Amanda White

Amanda has extensive experience working in education, mostly as a speech-language therapist with children, families/whānau and teachers in family homes and early childhood education or school contexts.

Amanda has recently completed her doctoral research using video methods to explore multimodal story interactions between 1-year-old children, their families, and teachers in a culturally linguistically diverse community of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Amanda’s current research interests include:

• Exploring multimodal communication and literacies
• Understanding children’s speech, language, communication and learning in the sociocultural contexts of early childhood education settings, schools, and family homes
• Partnering with teachers, parents and whānau in culturally and linguistically diverse communities
• Using qualitative research methods, including multimodal and thematic analysis of observational, interview, and video data

Qualifications

• PhD in Education, University of Auckland
• BSLT (Hons), University of Canterbury
• BA (Hons) in Education, University of Canterbury

Journal publications

• Williamson, J., White, A., and Hedges, H. (2023). Connecting and communicating: Story interactions in the early years. Early Childhood Folio, 27(1), pp. 3-8.
• White, A., Stagg Peterson, S., and Quigan, E. (2022). Young children co-constructing stories with educators. Early Childhood Folio, 26(2), pp. 13-19.
• White, A., Gaffney, J.S., and Hedges, H. (2021). Active, competent communicators: Lexie’s story. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984211047998
• White, A. and Padtoc, I. (2021). Supporting toddlers as competent story navigators across home and early childhood contexts. Early Childhood Folio, 25(2), pp. 3-8.
• Jacobs, M., Harvey, N., and White, A. (2021). Parents and whānau as experts in their worlds: Valuing family pedagogies in early childhood. Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 16(2), pp. 265-282.