Play as a learning practice increasingly is under challenge as a valued component of early childh... more Play as a learning practice increasingly is under challenge as a valued component of early childhood education. Views held in parallel include confirmation of the place of play in early childhood education and, at the same time, a denigration of the role of play in favor for more teacher-structured and formal activities. As a consequence, pedagogical approaches towards play, the curriculum activities that constitute play, and the appropriateness of play in educational settings, have come under scrutiny in recent years. In this context, this study investigates children's perspectives of play and how they understand the role of play and learning in their everyday activities. This article reports on an Australian study where teacher-researchers investigated child-led insights into what counts as play in their everyday classroom activities. Children (aged 3–4 years) described play as an activity that involved their active participation in " doing " something, being with peers, and having agency and ownership of ideas. Children did not always characterize their activities as " play " , and not all activities in the preschool program were described as OPEN ACCESS Educ. Sci. 2015, 5 346 play. The article highlights that play and learning are complex concepts that may be easily dismissed as separate, when rather they are deeply intertwined. The findings of this study generate opportunities for educators and academics to consider what counts as " play " for children, and to prompt further consideration of the role of play as an antidote to adult centric views of play.
This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. I... more This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. It analyses an episode in the block area to show the competent ways that some young boys use communication strategies to build their social worlds. Such understandings invite early childhood educators to reconsider young children's communicative competence and the ways they accomplish their social order. Understandings of language interactions In early childhood education, children's language typically has been studied from a developmental perspective. This approach has focused on a child's development of language or sometimes, on the child's lack of language. Recently, other perspectives have emerged that understand children's language differently. One such perspective is sociology of childhood, which recognises the complex language interactions in which young children engage with each other and with adults (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Mayall, 1999; Waksler, 199...
The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last deca... more The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last decade. While research has suggested a range of potential affordances and limitations of online counseling modalities, very few studies have offered detailed examinations of how ...
This chapter presents an initial investigation of communication between children and young people... more This chapter presents an initial investigation of communication between children and young people with telephone counsellors at Kids Help Line,a national Australian children’s helpline. It focuses on the openings of the calls to show the ways in which these young callers disclose and describe their troubles and delicate or sensitive matters to adult counsellors, and how these counsellors, in turn, display an awareness of the interactional sensitivity of these descriptions.
This paper reports on research with women inmates undertaking prison education in twoQueensland c... more This paper reports on research with women inmates undertaking prison education in twoQueensland correctional facilities: Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre and Helena Jones Community Corrections Centre. This study investigated inmate women's accounts of education using interview data. The research found that women's involvement in prison education identified institutional and cultural limitations concerning women's access to, and participation in, prison education programs. These accounts attested variously to the embeddedness of their educational experiences within these constraints. This work recommends, as a research policy imperative, changes to structural and cultural dimensions of prison education to support women inmates’ educational access and experiences.
There is much still to learn about how young children’s membership with peers shapes their constr... more There is much still to learn about how young children’s membership with peers shapes their constructions of moral and social obligations within everyday activities in the school playground. This paper investigates how a small group of girls, aged four to six years, account for their everyday social interactions in the playground. They were video-recorded as they participated in a pretend game of school. Several days later, a video-recorded excerpt of the interaction was shown to them and invited to comment on what was happening in the video. This conversation was audio-recorded. Drawing on a conversation analysis approach, this chapter shows that, despite their discontent and complaining about playing the game of school, the girls’ actions showed their continued orientation to the particular codes of the game, of ‘no going away’ and ‘no telling’. By making relevant these codes, jointly constructed by the girls during the interview, they managed each other’s continued participation w...
The notion of leadership continues to be debated and contested. It involves concepts of power, co... more The notion of leadership continues to be debated and contested. It involves concepts of power, context and relationships, with many social factors contributing to individual perceptions and understandings of what constitutes “good” leadership. In the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC), the concept of leadership remains relatively under-explored, particularly in relation to birth to age five services. This paper outlines a study investigating how the concept of leadership is understood and enacted by people in the ECEC field in Australia. It explores the contribution of a methodological framework of symbolic interactionism, informed by feminist theories, to the analysis of one case study, which is part of a larger project. The analysis of this case study indicates a tension between leadership at a centre level and leadership for the field in the broader context. The paper concludes that understanding this tension may assist the ECEC field to develop more effectively, ...
