Public investment, fragmentation and quality early education and care – existing challenges and future options

This chapter seeks to outline, critique and challenge Australia’s current approach to the provision of education and care services to children and their families. In doing so, the chapter highlights the complexities and fragmentation of the current system so that advocates and policy makers might avoid the temptation to proffer overly simplistic solutions that fail to address the ‘real world’ contexts that families must negotiate and children are left to experience. In examining Australia’s current approach to the provision of education and care services to children and their families, the chapter draws upon the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) including the Australian Background Report (Press & Hayes 2000); the OECD Country Note on Early Childhood Education and Care Policy in Australia (2001a); and the OECD Comparative Report Starting Strong: Early childhood education and care (2001b). The chapter also canvasses a range of other relevant national reports, including the recent policy paper What about the kids? Policy directions for improving the experiences of infants and young children in a changing world produced by the author for the Commissions for Children and Young People in NSW and Queensland and the National Investment for the Early Years (NIFTeY) (Press 2006), as well as trends such as the rapid corporatisation of the long day care sector

The giant in the playground: investigating the reach and implications of the corporatisation of child care provision

This paper is a case study of an Australian corporate child care provider, ABC Learning Ltd, when the corporation was at its height. In the months after this paper was first completed, ABC Learning was dramatically affected by a volatile financial market

The Horizon of The Publishable in/as Open Access:From Poethics to Praxis

This pamphlet explores ways in which to engage scholars to further elaborate the poethics of their scholarship. Following Joan Retallack, who has written extensively about the responsibility that comes with formulating and performing a poetics, which she has captured in her concept of poethics (with an added h), this pamphlet examines what connects the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of research. Here, in order to remain ethical we are not able to determine in advance what being ethical would look like, yet, at the same time, ethical decisions need to be made and are being made as part of our publishing practices: where we publish and with whom, in an open way or not, in what form and shape and in which formats. Should we then consider the poethics of scholarship as a poetics of/as change, or as Retallack calls it, a poetics of the swerve (clinamen), which continuously unsettles our familiar notions? This pamphlet considers how, along with discussions about the contents of our scholarship, and about the different methodologies, theories and politics that we use to give meaning and structure to our research, we should have similar deliberations about the way we do research. This involves paying more attention to the crafting of our own aesthetics and poetics as scholars, including a focus on the medial forms, the formats, and the graphic spaces in and through which we communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions that shape and determine our scholarly practices

High quality educators’ conceptualisation of children’s risk-taking in early childhood education: provoking educators to think more broadly

Children’s risk-taking is increasingly acknowledged as an important part of early childhood education. Previous research has predominantly focussed on children’s engagement with, and educators’ perspectives on, children’s risk-taking in outdoor physical play. However, little attention has been paid to how educators conceptualise children’s risk-taking more broadly. Our study addresses this research gap. A three-site case study, the research gathered data from educators in high quality early childhood services through observations and interviews. Findings show that educators predominantly framed children’s risk-taking as taking place in physical and outdoor play. However, with minimal provocation, educators extended their conceptualisations of risk to encompass a broader range of children’s experiences. Data suggests that participation in the research provoked many participants to think more broadly about children’s risk-taking

Innovative Methods for Researching Leadership Emergence

There is a growing understanding, internationally, that effective leadership has an influence on the quality of early childhood education programs. The leadership research agenda has expanded accordingly but despite this expansion there is little empirical research on the emergence and development of leadership in early childhood education. The article focuses primarily on the methodological challenge of studying the phenomena of emerging and developing leadership. We describe the innovative methods for data generation that were used to address these challenges for an Australian study of leading within early childhood education sites. We explain in detail two of the methods—a field observation tool and the Dialogic Café. Some findings, that serve to highlight the benefits of the method, are shared. We conclude by advocating for the use of innovative methods to understand the phenomenon of emerging leadership and development in early childhood education sites

Cultural diversity in the Australian early childhood education workforce: What do we know, what don’t we know and why is it important?

