Early Childhood Education Journal最新文献

With a view of children as social negotiators, this study explored how preschool children’s voices were nurtured through the implementation of an early-writing/applied phonics approach called Kid Writing (KW). The approach encouraged children to compose writing from their lives as they were guided by an adult who scaffolded the writing process. An analysis of classroom observations, focus groups, and children’s work samples revealed the extent to which preschool children’s voices, motivation, and writing capabilities were supported. Imperative to children’s success as writers in this study was the expansion of preschool teachers’ views of what counts as writing. By legitimizing the full developmental continuum of children’s early writing attempts, including scribbling, mark-making, drawing, and early letter formation, the results of this study documented what young children are capable of when they are empowered to self-express through their joy of writing. The findings disrupt the notion that preschool children are not ready to write. Rather, children’s overall literacy learning is supported by providing opportunities for preschoolers to write from their lived experiences.

While problematic behaviors can hamper children’s early positive development, the teacher–child relationship can play a crucial role in mitigating children’s externalizing problem behavior (EPB).This review aims to systematically examine and synthesize evidence on the effectiveness of interventions designed to enhance teacher–child interactions (TCIs) and assess their impact on reducing EPB among children in childcare settings. Systematic literature searches were performed on four electronic databases (EBSCO, ERIC, SCOPUS, and WOS). A complementary search of clinical trial registries (clinicaltrials.gov) was performed. The studies reported on interventions targeting the promotion of TCI to reduce children’s EPB in childcare settings. The children were aged 0–6 years, and their EPB was assessed using self-report questionnaires and/or observational coding instruments. The risk of bias was evaluated using the Joanna Briggs Institute’s Critical Appraisal Tool. The standardized mean differences were pooled using random effects, and a moderator analysis was conducted. The review included 26 studies, 12 of which were included in a meta-analysis, revealing a significant decrease in children’s EPB (SMD = −0.240; 95% CI = [−0.362, −0.117]; p = 0.001). Tier-2 interventions implemented within the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework were particularly effective (SMD = −0.508; 95% CI: [−0.755, −0.261]). Furthermore, interventions that integrated video components also showed significant effectiveness (SMD = −0.303; 95% CI: [−0.434, −0.172]). This review emphasizes the importance of enhancing TCIs to reduce children's EPB and recommends innovative training methods and long-term follow-up studies for improved effectiveness.

This article builds on conversations about the nature of a pedagogy specifically for babies, which are defined in this paper as 0–2 year olds. To do this, we explore articulations of social purpose and social pedagogy among 15 baby room educators working in UK nurseries. Our findings suggest four types of social purpose and four types of social pedagogy that inform what baby educators do, how they do it and why they do it. The baby educators in our study articulated their social purpose in terms of providing a secure foundation for childhood and adulthood; acting as a support system for parents; enabling healthy early development; and inspiring learning across the lifespan. Correspondingly, they identified their social pedagogy in terms of giving care and nurture to meet physical and emotional needs; cultivating parent partnerships; planning activities, interactions and resources around developmental goals; and creating provocations to stimulate learning based on individual interests. We hope that this typology helps to deepen our understanding of what baby educators experience and the pedagogies they enact day to day, as well as acting as a reflective tool for baby room educators to use to deepen their practice.

At present, research exploring educator’s understandings of displays of student work is scant yet such displays are regularly exhibited within the community spaces of early learning and elementary schools. These displays communicate messages to those within the space about teacher and student agency, curricular priorities, children and their work, and the relationship between teaching and learning. Grounded in a framework of documentality and teacher vision, this paper explores the ways in which preservice teachers (PSTs) understand teacher-cultivated, student work documentation. This research used a Photo-Elicitation Interview methodology to develop a descriptive account of PSTs' visions and understandings of teacher-cultivated, classroom documentation and displays of children's work. Findings reveal that PSTs held paradoxical views of student work documentation teetering between an appreciation of an adult-centered aesthetic disconnected from their academic and creative capacities to an expressed valuing of an agentic positioning of children in the experiences of the classroom.

