Suchergebnisse

This article explores whether the multiple tools used by government to implement social policy influence organizational performance. This analysis focuses on three tools—grants, contracts, and vouchers—and their use in the field of early childhood care and education. Through analysis of a field-based study of 22 organizations, the authors explore qualitative evidence and examine the relative consequences of each tool using multivariate modeling. The authors conceptualize organizational performance along four dimensions—management capacity, management outcomes, program capacity, and program outcomes—to better explore how government tools influence organizations delivering publicly funded services. Findings reveal that the different tools the government uses to implement early childhood programs have distinct consequences; grants have the most significant, positive consequences on a variety of desirable outcomes.

Klaten Regency is one of area in Central Java Province which prone to six kinds of disaster including earthquake, volcano eruption, flood, landslide, fire and hurricanes. The most vulnerable victims of disaster are children. This paper aims to describe the disaster education model for early childhood which applied in a model of playing while learning in the EWS park (Eling/Remember-Waspada/Alert-Siaga/Readiness). It involved government and community, include Regional Agency of Disaster Management (BPBD), Fire Rescue, Search and Rescue Unit, Teachers and Students of Early Childhood. This activity used collaborative participatory approach, which a number of community representatives were involved together in learning and simulating the disaster mitigation. The result of the community service showed that the process of learning activities takes place with a pleasant atmosphere, participants enthusiastically receive any material presented by the instructor. The material consists of flood mitigation, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Participants try to practice/simulate using the media provided in EWS Park. Simulations are done in groups and individuals with great enthusiasm.

Early childhood education is crucial for the development of young children's understanding of the natural world. Children have a role in sustaining a viable environmental and social future. This research interrogated key ideas concerning STEM education for sustainable development, drawing on seminal research and a range of government policy documents to formulate a futures-oriented approach to supporting children to build understandings in early childhood sustainability. Through the use of ethnography, a research methodology that uses both participation and observation of research participants, it became apparent that young children's play-based learning enabled agentic responses in aligning with early understanding of STEM and sustainability. Using accepted descriptors of international Sustainable Development Goals within an early childhood research study, the research highlights how the development of interactive, learner-centred STEM teaching not only enables investigative, action-adapted learning, but also fosters independent learners who are responsive to their natural environment. The implication of this research is that further development of children's environmental agency is suggested by the authors. The introduction of a whole-of-kindergarten approach that focuses on the systemic development of quality STEM education is posited as an avenue for educators to build young children's understandings of sustainable development.

