“Monsters Are Coming!”: Learning Literacy and Playing Games

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Annette Woods ◽  
Michelle Jeffries
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Still Images ◽  
Academic Benefits ◽  
Before School ◽  
One Year

Background/Context There are recent trends of bringing highly defined, teacher-directed pedagogies into early-childhood contexts in Australia, the United States. and other Western contexts. While the justification for these moves is often the improvement of outcomes for young children, they ignore the large body of research that attests to the social, emotional, and academic benefits of children having time to play and to experience educational programs founded in play-based pedagogies. Focus of the study In this study, we were interested in considering how young children name their worlds in education contexts in which literacies and sustainability education are brought together as educational concepts. This article reports on the playing of one game over time and considers the opportunities that were created by the playing of the game and the competence of the young children in using the game to collaborate, to learn literacy, and to make spaces for other everyday business together. Setting The fieldwork which produced the data for this article involved two researchers attending a suburban Australian early-childhood education context regularly for one year. Participants The children and educators of the center were engaged in an approved program, in the year before school starts within Australian requirements. Therefore the children ranged in age from 3 to 5 years. Research design This article reports on a qualitative study of one class of young children and their educators. Data were collected during fieldwork visits over a period of one year. We observed the children's engagement in outdoor play, collecting data in the form of short video recordings, still images, field notes, and texts produced by the children. Conclusions Our analysis provides evidence that children can demonstrate competent understandings of how language, bodies, movement, and space position themselves and others. The children involved competently collaborated and used language and texts to get along and to sustain a game over many months. They were only able to achieve this because they were given space to play, to own and govern spaces of play, and to problem-solve together as issues arose. The opportunity to direct themselves and their friends was vital as they developed respectful language and literacy practices.

How We Fail Our Children Part I—The Caretaking Young Children Need

2020 ◽  
pp. 92-118
Author(s):  
Maxine Eichner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Early Childhood Development ◽  
Free Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Work Hours ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
High Quality

A question for any thriving society is how to ensure that children have the things they need to do their best. Two different approaches, pro-family policy and free-market family policy, claim to satisfy children’s needs well. Countries with pro-family policy go out of their way to make it easy for parents to spend time with their children when kids most need it, as well as to provide them high-quality caretaking while parents work, and generous material support. In contrast, under free-market family policy, the United States expects parents to negotiate these conditions on their own, privately arranging for time off from work, reasonable work hours, caregiving while they work, and enough cash to support their kids. This chapter uses recent research on early childhood development to construct a list of the caretaking conditions that help young children thrive. It then considers the extent to which children receive these conditions under free-market family policy versus pro-family policy. Ultimately, it turns out that by far the biggest casualties of free-market family policy are our children.

scholarly journals Pathways to a more peaceful and sustainable world: The transformative power of children in families

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Pia R. Britto ◽  
Suna Hanöz-Penney ◽  
Liliana Angelica Ponguta ◽  
Diane Sunar ◽  
Ghassan Issa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
Child Development ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Early Childhood Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Policy Advocacy ◽  
Children And Families ◽  
Transformative Power

Abstract This article provides an overview of selected ongoing international efforts that have been inspired by Edward Zigler's vision to improve programs and policies for young children and families in the United States. The efforts presented are in close alignment with three strategies articulated by Edward Zigler: (a) conduct research that will inform policy advocacy; (b) design, implement, and revise quality early childhood development (ECD) programs; and (c) invest in building the next generation of scholars and advocates in child development. The intergenerational legacy left by Edward Zigler has had an impact on young children not only in the United States, but also across the globe. More needs to be done. We need to work together with a full commitment to ensure the optimal development of each child.

Role of Embodied Movement in Assessing Creative Behavior in Early Childhood: A Focused Review

2019 ◽  
Vol 126 (6) ◽  
pp. 1058-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Frith ◽  
Paul D. Loprinzi ◽  
Stephanie E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Creative Behavior ◽  
Physical Interactions ◽  
One Year ◽  
Interactive Play

The controlled measurement of creative potential in early childhood is imperative for researchers seeking to fully understand the initial emergence and development of creativity. Evidence for original ideation has been demonstrated in infants as young as one year old, through their performance of movement-based, interactive creativity tasks. In this focused review of developmental research, we suggest that embodied movements and interactive play may uniquely facilitate creative thinking in early childhood (i.e., from birth to age six). From this review, we propose that embodied movement reinforces physical interactions that influence cognitions underlying creative behavior. Embodied creativity may supplement traditional creativity measures, as young children may be more inclined to represent their inner thoughts and experiences through movement rather than through language alone. Thus, we explored the importance of embodied creativity as a means of informing current researchers about the development of creativity, and we suggest future experimental research in this area.

scholarly journals Young children’s citizenship membership and participation: comparing discourses in early childhood curricula of Australia, New Zealand and the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
LG Phillips ◽  
Jenny Ritchie ◽  
JK Adair
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Comparative Education ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Children And Childhood

© 2018, © 2018 British Association for International and Comparative Education. Recognition of young children as citizens is relatively new in sociology, with translation emerging into education. Discourses of children and childhood shape ideas of young children as citizens and national discourses of citizenship frame what civic participation can be. The authors analysed national early childhood education curricula frameworks of Australia, New Zealand and the United States to understand how discourses authorise constructions of children as citizens and opportunities for young children’s civic participation. They sought to locate how children are positioned as citizens and what opportunities there are for young children’s citizenship participation in national early childhood curricula documents of Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Illustrative examples of children’s citizenship membership and participation from the three nations’ early childhood curricula were critically read to locate how prevalent discourses of children, childhood and citizenship in each nation define children as citizens and shape possibilities for citizenship participation for young children.

