Chow, Angela; Galambos, Nancy L.; Johnson, Matthew D.; Krahn, Harvey J. (2018). Enlightenment or Status Defence? Education and Social Problem Concerns from Adolescence to Midlife. British Journal of Sociology of Education, v39 n7 p942-960. This paper asks whether concerns about social problems decline with age. Unconditional growth models (without covariates) revealed a decline over 25 years (age 18 to 43) in concerns about racial discrimination, treatment of Aboriginal Peoples, female job discrimination, unemployment and environmental pollution. Educational attainment was not associated with these change trajectories in conditional control models, providing no support for enlightenment or social reproduction hypotheses. Higher household income (age 43) was associated with faster declines in concerns about racial discrimination, treatment of Aboriginal Peoples and unemployment. With household income as a predictor, downward trajectories in treatment of Aboriginal Peoples, female job discrimination and environmental pollution were no longer significant, and the racial discrimination trajectory was reversed direction. These results provide compelling evidence for status defence theory…. [Direct]

Allen, Louisa; Aspin, Clive; Quinlivan, Kathleen; Rasmussen, Mary Lou; Sanjakdar, Fida (2014). Crafting the Normative Subject: Queerying the Politics of Race in the New Zealand Health Education Classroom. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, v35 n3 p393-404. This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes, we critically queer how the Maori concept of "hauora" is deployed in the intended and operational NZ Health curriculum to shape the raced subject. Despite the best intentions of curriculum developers and classroom teachers to utilise Maori ways of knowing to meet their obligations within a bicultural nation, we argue that the notion of "hauora" is domesticated by being aligned with normalising individualistic notions of well-being that reflect the Eurocentric neoliberal individual enterprise subject. Palatable notions of Maori epistemologies as cultural artefacts and iconography drive that… [Direct]

Dentith, Audrey M.; Root, Debra A. (2012). Teachers' Revitalizing the \Culture Commons\: An Ecological Imperative for the 21st Century Curriculum. Online Submission, Paper presented at the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum (AATC) Conference (San Antonio, TX, Oct 4, 2012). This paper reports on a summer program for educators that sought to prepare them to teach in and through the \cultural commons\ in the summer of 2012. The 5-day Academy for the Critical Inquiry of the Cultural Commons set out to foster knowledge of the cultural commons and their importance in the forging of ecological intelligence among contemporary educators. In this article, the Academy program and some of the work of the participants within it are described in detail. The authors define the \cultural commons\ and the relevance of this concept in contemporary education. The theoretical framework for the work is described along with descriptive vignettes of educators' experience…. [PDF]

Lingard, Robert; Peacock, David; Sellar, Sam (2015). Texturing Space-Times in the Australian Curriculum: Cross-Curriculum Priorities. Curriculum Inquiry, v45 n4 p367-388. The Australian curriculum, as a policy imagining what learning should take place in schools, and what that learning should achieve, involves the imagining and rescaling of social relations amongst students, their schools, the nation-state and the globe. Following David Harvey's theorisations of space-time and Norman Fairclough's operationalisation of these theories in the texturing of spatio-temporalities within policy texts, we seek to critically explore the cross-curriculum priorities of the Australian curriculum. These priorities–Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia, and sustainability–collectively provide a "futures orientation" to the curriculum. They also mediate and assemble conflicting spatio-temporalities, aligning the purposes of Australian schooling with an instrumentalist concern for "Asia literacy," whilst simultaneously recasting the space-times of neoliberal capitalism within… [Direct]

Keddie, Amanda (2012). Poetry and Prose as Pedagogical Tools for Addressing Difficult Knowledges: Translocational Positionality and Issues of Collective Political Agency. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, v20 n2 p317-332. In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools that can both accommodate and address difficult and painful knowledges. The paper presents and analyses poems and prose written by students at a non-traditional secondary school for disadvantaged girls (many of whom identify as Indigenous Australian). Through stories of grief and pain, but also hope and possibility, the poetry/prose book signifies a sense of collective political agency against oppressive relations towards the girls creating new moulds of existence. Contra to dominant approaches to recognising and valuing Indigeneity in schools, these writings represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent social practice. While it is contended that a valuing of marginalised cultures is an important aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and more critical focus is required in beginning to address Indigenous oppressions. (Contains 1 note.)… [Direct]

