scholarly journals Cross-Cultural Reactions to Using Computers in the Early Childhood Education Classroom

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Castellani ◽  
Linda Tsantis

The purpose of this study was to explore teacher and student use of KIDWARE as an integrated element throughout a countywide summer enrichment program. In particular, the intent of this research study was to look specifically at how elementary school English as a Second Language (ESOL) teachers and students used the KIDWARE program. This study was conducted under the assumption that technology has the capacity to allow students to work in authentic environments and create meanings based on their understanding of the teaching and learning task, and that computer software constitutes a human artifact and as such expresses the culture of its creators. This study was designed to engage with such software and to explore how it was used in an early childhood setting for ESOL learners.

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Aruna Ankiah-Gangadeen ◽  
Michael Anthony Samuel

Language policies in education in multilingual postcolonial contexts are often driven by ideological considerations more veered towards socio-economic and political viability for the country than towards the practicality at implementation level. Centuries after the advent of colonisation, when culturally and linguistically homogenous countries helped to maintain the dominion of colonisers, the English language still has a stronghold in numerous countries due to the material rewards it offers. How then are the diversity of languages – often with different statuses and functions in society – reconciled in the teaching and learning process? How do teachers deal with the intricacies that are generated within a situation where children are taught in a language that is foreign to them? This paper is based on a study involving pre-primary teachers in Mauritius, a developing multilingual African country. The aim was to understand how their approach to the teaching of English was shaped by their biographical experiences of learning the language. The narrative inquiry methodology offered rich possibilities to foray into these experiences, including the manifestations of negotiating their classroom pedagogy in relation to their own personal historical biographies of language teaching and learning, the policy environment, and the pragmatic classroom specificities of diverse, multilingual learners. These insights become resources for early childhood education and teacher development in multilingual contexts caught within the tensions between language policy and pedagogy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Abril-López ◽  
Dolores López Carrillo ◽  
Pedro Miguel González-Moreno ◽  
Emilio José Delgado-Algarra

This article presents the research results in relation to an interdisciplinary teaching innovation project—Teaching and Learning of Social Sciences and Teaching and Learning of Natural Sciences—with Early Childhood Preservice Teachers (ECPT) at the University of Alcalá (Spain) in the pandemic context by COVID-19 during 2020–2021 (N = 55): 52 women (94.55%) and 3 men (5.45%) from 20 to 22 years of age. The main research problem is to know if the ECPT improves the learning to learn competence after a challenge-based learning (CBL) linked to virtual tour in a museum. The main objective was to improve the learning to learn competence, during a virtual tour at the Community of Madrid Regional Archaeological Museum (MAR) (Alcalá de Henares, Spain) for a reflective training of students to understand problems of the past and present and future global challenges, promote collaborative and multidisciplinary work, and defend ethics and leadership. In order to ascertain the level of acquisition of this competence in those teachers who were being trained, their self-perception—pretest–posttest—of the experience was assessed through a system of categories adapted from the European Commission. ECPT worked, in small groups and using e/m-learning tools, ten challenges and one storytelling cooperatively with university teachers to solve prehistoric questions related to current situations and problems. Subsequently, two Early Childhood Education teachers from a school in Alcalá de Henares reviewed the proposals and adapted them for application in the classroom of 5-year-old boys and girls. The results show an improvement in this competence in Early Childhood Preservice Teachers: total score pre-post comparison paired-samples Wilcoxon test result shows a statistically significant difference (p > 0.001); an evaluation rubric verified the results of self-perception. Second, we highlight the importance of carrying out virtual museum tours from a challenge-based learning for the development of big ideas, essential questions, challenges, and activities on socioeconomic, environmental, and emotional knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Third, this experience shows the insufficient educational adaptation of the virtual museum tour to the Early Childhood Education stage from a technological and didactic workshops point of view, but there is a diversity of paleontological and archaeological materials and a significant sociocritical discourse.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
MICHAEL OLUBUNMI ODEWUMI ◽  
Grace O. OPUTA, Grace O ◽  
Isyaka BELLO

Early stages of reading and writing rest solely on the alphabet.  Learning of letters with infographics in the elementary classes makes learning more easy and meaningful.  The study examined the potentials of infographics in enhancing learning at an early childhood level especially on letters.  The researcher utilized experimental design which including pre and post-test. The package was validated by experts with a reliability coefficient of 0. 77. The findings of this study showed that the experimental group means a score of 30.60 is higher than the control group means a score of 30.50 co-efficient. Moreover, the means score of 30.742 for females and 30.345 for male pupils was obtained. The study concluded that children at the early childhood level could learn better using infographics based approach. It was recommended that incentives should be provided for pre-school teachers to participate in highly effective staff development to help them integrate infographics into their teaching and learning. Also, infographics based approach be used for all subjects in early childhood education in Nigeria


2019 ◽  
pp. 575-587
Author(s):  
Adela González Fernández

Bilingual education at the earlier stages of education is one of the main concerns of current governments and educative policies. This is resulting in the proliferation of new methodologies and educative proposals in order to obtain the best possible results. However, most of the time, teachers and educators focus on teaching linguistic elements in isolation. The aim of this chapter is to propose the use of musical tales in bilingual education in early childhood education as a tool for teachers and students to learn to communicate fluently in the foreign language. The use of music, literature, and drama in the same activity makes the perfect combination to help children learn a new language, since it improves aspects like vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and the communicative compentence in general.


Author(s):  
Asil Ali Özdoğru

Play is a universal form of human behavior that has been observed across all cultures and constitutes a fundamental role in children's development. This chapter summarizes theory, research, and practice of play in early childhood education from a cross-cultural perspective. Even though there are common qualities of play, there is a great deal of variation within and across cultures. In the multicultural environment of globalizing world, early childhood professionals need to make better use of play from an intercultural perspective. Effective utilization of play in early childhood education needs a thorough understanding of scientific theories and cross-cultural research on play. Quality early childhood education programs incorporate play as a central element in the curriculum with consideration of both individual- and group-level differences. Developmentally and culturally appropriate practice in early childhood education demands the assessment and utilization of individual and cultural characteristics of children in the planning and implementation of play-based interventions.


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