The New Zealand Annual Review of Education

Children’s interests and early childhood curriculum: A critical analysis of the relationship between research, policy, and practice

Liz Chesworth, Helen Hedges — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Policy makers have a powerful influence on educational practice. When such bodies are vague about the evidence-base for their policies they may uncritically rely on outdated theories, beliefs, and selective research evidence. A tension may then exist where practitioners become undermined as agents in curricular decision-making. Practitioners may aim to provide curriculum and pedagogy aligned with contemporary knowledge, but are also bound to the policy bodies who hold persuasive power. In England and Aotearoa New Zealand, two particular organisations in each country have most influence on early childhood education. Focused on the notion of children’s interests, this article questions the basis for the key curricular policy, accompanying advice and guidance, and evaluation standards of these organisations. We do so having discussed children’s interests from historical and contemporary research perspectives. We then trace and critique ways children’s interests present in significant policy documents. We suggest that both policy and practice adopt contemporary perspectives of children’s interests and move towards a middle space between curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived (Aoki, 2005). Such a space provides a way forward for ongoing curriculum conversations about children’s interests.

The ideal early childhood teacher?

Kiri Gould — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In policy, teachers are persistently positioned as central to improving the quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC). They are frequently the targets for policy reform that proactively seeks to shape teaching priorities and practices. The constructions of teachers in policy shape notions of ideal professional identities, opening up spaces for certain identities and closing spaces for others. This critical discourse analysis of seven key ECEC policy texts assembles a range of discourses to identify and critically examine two prevalent and distinct 'ideal' professional identities for early childhood teachers: The Professional and The Kaiako.

Early childhood teachers engaging with leadership narratives in policy

Louise Gorst, Alice Chen Jia, Maria Cooper — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Educational leadership resists a unifying definition, assumption, or theory. This complexity encourages us to learn about leadership to understand its core components, underlying assumptions, and relevance for context. In Aotearoa New Zealand, policy rhetoric promotes leadership as being enacted by teachers and positional leaders. This consideration for teachers is positive but problematic, as it requires them to consider leadership in ways beyond what they feel equipped or supported to achieve. Augmenting this concern is the limited professional learning support for leadership development, especially in early childhood, and the increasing responsibility for teachers to achieve policy aspirations. To understand the rhetoric used to emphasise this responsibility, we utilise qualitative document analysis to examine the leadership narratives promoted in the Teaching Council’s Leadership Strategy and Capability Framework, from the perspectives of provisionally certificated teachers, teacher leaders, and positional leaders. Our argument suggests the leadership narratives promulgated by these texts are ambitious and raise issues of: coherence, contextualisation, and complexity. We discuss these issues in relation to support for teachers to critically engage with policy texts as important leadership learning.

Opening up the narrow

Philippa Nicoll Antipas — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It is vital to engage with professional learning and development (PLD) to be a teacher in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the way it has been enacted due to education policy, PLD has essentially become synonymous with teacher inquiry: to engage with PLD is to follow an inquiry cycle. Literature into what constitutes effective teacher PLD similarly endorses an inquiry approach. But teacher inquiry as interpreted by Ministry of Education neoliberal-influenced policy and procedures risks becoming a linear process abstracted away from the context and complexity of schools and teaching. Neoliberal influences on education policy have similarly supported input-output assumptions of PLD and have led to a narrowing effect. However, it is possible to open PLD up to be creative and subversive. If policy and procedure were to be decoupled, introducing greater flexibility, and refocused on the principles that underpin effective teacher PLD, then this creativity and transformation could be realised.