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Children's Interests, Inquiries, and Identities argues that the powerful relationship between interests and informal learning has been under-recognised and undervalued. The book proposes new principles for understanding children's learning.
Children’s curiosity about their lives and worlds motivates many interests. Yet, adults often have fixed ideas about what children’s interests are and have been criticised for trivialising children’s interests. This book offers a critical and accessible engagement with research on children’s interests that challenges us to move beyond surface-level understandings. Children’s Interests, Inquiries and Identities argues that the powerful relationship between interests and informal learning has been under-recognised and undervalued. The book proposes new principles for understanding children’s learning. It provides evidence that we need to look beyond the activities or topics children may currently be selecting to find out who and what has stimulated their interests, how we might identify and interpret interests more analytically and deeply, and how we might respond and engage with these in ways that take children’s interests seriously. Moving beyond play-based activities, Helen Hedges explains and illustrates a number of ways by which children’s interests can be interpreted and understood, to get to the heart of what really matters to, and for, children. The book draws on examples from research with children aged under 5 years, and young adults aged 18-25. It also includes a chapter on teachers’ interests. It presents new and original models for interests-based curriculum and sociocultural curriculum and pedagogy for future examination in research and practice. This book demonstrates that leaving behind long-standing, taken-for-granted practices that have influenced understandings of curriculum, pedagogy, learning, and outcomes allows a new perspective of children’s interests to emerge. It will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate students, and practitioners in the early years, parents, and other professionals who work with young children.
Children’s curiosity about their lives and worlds motivates many interests. Yet, adults often have fixed ideas about what children’s interests are and have been criticised for trivialising children’s interests. This book offers a critical and accessible engagement with research on children’s interests that challenges us to move beyond surface-level understandings. Children’s Interests, Inquiries and Identities argues that the powerful relationship between interests and informal learning has been under-recognised and undervalued. The book proposes new principles for understanding children’s learning. It provides evidence that we need to look beyond the activities or topics children may currently be selecting to find out who and what has stimulated their interests, how we might identify and interpret interests more analytically and deeply, and how we might respond and engage with these in ways that take children’s interests seriously. Moving beyond play-based activities, Helen Hedges explains and illustrates a number of ways by which children’s interests can be interpreted and understood, to get to the heart of what really matters to, and for, children. The book draws on examples from research with children aged under 5 years, and young adults aged 18-25. It also includes a chapter on teachers’ interests. It presents new and original models for interests-based curriculum and sociocultural curriculum and pedagogy for future examination in research and practice. This book demonstrates that leaving behind long-standing, taken-for-granted practices that have influenced understandings of curriculum, pedagogy, learning, and outcomes allows a new perspective of children’s interests to emerge. It will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate students, and practitioners in the early years, parents, and other professionals who work with young children.
As countries experience increasing cultural diversity both within and between their borders, contemporary researchers are exploring the connection between culture and children's learning and academic experiences. One important goal is to provide all children with educational experiences that are culturally sensitive, relevant, and effective in helping them reach their maximum potential and preparing them for the future. With over twenty-five contributing authors, this volume investigates the connection between culture and children's schooling and learning experiences from multidisciplinary perspectives, diverse methodologies, and cross-cultural and culture specific approaches. The common thread running through the chapters is the understanding that learning is an activity that takes place within cultural contexts. Together, the chapters highlight the forces that shape children's everyday learning experiences. Core themes address how parental beliefs and cultural ways of learning and problem-solving shape children's learning experiences and social interactions with teachers; the importance of quality early childhood education and playful learning to children's school success and development; and how the complex intersection of cultural variables with forces such as historical injustice, social and educational inequality, economic stability, and political ideologies shape children's learning. The volume honors the experiences of Indigenous, newcomer, first-generation children, and children of underrepresented communities and highlights the vital role that policy makers, teacher educators, schools, and classroom educators play in helping all children reach their academic and social potential.
This edited volume takes the US-derived concept and praxis of funds of knowledge and applies it globally to critically analyse current education in line with social justice, antiracism, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Edited by one of the premier international voices for the funds of knowledge approach, and in particular funds of identity theory, chapters foreground first-hand, participatory, research-practice experiences with learners, schools, and local communities. These experiences demonstrate the positive, social-justice inspired pedagogical actions that result in, and reveal, powerful possibilities for a decolonialised, antiracist praxis that aims to eradicate deficit thinking in education. Further, the inclusion of voices that are typically "othered" in the construction and distribution of academic knowledge make this a seminal volume in the field. Ultimately, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers working in the sociology of education, psychology of education, and those specifically dealing with antiracism, decolonialism, and equity within education.
Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.
In a climate of increasing emphasis on testing, measurable outcomes, competition and efficiency, the real lives of children and their teachers are often neglected or are too messy and intricate to legislate and quantify. As such, curricula are designed without including the very people that compose the identities of schools. Here Clandinin takes issue with this tendency, bringing together a collection of narratives from seven writers who spent a year in an urban school, exploring the experiences and contributions of children, families, teachers and administrators. These stories show us an alternative way of attending to what counts in schools, shifting away from the school as a business model towards an idea of schools as places to engage citizenship and to attend to the wholeness of people’s lives. Articulating the complex ethical dilemmas and issues that face people and schools every day, this fascinating study puts school life under the microscope raises new questions about who and what education is for.
This book explores how we can better understand and support children’s learning identity as artists. It discusses an innovative pedagogical approach that outlines parents’ and educators’ roles in developing and supporting children as artists. Drawing on original research, the book discusses rich case study examples and vignettes to give new insights into children’s learning and developing identities as artists. It identifies the key characteristics of children’s creative learning and outlines a creative and reflective pedagogy while highlighting the role of adults in the process. The chapters discuss topics such as curiosity, creative skills, self-directed learning, real-life contexts for learning and ways of engaging creative learning and imagination. The book provides a new model for children’s art education and will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students in the fields of arts education, creativity, and learning. It will also appeal to specialist art educators and policy makers within the arts and arts education.
The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.