This paper reviews current literature and research relevant to the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Early Childhood Education (ECE) workforce in Australia, including data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Australia is a highly multicultural society, with one out of every three people born overseas. Anecdotally, the Australian early childhood sector is reported to have a highly multicultural workforce. Yet there is a noticeable lack of data and research concerning cultural diversity in the Australian ECE workforce. This paper reports on the data from the ABS-Census of Population and Housing (ABS-Census), the small body of literature on the CALD ECE workforce and literature pertaining to CALD in other Australian workforces to argue that more data and research is needed. Developing a richer understanding of the status, experience and contributions of CALD educators would enable the sector to recognise and support the potential benefits of such a workforce for children and families and social cohesion in Australia

Cold War Sport, Film and Propaganda : A Comparative Analysis of the Superpowers

This document is the author's original submitted manuscript (pre-print) version. An updated version has been published by MIT Press in Journal of Cold War Studies, available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_a_00721.Films and sports played central roles in Cold War popular culture. Each helped set ideological agendas domestically and internationally while serving as powerful substitutes for direct superpower conflict. This article brings film and sport together by offering the first comparative analysis of how U.S. and Soviet cinema used sport as an instrument of propaganda during the Cold War. The article explores the different propaganda styles that U.S. and Soviet sports films adopted and pinpoints the political functions they performed. It considers what Cold War sports cinema can tell us about political culture in the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945 and about the complex battle for hearts and minds that was so important to the East-West conflict.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Towards a re-conceptualisation of risk in early childhood education

© The Author(s) 2019. Children’s engagement in risk-taking has been on the agenda for early childhood education for the past 10–15 years. At a time when some say the minority world has become overly risk averse, early childhood education aims to support confident, competent and resilient children through the inclusion of beneficial risk in early childhood education. The concept of risk is a complex phenomenon. Beneficial risk is engaging in experiences that take a person outside of their comfort zone and include outcomes that may be beneficial to learning, development and life satisfaction. To date, research on beneficial risk in early childhood has focused on children’s risk-taking in outdoor play. This focus has led to a predominant conceptualisation of beneficial risk in early childhood as an outdoor physical play activity for children. In this article, the authors problematise this conceptualisation. Drawing on both broad and early childhood education specific literature, the authors explore the current discourse on risk in both childhood and early childhood education. The authors identify the development of the current conceptualisation of risk as an experience for children within play, outdoors and as a physical activity, and highlight the limitations of this conceptualisation. The authors argue that for risk-taking to be in line with the predominantly holistic approach of early childhood education, a broad view of risk is needed. To achieve this broad view, the authors argue for a re-conceptualisation of risk that encompasses a wide range of risk experiences for both children and educators. The authors suggest further research is needed to expand our understanding of beneficial risk in early childhood education. They propose further research will offer a significant contribution to the early childhood sector

Embedding Collaboration in Integrated Early Childhood Services: The Strategic Role of Governance and Leadership

In Australia, as in many parts of the world, there is an increased focus on the provision of integrated child and family services. These services bring together inter-disciplinary teams to provide a range of professional supports to children and families, particularly those facing multiple challenges. However, the effective provision of integrated services is complex and involves the renegotiation of professional boundaries and the development of new and expanded ways of working. This article draws on relevant literature and data from two Australian studies to examine the role of governance and leadership in developing and sustaining service integration. It argues that successful integration is dependent upon these levels of management intentionally and strategically deploying time and resources to the objective of fostering strong professional and community collaborations. At the same time, cultivating a culture of participative and responsive management is essential to sustaining integration

What about the kids? Improving the experiences of infants and young people in a changing world

How we nurture our babies and young children is universally regarded as fundamental to our humanity. But the ways in which we choose to care for our infants and toddlers are infinitely diverse. Each era, every culture and all families endeavour to create the best possible start in life for their young, but they face many and varied challenges. It is concern about the ways in which Australia is meeting the test of caring for our infants and young children today that has prompted the NSW Commission for Children and Young People, the Queensland Commission for Children and Young People and Child Guardian, and the National Investment for the Early Years organisation (NIFTeY) to look closely at the current situation. Our earlier work \u27A Head Start for Australia’s Children\u27 provided a blueprint for what Australia needed to do to give our children a good start in life. What about the kids? , builds on this earlier work and puts forward concrete suggestions for policy improvements to support the care and education of all babies and young children. This is done both in this short paper and in the larger research paper of the same title by Frances Press