Investing in early childhood care and education services contributes to the lifetime well- being ... more Investing in early childhood care and education services contributes to the lifetime well- being of children and families. Early childhood teachers work at the frontline of this investment, supporting families and dealing with day-to-day issues that impact on the lives and learning of young children. These teachers work within prevailing social and political structures yet they are also co-constructors of
This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. I... more This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. It analyses an episode in the block area to show the competent ways that some young boys use communication strategies to build their social worlds. Such understandings invite early childhood educators to reconsider young children's communicative competence and the ways they accomplish their social order. Understandings
The lives of children are seen to be governed increasingly by child-focused legislation and polic... more The lives of children are seen to be governed increasingly by child-focused legislation and policy. In this study we explored the different ways that children competently experience and deal with various forms of adult-determined regulation in their everyday lives. We asked: What are children’s everyday experiences? How do they construct their own social spaces in everyday contexts? We investigated children’s experiences from the perspective of children themselves. Studies of children using adult understandings of children’s experiences are common, but few studies understand children as competent informants of their everyday lives. In this study, we viewed children as active agents who deal competently with each other and with adults in their everyday lives.
Funded by a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Faculty of Education Research Grant in 2002... more Funded by a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Faculty of Education Research Grant in 2002, this study investigated the impact of regulatory devices on young people’s everyday experiences in collaboration with the Commission for Children and Young People (Queensland). Data were collected in three Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) services in three provincial cities of Queensland. Pseudonyms were given to each research site. The three sites for the research were Herstville Youth Service, Branston Youth Service and Granard Youth Service. A total of seventeen residents participated in the study, ranging in age from mid to late teens. The research found that residents oriented to regulation, self-regulation and negotiation, albeit in different strengths and combinations, depending on the service attended, and the types of social relationships and networks to which participants had access. Across the SAAP services, residents oriented to regulation as the key aspect...
The sociology of childhood framework is generating new approaches to researching children as comp... more The sociology of childhood framework is generating new approaches to researching children as competent informants of their own everyday experience. Seeing children as competent research participants contrasts much educational research that sees children as developing and seeking to attain competence and provides valuable methodological insights of home and school. Participants were children aged 7-12 years enrolled in two Brisbane schools. This paper investigates children's own accounts of their everyday practices in two Brisbane schools. It provides accounts of how children, themselves, make sense of their everyday lives and how they feel about making decisions or having decisions made for them. The paper demonstrates that negotiating various forms of adult- etermined regulation and control is an important and necessary part of children's everyday lives. So too, it shows that some forms of adult regulation are more acceptable to children than others and that finding social ...
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2014
While there has been much interest in children's use of different technologies, research is often... more While there has been much interest in children's use of different technologies, research is often done with schoolage children in their classrooms. This exploratory research study looks at fifteen preschool children (aged three to five) in Queensland, Australia and their use of different technologies in their own homes. This paper examines data from a checklist of technologies available in the home and video recording data of children's interactions with online technologies and other people captured by parents, which were analyzed using a modified 'seating sweeps' approach to gain a detailed, descriptive analysis of the home environment.
ABSTRACT Australian preschool teachers’ use of Web-searching in their classroom practice was exam... more ABSTRACT Australian preschool teachers’ use of Web-searching in their classroom practice was examined (N = 131). Availability of Internet-enabled digital technology and the contribution of teacher demographic characteristics, comfort with digital technologies and beliefs about their use were assessed. Internet-enabled technologies were available in 53% (n = 69) of classrooms. Within these classrooms, teacher age and beliefs predicted Web-searching practice. Although comfortable with digital access of knowledge in their everyday life, teachers reported less comfort with Web-searching in the context of their classroom practice. The findings identify the provision of Internet-enabled technologies and professional development as actions to support effective and confident inclusion of Web-searching in classrooms. Such actions are necessary to align with national policy documents that define acquisition of digital literacies as a goal and assert digital access to knowledge as an issue of equity.
