A Cultural-Historical Approach Towards Pedagogical Transitions


Book Description

This book investigates pedagogical change across curricula and political transitions in the South African context, from 1994 to today. Tracing pedagogical transitions from post-apartheid to the demands of the 21st century, the book seeks to develop a novel approach to pedagogy that can meet the needs of students today. Adopting a cultural-historical lens, Hardman analyses the contradictions that arise due to transitions in the curriculum and describes the current state of teaching in primary schools in South Africa by focusing on how teachers teach scientific concepts. She goes on to examine the transitions from children's indigenous science/maths understanding to school science/maths understanding, developing a pedagogy that can transform the learning of mathematics and science in developing contexts. Building on theories from Vygotsky, Davydov, Feuerstein, Freire, Bruner and Hedegaard, Hardman develops a new and inclusive, decolonial pedagogical approach that can meet the needs of a multicultural and multilingual contexts around the world.




Exploring Young Children’s Agency in Everyday Transitions


Book Description

This book presents new ethnographic research carried out with five children between one and five years old. It explores children's agency in relation to daily transitions across everyday life contexts such as home and day-care contexts. Based on this new research, Pernille Juhl shows how young children are active participants orientating in their everyday life transitions. She argues that we should understanding children as creative and transformative subjects co-creating together with co-participants such as parents, professionals and other children, the conditions under which they live. Juhl builds on theoretical work by Holzkamp, Stetsenko, Hedegaard and Vygotsky and covers a range of theoretical approaches and concepts in her analysis such as befindlichkeit, micromovements and embodied orientation. While the research was carried out in the Danish context, the broader theoretical discussions are relevant for early childhood contexts globally, with a focus on Europe and the USA.




Affective Early Childhood Pedagogy for Infant-Toddlers


Book Description

This exciting new book brings fresh knowledge of affective pedagogies in early childhood education and care. The book draws on cultural-historical theory in alignment with visual methodologies to elucidate infant-toddlers’ affective pedagogies through analysis of case examples. The book reveals contemporary pedagogical practices in the infant-toddler space like mealtimes, nappy change and play. These pedagogical practices show the highly specialised nature of working with infant-toddlers such as the affective relations between educators and infant-toddlers, affective dialogue, affective engagement, and the creation of affective spaces. The value of collaboration is highlighted through creating an affective space for educators to become aware, reflect and position themselves as effective and affective educators. The book introduces innovative methodological tools such as images and collective drawings for collaborative reflection.




After Excessive Teacher and Faculty Entitlement


Book Description

This second collection of perspectives on excessive teacher/faculty entitlement draws together authors from nine countries to address afresh the ‘conundrums’ affecting teaching and teacher education through the new lens afforded by the notion of excessive entitlement.




Qualitative Studies of Exploration in Childhood Education


Book Description

This book uses the concept of exploration as a way of understanding transitions in children between the ages of 5 to 18 years old. Written by an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, India, Norway and the UK, the chapters offer a diverse set of case studies. The topics and themes covered include transitions in outdoor playtime, the transition to daycare, compassion in kindergarten, learning with fathers, transitions of Chinese traditional culture and disability. The chapters are organised into two parts, the first part covering macro transitions and the second covering micro-genetic transitions. The contributors show how both macro and micro-genetic transitions influence children's everyday lives, and how these different transitions open up new possibilities for play, learning and development. The contributors draw on Vygotsky's cultural historical theory and the understanding that children's cultural formation takes form in a dialectic relation between children's interests and motives and the institutional settings they participate in.




EBOOK: Studying Children: A Cultural-Historical Approach


Book Description

Studying Children is the first book of its kind to offer a theoretical and practical discussion of how to undertake research using cultural-historical theory when researching the everyday lives of children. The authors discuss the complexities of child development, providing a critique of alternative perspectives of research and notions of development. They provide a number of case studies following researchers in early childhood as they move from a developmental approach to a cultural-historical framework for observing and planning for young children. The chapters: Provide a solid framework for understanding the foundations of this approach Address the importance of viewing research as an interactive technique Offer guidance on how to collect and interpret material Show how to make observations of and interviews with children, within a dialectical research approach Present examples of how to write and present findings using this technique The book is rich with examples of how to undertake specific methods, such as surveys, experiments, case studies, digital video observations, interviews, and children as researchers. Studying Children is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and students working in the field of Early and Middle Childhood at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.




Children's Play and Development


Book Description

This book provides new theoretical insights to our understanding of play as a cultural activity. All chapters address play and playful activities from a cultural-historical theoretical approach by re-addressing central claims and concepts in the theory and providing new models and understandings of the phenomenon of play within the framework of cultural historical theory. Empirical studies cover a wide range of institutional settings: preschool, school, home, leisure time, and in various social relations (with peers, professionals and parents) in different parts of the world (Europe, Australia, South America and North America). Common to all chapters is a goal of throwing new light on the phenomenon of playing within a theoretical framework of cultural-historical theory. Play as a cultural, collective, social, personal, pedagogical and contextual activity is addressed with reference to central concepts in relation to development and learning. Concepts and phenomena related to ZPD, the imaginary situation, rules, language play, collective imagining, spheres of realities of play, virtual realities, social identity and pedagogical environments are presented and discussed in order to bring the cultural-historical theoretical approach into play with contemporary historical issues. Essential as a must read to any scholar and student engaged with understanding play in relation to human development, cultural historical theory and early childhood education.







Early Learning and Development


Book Description

Early Learning and Development offers new models of 'conceptual play' practice and theory.




Transitions and Transformations


Book Description

Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations. Through detailed accounts, in such diverse settings as nursing homes in Sri Lanka, a factory in Massachusetts, cemeteries in Japan and clinics in Mexico, the authors explore not simply our understandings of growing older, but the interweaving of individual maturity and intergenerational relationships, social and economic institutions, and intimate experiences of gender, identity, and the body.