Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemThirty-one is a lot!: Assessing four-year-old children's number knowledge during an open-ended activity(SAGE Publications, 2015)In Early Childhood Education, formative assessment should be ongoing and include multiple sources of evidence of children's existing knowledge. Children's understanding of mathematical concepts is highly diverse from a very early age, yet practical strategies to assess children's individual understanding are not always child centred and strengths based.This study explores the diverse ways in which 47 four-year-old children at three different early learning centres in metropolitan Melbourne demonstrated their number knowledge while they traced around wooden numerals, drawing and discussing values of quantity. Examples of children's representations of quantity are illustrated, accompanied by extracts of transcribed conversations. Findings demonstrate that this formative assessment strategy, through attuned prompts and skilled inquiry from the teacher, elicits children's complex understanding of number, located in the everyday experiences of their lives. Embedded in play-based activity, this assessment strategy is both engaging for children and highly productive for educators in documenting children's learning.
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ItemInterlocutor-child interactions: Supporting children's creativity in graphic-narrative-embodied play(Australian Pre-School Association, 2017)Fostering creativity in children's learning is prioritised in a number of early chldhood education framework documents across the world. Despite this emphasis, the educator's role in supporting children's creativity is often mitigated due to lack of understanding about the nature of creativity and how to appropriately provide support. This paper presents a practioner-based case study of chldren's graphic-narrative-embodied play experience through interlocutor-child interactions in one early childhood setting in Melbourne, Australia. The study aimed to investigate how one-to-one creative dialogues support children's drawing-talking and gesturing. Three children's graphic-narrative-embodied play and interlocutor-child interactions were video-recorded, transcribed and analysed using an interpretivist paradigm. The analysis process was guided by sociocultural theories and pre-existing frameworks on children's creative dispositions, thinking styles and creative processes in multimodal meaning-making. Key findings include conditions that favour creativity in children's graphic-narrative-embodied play and approaches to co-creating this with children.
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ItemReevaluating the Concrete-Explanatory Animation Creation as a Digital Catalyst for Cross-Modal Cognition(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2017)
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ItemMaking visual arts learning visible in a generalist elementary school classroom(Arizona State University, 2017)This article presents the story of one elementary school teacher's shift in art praxis through her involvement in a research project aimed at facilitating participatory arts-based communities of practice. Qualitative methods and social constructivism informed Professional Learning Interventions (PLIs) involving: (1) a visual arts workshop, (2) facilitations with academics within the teacher's classroom context, and (3) semi-structured discussions to study and curte the teacher's lived experience. A teacher-facilitator-interviewer triad co-researched the meaning of 'quality' in relation to: Learning, Pedagogy, Environment, and Community Dynamics (L-PEC). Adapted from Seidel et. al (2009) L-PEC was a theoretical lens to guide inquiry and action specific to the teacher's (i.e., Ali's) classroom. Ali's evolving praxis served as a source of inspiration for the other Grade 3-4 teachers in her school who formed their own community of practice to support student learning through the visual arts.