ABSTRACT Purpose – This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground... more ABSTRACT Purpose – This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground duty asks two boys to each give an account of their actions over an incident that had just occurred on some climbing equipment in the playground.Methodology – This chapter employs an ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. The data are taken from a corpus of video recorded interactions of children, aged 7–9 years, and the teacher, in school playgrounds during the lunch recess.Findings – The findings show the ways that children work up accounts of their playground practices when asked by the teacher. The teacher initially provided interactional space for each child to give their version of the events. Ultimately, the teacher's version of how to act in the playground became the sanctioned one. The children and the teacher formulated particular social orders of behavior in the playground through multimodal devices, direct reported speech, and scripts. Such public displays of talk work as socialization practices that frame teacher-sanctioned morally appropriate actions in the playground.Value of chapter – This chapter shows the pervasiveness of the teacher's social order, as she presented an institutional social order of how to interact in the playground, showing clearly the disjunction of adult–child orders between the teacher and children.
ABSTRACT The research presented in this volume has been undertaken in a range of settings and acr... more ABSTRACT The research presented in this volume has been undertaken in a range of settings and across ages, to display the rich, varied, and complex aspects of children and young people's everyday lives. The papers contribute to understanding children's disputes, framed as forms of social practice, by closely examining children's talk and interaction in disputes to offer insight into how they arrange their social lives within the context of school, home, neighborhood, correctional, and cafe settings. As such, this volume contributes to an emerging body of edited volumes that investigate children and young people's everyday interactions (Cromdal, 2009; Cromdal & Tholander, in press; Gardner & Forrester, 2010; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2007; Hutchby & Moran-Ellis, 1998). Each paper has been peer reviewed, by respected researchers of the field, in some cases authors of this volume, and revised.
ABSTRACT The view that children should have a say in and participate in the decision-making of, m... more ABSTRACT The view that children should have a say in and participate in the decision-making of, matters that affect them is now an accepted position when considering research and policy in the early years. This paper reviews the field of child participation in the Australian context to show that, despite growing evidence of support within policy and research arenas, young children’s participation rights in Australia have not been key agenda items for early childhood education. While a significant part of children’s daily experience takes place in classrooms, the actual practices of engaging young children as participants in everyday activities remains a challenge for early childhood education. Participation is an interactional process that involves managing relationships between children and adults. Recommendations include further research into the daily experiences of young children to show what participation might look like when translated to the everyday activities of the classroom and playground.
Play as a learning practice increasingly is under challenge as a valued component of early childh... more Play as a learning practice increasingly is under challenge as a valued component of early childhood education. Views held in parallel include confirmation of the place of play in early childhood education and, at the same time, a denigration of the role of play in favor for more teacher-structured and formal activities. As a consequence, pedagogical approaches towards play, the curriculum activities that constitute play, and the appropriateness of play in educational settings, have come under scrutiny in recent years. In this context, this study investigates children's perspectives of play and how they understand the role of play and learning in their everyday activities. This article reports on an Australian study where teacher-researchers investigated child-led insights into what counts as play in their everyday classroom activities. Children (aged 3–4 years) described play as an activity that involved their active participation in " doing " something, being with peers, and having agency and ownership of ideas. Children did not always characterize their activities as " play " , and not all activities in the preschool program were described as OPEN ACCESS Educ. Sci. 2015, 5 346 play. The article highlights that play and learning are complex concepts that may be easily dismissed as separate, when rather they are deeply intertwined. The findings of this study generate opportunities for educators and academics to consider what counts as " play " for children, and to prompt further consideration of the role of play as an antidote to adult centric views of play.
This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. I... more This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. It analyses an episode in the block area to show the competent ways that some young boys use communication strategies to build their social worlds. Such understandings invite early childhood educators to reconsider young children's communicative competence and the ways they accomplish their social order. Understandings of language interactions In early childhood education, children's language typically has been studied from a developmental perspective. This approach has focused on a child's development of language or sometimes, on the child's lack of language. Recently, other perspectives have emerged that understand children's language differently. One such perspective is sociology of childhood, which recognises the complex language interactions in which young children engage with each other and with adults (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Mayall, 1999; Waksler, 199...
The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last deca... more The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last decade. While research has suggested a range of potential affordances and limitations of online counseling modalities, very few studies have offered detailed examinations of how ...
This chapter presents an initial investigation of communication between children and young people... more This chapter presents an initial investigation of communication between children and young people with telephone counsellors at Kids Help Line,a national Australian children’s helpline. It focuses on the openings of the calls to show the ways in which these young callers disclose and describe their troubles and delicate or sensitive matters to adult counsellors, and how these counsellors, in turn, display an awareness of the interactional sensitivity of these descriptions.