Although quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) and strong collaborations between families and ECEC educators are important for all children, they may be particularly important for children and families who utilize nighttime or weekend ECEC. This study focuses on ECEC educators’ discourses about closeness versus distance in educational collaborations between parents with nonstandard schedules and professionals who work in extended hours ECEC. The data for this study were collected by interviewing ECEC teachers (n = 12) and nurses (n = 18) working in Finland. Research findings: Using the principles of discourse analysis, we found three tensional discourses: (a) the timing of ECEC and asynchrony; (b) a sense of time versus hurry; and (c) care versus criticism. Practice and policy: The findings revealed that extended hours ECEC provides both challenges and possibilities for creating close educational collaboration with parents. This has important implications for the kinds of structural supports and training educators in extended hours ECEC may need to foster quality collaboration with families.

The body of literature for a professional field is created by voices from people who share their ideas with others through scholarly writing. How do emerging scholars acquire the requisite academic writing skills to publish and contribute to publishing research in our profession? Mentorship is a time-honored practice that could be considered. One possible way to prepare people to amplify their voices through their scholarly writing is through mentorships. Writing mentorships, defined here as a productive collaboration between a more experienced academic author and an emergent scholar that results in professional publication, is the focus of this article. The authors will provide an overview of a specific mentorship program called, Division for Early Childhood Consortium for Innovations in Doctoral Excellence (DECIDE). The article concludes with strategies for generating more productive and satisfying mentor and mentee writing relationships with recommendations for future research.

Research on immigrant populations shows that child care choices are dependent on the population’s region of origin. While the Russian immigrant population in the United States comprises the largest group of immigrants from Eastern Europe and is likely to increase in the future, there is virtually no research on Russian immigrant families’ child care search and selection criteria. This qualitative study applies the theoretical model of Pungello and Kurtz-Costes (1999), which illustrates how factors such as parental demographic characteristics, environmental context, child characteristics, and parental beliefs play into families’ child care selection. The study draws from semi-structured interviews with 11 Russian immigrant families residing in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States to examine their child care search processes and selection criteria. Results revealed that most parents found child care through friends’ recommendations, Internet search, and online reviews. Nine themes describing child care criteria valued by Russian immigrant families emerged from the analysis. Specifically, parents mentioned culture and personal beliefs, child characteristics, convenience, cost and subsidy, education and learning, program features, facilities and environment, teacher characteristics, and rating and reputation as the major factors in selecting child care. Understanding Russian immigrant parents’ child care information sources and selection criteria will allow for early care and education (ECE) providers to accommodate the needs of Russian immigrant population and for policymakers to facilitate access to ECE programs for these families.

Extensive studies have documented cognitive and social-emotional benefits associated with bilingualism. However, past research has considered the cognitive and social-emotional benefits of being bilingual separately, despite research suggesting the convergence of these two domains. This tendency persists even for research that decenters English acquisition and focuses more broadly on benefits associated with multi-language learning (MLL). Furthermore, extant theoretical frameworks that address MLL motivation have generally failed to consider the cognitive and social-emotional benefits as motivators for pursuing MLL. Therefore, the present review synthesizes the cognitive and social-emotional benefits associated with multilingualism with the goal of making suggestions for expounding upon MLL frameworks to reflect a broader range of motivations. We suggest that motivation frameworks consider the cognitive and social-emotional gains associated with multilingualism. In doing so, frameworks have the potential to help us better understand caregivers’ and learners’ key impetuses in pursuing MLL.

As early as preschool, Black children are more at risk than their peers to receive exclusionary practices. These negative early childhood school experiences can create greater risk for entrance into the preschool-to-prison pipeline. However, familial protective factors can help reduce exposure and mitigate this systemic pipeline for young children. The purpose of this study was to determine the familial factors associated with reducing a child’s entrance into the preschool-to-prison pipeline. Results from this study indicated that there were differences in perspectives among teachers and families regarding their child’s academic and behavioral risk. The findings also suggest that consistent strategies and collaboration among teachers and families can serve as familial protective factors, potentially mitigating the risk of academic failures and behavioral disorders.

In recent years the notion of teachers as researchers in their own educational settings has become more prominent and encouraged in research literature. In the context of early childhood education (ECE), the participatory role of teachers is especially suited given its multidisciplinary and practice-based research space. This paper explores this premise and presents a scoping review of ECE studies which have employed a Design-based research (DBR) methodology. The review revealed DBR to be a very recent evolution of participatory methodologies with 25 international studies identified from 2013 to 2023, with differing notions and levels of participation within their phase design and overlapping focus areas and outputs. Implications are discussed in relation to the nature of participants’ roles in DBR, and the emergence of DBR as an apt model of research-informed professional learning for early childhood educators.