Guest editors: Dr. Fikile Nxumalo (University of Texas at Austin) and Dr. Nikki Rotas (University of Alberta)A growing body of work has illustrated the importance of situating environmental education in current precarious times that disrupt idealized notions of both childhood and nature/environment. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship and from the environmental humanities, several scholars have critically engaged with ways in which the notion of the Anthropocene, as a current epoch marked by devastating human impact on the earth, necessitates a turn away from romantic conceptions of children and nature (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Malone, Truong & Gray, 2017; Ritchie, 2015). This work supports an orientation towards critical and generative pedagogies that are firmly situated within the messy anthropogenic worlds that young children co-inhabit, and that take seriously the inseparability of nature and culture. Importantly, this work has also taken up the Anthropocene as a contested political marker of current times rather than a neutral scientific fact (Lloro-Bidart, 2016; Colebrook, 2016; Saldanha & Stark, 2016; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Taking up the political signification of the Anthropocene in early childhood education includes challenging the figure of the developing human child as future steward – a common trope of nature based education that is rooted in instrumental approaches to teaching and learning (Blaise, 2013; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Taylor, in press). In addition, methodological attention to 'how' Anthropocene discourses manifest in early childhood settings and across disciplinary frameworks is important. How, for example, do environmental education practices materialize in schools and communities? In what ways do current environmental education practices affirm the capacity of students and/or reiterate deficit racialized discourses in schools? How might creative and critical practices 'presence' (Simpson, 2011) Indigenous land and communities in present place and time? Building from these and other insights on the potential invigorations of bringing interdisciplinary perspectives into conversation with early childhood environmental education, this special issue invites further critical and creative interventions into questions of research and practice in early childhood. In this special issue, we invite papers that reconceptualize environmental education in ways that situate teaching and learning within current environmental precarities, intervene into dominant child-nature discourses, trouble normative methodologies, and unsettle the universalisms and omissions of the Anthropocene. In this regard, submissions are invited that are animated by, but not limited to:Black studies + environmental education + childhoodBlack/immigrant childhoods in the AnthropoceneIndigenous land education + environmental early childhood educationDecolonizing place based early education#WaterIsLife + childhoodToxic pollutants + childhood entanglementsDiscard studies + environmental education + childhoodCritical disability studies + environmental education + childhoodQueering childhood-nature relationshipsSpeculative practices + creative methodologies in environmental educationMaterial Technologies + Environmental Education + ChildhoodArts-based early childhood pedagogies for the AnthropoceneClimate change + environmental early childhood educationSTEM + the environmental humanities in early childhood educationMultispecies relations + childhood in the AnthropoceneAffect + Environmental Education + ChildhoodUrban education + the AnthropoceneNew Material feminisms + environmental early childhood educationWe seek submissions that push current boundaries of environmental education with young children by engaging interdisciplinary perspectives in critical, creative and generative ways while disrupting anthropocentric, deficit images of children and families. We welcome submissions in multiple formats, including qualitative and post-qualitative research articles, conceptual essays, digital media pieces, aesthetic works, reviews, and interviews. We also encourage submissions from educators working in early childhood settings for the Ideas from Practice section of the journal. Submissions are due August 1, 2017. Please see the author guidelines for submission preparation instructions. Please contact Fikile Nxumalo (fnxumalo@austin.utexas.edu) and Nikki Rotas (rotas@ualberta.ca) with any questions. ReferencesBlaise, M. (2013). Activating micropolitical practices in the early years: (Re)assembling bodies and participant observations. In R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.) Deleuze and research methodologies, pp. 184–200. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress.Colebrook, C. (2016). 'A grandiose time of co-existence': Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene. Deleuze Studies, 10(4), 440-454.Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.Lloro-Bidart, T. (2016). A feminist posthumanist political ecology of education for theorizing human-animal relations/relationships. Environmental Education Research, (23)1, 111-130.Malone, K., Truong, S., & Gray, T. (2017). Reimagining sustainability in precarious times. Singapore : Springer.Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. & Taylor, A. (2015). (Eds.) Unsettling the Colonialist Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge.Ritchie, J. (2015). Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective. Journal of Pedagogy, (6)2, 41- 56.Saldanha, A. & Stark, H. (2016). A new earth: Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene. Deleuze Studies, 10(4), 427-439.Simpson, L. (2011). Dancing on our turtle's back: Stories of Nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence, and a new emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishers.Taylor, A. (in press) Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene, Environmental Education Research.Tuck, E. & McKenzie, M. (2014). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. New York: Routledge.

1. An Introduction to the Nordic countries: family, children and early childhood education -- 2. Children's Initiatives in the Finnish Early Childhood Education Context -- 3. Do children learn through play? How do we know? -- 4. Practicing Belonging in Kindergarten: Children's use of Places and Artefacts -- 5. Parental involvement in ECEC in Finland and in Sweden -- 6. Negotiating 'real families' in Swedish preschools -- 7. Instructional Strategies in Early Swedish Immersion in Finland -- 8. Children under the age of three in Norwegian childcare: Searching for Qualities -- 9. Systematic quality work in a Swedish context -- 10. Early Childhood Education (ECE) in the Nordic Countries: Universal Challenges to the Danish Model- Towards a Future ECE Paradigm

In an era in which environmental education has been described as one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time, further insights are needed to understand how best to approach the learning and teaching of environmental education in early childhood education. In this book we address this concern by identifying two principles for using play-based learning early childhood environmental education. The principles we identify are the result of research conducted with teachers and children using different types of play-based learning whilst engaged in environmental education. Such play-types connect with the historical use of play-based learning in early childhood education as a basis for pedagogy.? In the book 'Beyond Quality in ECE and Care' authors Dahlberg, Moss and Pence implore readers to ask critical questions about commonly held images of how young children come to construct themselves within social institutions. In similar fashion, this little book problematizes the taken-for-grantedness of the childhood development project in service to the certain cultural narratives. Cutter-Mackenzie, Edwards, Moore and Boyd challenge traditional conceptions of play-based learning through the medium of environmental education. This book signals a turning point in social thought grounded in a relational view of (environmental) education as experiential, intergenerational, interspecies, embodied learning in the third space. As Barad says, such work is based in inter-actions that can account for the tangled spaces of agencies. Through the deceptive simplicity of children's play, the book stimulates deliberation of the real purposes of pedagogy and of schooling. Paul Hart, University of Regina, Cana.