scholarly journals Sticky stories from the classroom: From reflection to diffraction in Early Childhood Teacher Education

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Rigmor Moxnes ◽  
Jayne Osgood

This article aims to challenge the prominence of reflexivity as a strategy for early childhood teachers to adopt by taking Norwegian early childhood teacher education as its focus. Observed micro-moments from a university classroom generate multilayered, multi-sensorial entangled narratives that address what reflection and diffraction are and what they do – where students, the educator, materiality, space and affects intra-act. Furthermore, the article explores the ways in which teacher educators and students in early childhood teacher education become-with the classroom and materiality, and, in doing so, ideas about professionalism in early childhood education are opened out. By identifying the limitations of reflection, the authors go on to explore what working with diffraction might offer to reach alternative understandings. By placing a focus on seemingly unremarkable and routine events in the life of an early childhood teacher education classroom, the authors offer other, potentially more generative ways to think about student teachers and their further professional practice in kindergartens.

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi

This article constitutes an attempt to investigate how student teachers and teacher educators in the context of Swedish early childhood teacher education are invented and reinvented by practices that are inspired by feminist and post-structural thinking. I give examples of practice that explicitly make use of different aspects of the personal, such as subjectivities, voice and experience. These are theorized, problematized and troubled in relation to concepts of power, resistance and emancipation. The article questions the possibility of ‘getting outside’ of the regulatory regimes of power production through practices of ‘getting personal’, and asks just how much freedom is possible, even given overtly ‘emancipist’ teaching.


Author(s):  
Kevin Hsieh ◽  
Melanie Davenport

Integrating the arts into the early childhood classroom is considered one of the effective pedagogies for children to learn different disciplines. However, most students in early childhood teacher education programs do not have experience in art, nor do they generally create art themselves. However, these future teachers and their students alike are surrounded with visual culture, immersed in technology, and grew up with television and other devices as indispensable parts of their lives, so these can provide portals for teaching them about the arts and interdisciplinary content integration. Teaching future Early Childhood Education (ECE) teachers creative pedagogies for integrating the arts into their classrooms through the use of technology is essential. The purpose is not just to help them understand the connections between the visual arts and what they see around them on television, tablet, and computer, but also, perhaps optimistically, to encourage them to be advocates for the arts in the lives of their students. In this chapter, the authors contemplate some of the challenges in building those connections for ECE students. They consider the questions: How can we build their confidence with this subject matter and guide them to integrate art forms through technology into their curricula? How can we foster in these future teachers a creative sensibility that recognizes the arts as a fundamental shared human means of expressing identity, understandings, beliefs, and ideas? How can we utilize very accessible community resources to encourage this transformation? This chapter describes a hands-on approach developed for guiding ECE majors who have little or no arts experience to understand, appreciate, and engage in the arts through technology and the interdisciplinary possibilities of Puppetry Arts. They describe the philosophy, process, resources, and outcomes of the course and offer recommendations for integrating the arts into early childhood education coursework through technology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aya Ben-Harush ◽  
Lily Orland-Barak

Purpose Current approaches to early childhood teacher education have moved from a view of student–teacher training as interactions involving one novice and one expert, to a process that demands resources and engagement of several professional players while mediating students’ learning in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a triadic mentoring model of a university–school collaboration (“Academia–Classroom”) on student teachers’ (STs) learning in the context of early childhood education in Israel. Eight mentoring triads were formed in six kindergartens. Each mentoring triad was comprised of the ST, a cooperating teacher and the college supervisor. This paper focuses on three representative triads of the eight that were studied. Design/methodology/approach The in-depth study adopted qualitative methodology including three complementary data-collection sources: observations of the STs working with children in the kindergarten; observations and recordings of the triadic mentoring conversations following the observations; in-depth interviews with each participant in the mentoring triad. Data were analyzed using an interpretative framework developed for the study, which combined elements from Engestrom’s cultural historical activity theory, Gee’s building tasks and Edward’s relational agency. Findings The research identified three major patterns of interaction operating in the mentoring triad that promoted or hindered the learning process of early childhood education students: dissonant, harmonic and argumentative. The way in which relational agency developed in the triads was found to be the most significant aspect of students’ learning process. Originality/value The patterns of interaction identified shed light on new aspects of relational agency, thus offering additional interpretative lenses for examining how relational agency operates in ST mentored learning processes. These new identified patterns have practical implications for the design of mentoring frameworks in early childhood teacher education.


2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Goldstein

Conceptualising and implementing early childhood teacher education for racial and cultural diversity is a complex task that involves learning about social stratification and race, acknowledging the privileges associated with whiteness, and finding ways to create positive racial teaching identities. This article discusses three ways that teacher educators might prepare white early childhood education students for anti-racist work in their classrooms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-96
Author(s):  
Anita Croft

The benefits of beginning Education for Sustainability (EfS) in early childhood are now widely documented. With the support of their teachers, young children have shown that through engagement in sustainability practices they are capable of becoming active citizens in their communities (Duhn, Bachmann, & Harris, 2010; Kelly & White, 2012; Ritchie, 2010; Vaealiki & Mackey, 2008). Engagement with EfS has not been widespread across the early childhood sector in Aotearoa New Zealand (Duhn et al., 2010; Vaealiki & Mackey, 2008) until recently. One way of addressing EfS in early childhood education is through teacher education institutions preparing students to teach EfS when they graduate.


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