This paper reports on research with women inmates undertaking prison education in twoQueensland c... more This paper reports on research with women inmates undertaking prison education in twoQueensland correctional facilities: Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre and Helena Jones Community Corrections Centre. This study investigated inmate women's accounts of education using interview data. The research found that women's involvement in prison education identified institutional and cultural limitations concerning women's access to, and participation in, prison education programs. These accounts attested variously to the embeddedness of their educational experiences within these constraints. This work recommends, as a research policy imperative, changes to structural and cultural dimensions of prison education to support women inmates’ educational access and experiences.
There is much still to learn about how young children’s membership with peers shapes their constr... more There is much still to learn about how young children’s membership with peers shapes their constructions of moral and social obligations within everyday activities in the school playground. This paper investigates how a small group of girls, aged four to six years, account for their everyday social interactions in the playground. They were video-recorded as they participated in a pretend game of school. Several days later, a video-recorded excerpt of the interaction was shown to them and invited to comment on what was happening in the video. This conversation was audio-recorded. Drawing on a conversation analysis approach, this chapter shows that, despite their discontent and complaining about playing the game of school, the girls’ actions showed their continued orientation to the particular codes of the game, of ‘no going away’ and ‘no telling’. By making relevant these codes, jointly constructed by the girls during the interview, they managed each other’s continued participation w...
The notion of leadership continues to be debated and contested. It involves concepts of power, co... more The notion of leadership continues to be debated and contested. It involves concepts of power, context and relationships, with many social factors contributing to individual perceptions and understandings of what constitutes “good” leadership. In the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC), the concept of leadership remains relatively under-explored, particularly in relation to birth to age five services. This paper outlines a study investigating how the concept of leadership is understood and enacted by people in the ECEC field in Australia. It explores the contribution of a methodological framework of symbolic interactionism, informed by feminist theories, to the analysis of one case study, which is part of a larger project. The analysis of this case study indicates a tension between leadership at a centre level and leadership for the field in the broader context. The paper concludes that understanding this tension may assist the ECEC field to develop more effectively, ...
Investing in early childhood care and education services contributes to the lifetime well- being ... more Investing in early childhood care and education services contributes to the lifetime well- being of children and families. Early childhood teachers work at the frontline of this investment, supporting families and dealing with day-to-day issues that impact on the lives and learning of young children. These teachers work within prevailing social and political structures yet they are also co-constructors of
This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. I... more This paper explores the verbal and non-verbal interaction of children in a preschool classroom. It analyses an episode in the block area to show the competent ways that some young boys use communication strategies to build their social worlds. Such understandings invite early childhood educators to reconsider young children's communicative competence and the ways they accomplish their social order. Understandings
The lives of children are seen to be governed increasingly by child-focused legislation and polic... more The lives of children are seen to be governed increasingly by child-focused legislation and policy. In this study we explored the different ways that children competently experience and deal with various forms of adult-determined regulation in their everyday lives. We asked: What are children’s everyday experiences? How do they construct their own social spaces in everyday contexts? We investigated children’s experiences from the perspective of children themselves. Studies of children using adult understandings of children’s experiences are common, but few studies understand children as competent informants of their everyday lives. In this study, we viewed children as active agents who deal competently with each other and with adults in their everyday lives.
Funded by a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Faculty of Education Research Grant in 2002... more Funded by a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Faculty of Education Research Grant in 2002, this study investigated the impact of regulatory devices on young people’s everyday experiences in collaboration with the Commission for Children and Young People (Queensland). Data were collected in three Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) services in three provincial cities of Queensland. Pseudonyms were given to each research site. The three sites for the research were Herstville Youth Service, Branston Youth Service and Granard Youth Service. A total of seventeen residents participated in the study, ranging in age from mid to late teens. The research found that residents oriented to regulation, self-regulation and negotiation, albeit in different strengths and combinations, depending on the service attended, and the types of social relationships and networks to which participants had access. Across the SAAP services, residents oriented to regulation as the key aspect...
