used a collaborative whakawhanaungatanga approach to explore how early childhood educators in settings other than kōhanga reo encourage whānau Māori to participate in early childhood education. They identified strategies by which early childhood educators are implementing their understandings ...

This article looks at ways of bridging the discontinuities young children experience between three settings: the home environment, the early childhood setting, and the new entrant classroom. It highlights the empowerment that occurs for children, families, and teachers in early childhood and school settings when children’s experiences at home are ...

The question of how to define and describe quality in early childhood services has been a matter of debate, both in New Zealand and internationally. This article discusses definitions of quality, drawing on examples from Norway and Japan to demonstrate the complexity involved in judging what is good or bad ...

This article looks at the current organisation of senior secondary curriculum in New Zealand, and raises some key questions that will need to be considered as we seek to develop a senior secondary curriculum designed for life in the twenty-first century. It asks: Do our current structures, for senior secondary ...

This article argues the view that curriculum policy is an educative resource for teachers, and that this view imposes certain design considerations on policy. Foremost among these is the need to signal shifts in meaning, in ways that enable teachers to better understand what the reform is requiring of them ...

This paper challenges the belief that methods of teaching reading are the answer to raising age cohort standards of achievement, and that literacy, in the form of reading and writing, is based on spoken language. It is argued that documents, advising how to raise standards of literacy, have overlooked the ...

This article explores and critiques the different ways in which the concept of “key competencies” has been understood and represented in the curriculum. It is argued that if competencies are to go beyond simply reinforcing the curriculum status quo, the role they play in the curriculum needs to be better ...

The “literary curriculum” seeks to make curriculum space legible. This requires denying that knowledge has backgrounds that cannot be made legible. Worse still, the attempt to make knowledge legible undermines that which can reasonably be described, and leaves it, if not unusable, then deficient. The difficulty facing those who are ...

This article explores how schools might develop a curriculum and pedagogy for the understanding of thinking, rather than the knowing of thinking. It suggests viewing the understanding of thinking processes through Bereiter and Scardamalia’s interpretation of educational process in Popper’s three-world schema. Such an interpretation leads schools to the development ...