Educator licensure overlap in the early grades: Why it occurs, why it matters, and what to do about it

2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-17
Author(s):  
R. Clarke Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
Elementary Education ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Developmentally Appropriate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Appropriate Practices ◽  
Educational Importance

In the United States, 48 states have recognized the educational importance of the early years by awarding stand-alone early childhood education (ECE) licenses that require specialized training in teaching young children. Yet, at the same time, teachers with elementary education (ELED) licenses are allowed to teach kindergarten in 34 states and 1st through 3 rd grade in more than 45 states. This means that teachers may be licensed to teach young children without receiving specialized early childhood training. R. Clarke Fowler explores the extent of the licensure overlap, the reasons for it, and the effects it has on early childhood education. He recommends moving toward a preK-3 license that requires teachers to learn developmentally appropriate practices for the education of young children.

scholarly journals Posthuman literacies: Young children moving in time, place and more-than-human worlds

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Hackett ◽  
Margaret Somerville
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Emergent Literacy ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
The Body ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Uk

This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualisation of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as a communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s linguistic and non-linguistic utterances, and which occurs through, with, alongside movement. This paper draws on data from two different research studies: in the first study, two-year-old children in the UK banged on drums and marched in a museum. In the second study, two young children in Australia chose sites for their own research and produced a range of emergent literacies from vocalisation and ongoing stories to installations. We present examples of ways in which speaking, gesturing and sounding, as emergent literacy practices, were not so much about transmitting information or intentionally designed signs, but about embodied and sensory experiences in which communication about and in place occurred through the body being and moving in place. This paper contributes to the field of posthuman early childhood literacies by foregrounding movement within in-the-moment becoming. Movement and sound exist beyond the parameters of human perception, within a flat ontology in which humans are decentred and everything exists on the same plane, in constant motion. Starting from movement in order to conceptualise literacy offers, therefore, an expanded field of inquiry into early childhood literacy. In the multimodal literacy practices analysed in this paper, meaning and world emerge simultaneously, offering new forms of literacy and representation and suggesting possibilities for defining or conceptualising literacy in ways that resist anthropocentric or logocentric framings.

Early Childhood Corner: Recognizing the Mathematics

1997 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-115
Author(s):  
Birgitta Corneille
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
One Year

The mathematics that young children explore or to which they are exposed depends on what is important in their everyday lives. One year when teaching nursery school. I found that groups of children on the playground were counting back from ten to zero to “Blast off!” They were usually perched on different climbing apparatus.

Civic Action and Learning with a Community of Aboriginal Australian Young Children

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Gwenneth Phillips ◽  
Kerryn Moroney
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civic Action ◽  
Civic Learning ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Education And Care

CIVICS AND CITIZENSHIP ARE increasingly used in early childhood education policy, but what citizenship and civic learning can be for young children is under-researched and lacking definition. Drawing from the Australian findings of the major study Civic action and learning with young children: Comparing approaches in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, this article shares evidence of civic capacities that a community of young Aboriginal Australian children demonstrate in an early childhood education and care centre. Communitarian citizenship theory provides a framework for citizenship that is accessible for young children by focusing on families, communities and neighbourhoods. Cultural readings of illustrative examples on how young Aboriginal children express civic identity, collective responsibility, civic agency, civic deliberation and civic participation are discussed, highlighting how cultural values shape civic action. Links to state and national early childhood curricula are provided to guide others to further support civic learning in early childhood education.

scholarly journals Investigating Early Childhood Teachers’ Perceptions of a Preschool Yoga Program

SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401882175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenya Wolff ◽  
Alicia Stapp
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
School Setting ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Development ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Teachers Perceptions ◽  
Area Of Interest ◽  
Cognitive Benefits

Yoga for young children has become a growing area of interest in early childhood settings across the United States. Evidence suggests that yoga has the ability to improve young children’s physical development, executive functioning, self-regulation, and can aid in decreasing stress and anxiety. While the scope of research on yoga for young children has primarily focused on the experiences and outcomes of the children who participate, far less is known about the experiences and perceptions of teachers who have engaged in such programs with their students. This study utilized a qualitative case study to investigate teachers’ perceptions of yoga in a school setting. It took place at a laboratory preschool in North Mississippi over the course of 6 months from January to June 2017. A variety of qualitative research methods were employed to garner data including semi-structured interviews, classroom visits, and observations of weekly yoga classes. Findings from the study revealed teachers perceive the benefits of yoga to be increased physical development, self-regulation, and socioemotional skills, along with behavioral and cognitive benefits in the classroom. In addition, teacher buy-in was found to be critical to program success, as the teachers who perceived yoga positively were more willing to incorporate it into their classroom, thus extending its benefits. Of particular interest were reports by preschool teachers of students who continued to use yoga in their daily lives and retain many of the skills learned in yoga even months after they had taken yoga classes.

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