“After Lunch We Offer Quiet Time and Meditation” : Early Learning Environments in Australia and Finland Through the Lenses of Educators

Modern societies organize ECEC services from their own cultural, social and political contexts, which is also reflected in the steering documents of the country and further in the work of teachers (Garvis, et al., 2018). In many of the countries children’s access to preschool has broadened and the benefits of high quality ECEC have been recognized. In Australia and Finland, concepts of play based learning, child initiated play or free play have been highlighted as founding pillars of the early learning environments. In this paper we take a closer look at ECEC environments in Australia and Finland through the lenses of 26 educators. They described in an online questionnaire children’s daily activities as well as they indicated the amount of free play related to these activities.Peer reviewe

Loans, logins and lasting the course: Academic library use and student retention

Activities and services that improve student engagement and retention in the higher education sector are important not only to individual student’s success but also to university planning and funding. This paper reports on a quantitative study that was carried out to explore whether use of the library by new university students is associated with continued enrolment. Students’ socioeconomic background and age were also examined in relation to library use. Limited to commencing students in March 2010 at Curtin University, the study drew on demographic data from the University’s enrolment system and instances of library use from the Library’s management system. Results of the statistical analyses indicate that library use is associated with retention, and importantly, library use in the early weeks of a student’s first semester is associated with retention. ‘Mature aged’ (21 years and over) students displayed different library use patterns than their younger colleagues and there was some variation in library use between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Findings from this study suggest that academic libraries can contribute to the retention of students and that carefully targeted programs and services may improve library use by some groups of students

Blood donor behaviour, motivations and the need for a systematic cross-cultural perspective: the example of moral outrage and health and non-health based philanthropy across seven countries

Background: Blood donation is a prosocial altruistic act that is motived by the mechanisms that underlie altruism (e.g., warm-glow, reciprocity, fairness/trust). Because there is consistent evidence that altruism and its mechanisms show cross-cultural variability, in the present paper we make the case for a cross-cultural perspective in blood donor research. Methods: We analyse a subset of variables from a larger study, with samples drawn from seven countries (England, Malta, the Netherlands, Australia, USA, Hungary, Italy: average N per country = 282). This subset of variables focuses on health (organ donor registration) and non-health (volunteering, donating money) philanthropy, family traditions of helping, and moral outrage as predictors of blood donor status. Results: We show two cross-cultural universals: 1) organ donor registration in opt-in countries is positively associated with blood donor status and 2) non-health philanthropy is generally unrelated to blood donor status. We also show two country specific effects: 1) a family tradition for helping is associated with blood donor status in Italy only and 2) moral outrage is a predictor only in the USA. Conclusions: We contend that these findings provide proof of principle why a cross-cultural perspective on blood donor behaviour is needed

Seeking children's perspectives: a respectful layered research approach

This article discusses why researchers and educators might choose to seek children's perspectives. It also highlights some of the key considerations when seeing children as having the right to contribute to decisions that affect them. The article draws on findings from a study that used pedagogically oriented methods for researching three- and four-year-old children's perspectives about outdoor spaces in the early childhood setting they attended. The article discusses the possibilities and practicalities of this research approach for both research and pedagogy. Examples are provided for others who may be considering working/researching in these ways