The sociology of childhood framework is generating new approaches to researching children as comp... more The sociology of childhood framework is generating new approaches to researching children as competent informants of their own everyday experience. Seeing children as competent research participants contrasts much educational research that sees children as developing and seeking to attain competence and provides valuable methodological insights of home and school. Participants were children aged 7-12 years enrolled in two Brisbane schools. This paper investigates children's own accounts of their everyday practices in two Brisbane schools. It provides accounts of how children, themselves, make sense of their everyday lives and how they feel about making decisions or having decisions made for them. The paper demonstrates that negotiating various forms of adult- etermined regulation and control is an important and necessary part of children's everyday lives. So too, it shows that some forms of adult regulation are more acceptable to children than others and that finding social ...
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2014
While there has been much interest in children's use of different technologies, research is often... more While there has been much interest in children's use of different technologies, research is often done with schoolage children in their classrooms. This exploratory research study looks at fifteen preschool children (aged three to five) in Queensland, Australia and their use of different technologies in their own homes. This paper examines data from a checklist of technologies available in the home and video recording data of children's interactions with online technologies and other people captured by parents, which were analyzed using a modified 'seating sweeps' approach to gain a detailed, descriptive analysis of the home environment.
ABSTRACT Australian preschool teachers’ use of Web-searching in their classroom practice was exam... more ABSTRACT Australian preschool teachers’ use of Web-searching in their classroom practice was examined (N = 131). Availability of Internet-enabled digital technology and the contribution of teacher demographic characteristics, comfort with digital technologies and beliefs about their use were assessed. Internet-enabled technologies were available in 53% (n = 69) of classrooms. Within these classrooms, teacher age and beliefs predicted Web-searching practice. Although comfortable with digital access of knowledge in their everyday life, teachers reported less comfort with Web-searching in the context of their classroom practice. The findings identify the provision of Internet-enabled technologies and professional development as actions to support effective and confident inclusion of Web-searching in classrooms. Such actions are necessary to align with national policy documents that define acquisition of digital literacies as a goal and assert digital access to knowledge as an issue of equity.
ABSTRACT Purpose – This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground... more ABSTRACT Purpose – This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground duty asks two boys to each give an account of their actions over an incident that had just occurred on some climbing equipment in the playground.Methodology – This chapter employs an ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. The data are taken from a corpus of video recorded interactions of children, aged 7–9 years, and the teacher, in school playgrounds during the lunch recess.Findings – The findings show the ways that children work up accounts of their playground practices when asked by the teacher. The teacher initially provided interactional space for each child to give their version of the events. Ultimately, the teacher's version of how to act in the playground became the sanctioned one. The children and the teacher formulated particular social orders of behavior in the playground through multimodal devices, direct reported speech, and scripts. Such public displays of talk work as socialization practices that frame teacher-sanctioned morally appropriate actions in the playground.Value of chapter – This chapter shows the pervasiveness of the teacher's social order, as she presented an institutional social order of how to interact in the playground, showing clearly the disjunction of adult–child orders between the teacher and children.
ABSTRACT The research presented in this volume has been undertaken in a range of settings and acr... more ABSTRACT The research presented in this volume has been undertaken in a range of settings and across ages, to display the rich, varied, and complex aspects of children and young people's everyday lives. The papers contribute to understanding children's disputes, framed as forms of social practice, by closely examining children's talk and interaction in disputes to offer insight into how they arrange their social lives within the context of school, home, neighborhood, correctional, and cafe settings. As such, this volume contributes to an emerging body of edited volumes that investigate children and young people's everyday interactions (Cromdal, 2009; Cromdal & Tholander, in press; Gardner & Forrester, 2010; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2007; Hutchby & Moran-Ellis, 1998). Each paper has been peer reviewed, by respected researchers of the field, in some cases authors of this volume, and revised.
ABSTRACT The view that children should have a say in and participate in the decision-making of, m... more ABSTRACT The view that children should have a say in and participate in the decision-making of, matters that affect them is now an accepted position when considering research and policy in the early years. This paper reviews the field of child participation in the Australian context to show that, despite growing evidence of support within policy and research arenas, young children’s participation rights in Australia have not been key agenda items for early childhood education. While a significant part of children’s daily experience takes place in classrooms, the actual practices of engaging young children as participants in everyday activities remains a challenge for early childhood education. Participation is an interactional process that involves managing relationships between children and adults. Recommendations include further research into the daily experiences of young children to show what participation might look like when translated to the everyday activities of the classroom and playground.
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Papers by Susan Danby