Ritchie, Jenny (2012). Early Childhood Education as a Site of Ecocentric Counter-Colonial Endeavour in Aotearoa New Zealand. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, v13 n2 p86-98. This article draws upon a range of theoretical domains, first to outline the historical rationale for the urgent changes needed to challenge and transform the dominator culture which has justified exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the resources of the earth. It invites educators to reconsider the narratives that are either consciously or inadvertently promoted in our work, suggesting that we can learn from Indigenous epistemologies in which humans are situated alongside earth others, as respectful, related guardians and caretakers. It finally draws on some examples from a recent qualitative study conducted with ten early childhood centres from across Aotearoa, to illuminate possibilities for enactment of counter-colonial renarrativisation within early childhood settings in service of an ethical project of enhancing relationalities, reconnecting children and their families with the more-than-human world. (Contains 7 notes and 1 figure.)… [Direct]

Devine, Ben; Macvean, Michelle; Mildon, Robyn; Shlonsky, Aron (2017). Parenting Interventions for Indigenous Child Psychosocial Functioning: A Scoping Review. Research on Social Work Practice, v27 n3 p307-334 May. Objectives: To scope evaluations of Indigenous parenting programs designed to improve child psychosocial outcomes. Methods: Electronic databases, gray literature, Indigenous websites and journals, and reference lists were searched. The search was restricted to high-income countries with a history of colonialism. Results: Sixteen studies describing evaluations of 13 programs were found. Most were controlled studies from United States and Australia, targeting child social, emotional, behavioral and mental health outcomes, and these were delivered to groups of parents. Program content focused most often on child development and learning, child behavior management, and parent-child interactions. Some studies reported improvements in child and parent outcomes, though the majority used self-report measures and some were noncontrolled studies. Conclusions: This scoping review provides the first known map of evaluations of programs targeting parents of Indigenous children. There were few… [Direct]

Thaman, Konai Helu (2013). Quality Teachers for Indigenous Students: An Imperative for the Twenty-First Century. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, v12 n1 p98-118. This paper argues that all learners need teachers who are not only professionally qualified but also culturally competent. This is particularly so with teachers of indigenous students, who face the conflicting expectations of schools and those of their home cultures. References to Pacific students will be used to illustrate some of the conflicts as well as attempts to address teaching and learning issues in Pacific Island Countries (PICs)…. [PDF]

Papic, Marina (2015). An Early Mathematical Patterning Assessment: Identifying Young Australian Indigenous Children's Patterning Skills. Mathematics Education Research Journal, v27 n4 p519-534 Dec. This paper presents an Early Mathematical Patterning Assessment (EMPA) tool that provides early childhood educators with a valuable opportunity to identify young children's mathematical thinking and patterning skills through a series of hands-on and drawing tasks. EMPA was administered through one-to-one assessment interviews to children aged 4 to 5 years in the year prior to formal school. Two hundred and seventeen assessments indicated that the young low socioeconomic and predominantly Australian Indigenous children in the study group had varied patterning and counting skills. Three percent of the study group was able to consistently copy and draw an ABABAB pattern made with coloured blocks. Fifty percent could count to six by ones and count out six items with 4% of the total group able to identify six items presented in regular formations without counting. The integration of patterning into early mathematics learning is critical to the abstraction of mathematical ideas and… [Direct]

Dobinson, Toni (2015). Teaching and Learning through the Eyes of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Postgraduates and Their Lecturers in Australia and Vietnam: Implications for the Internationalisation of Education in Australian Universities. Education Research and Perspectives, v42 p329-396. International and transnational education has become common place. Australian universities have embraced the rise in international enrolments from students in the Asia-Pacific region. There are many considerations, however, if these courses are to avoid being labelled neo-colonial exercises, not least of which is the necessity for informed dialogue about practices and beliefs in teaching and learning between all stakeholders. With this in mind, this paper draws on a larger study which examined the teaching and learning experiences and perspectives of a group of culturally and linguistically diverse postgraduates and lecturers from the Asian continent and Australia. All of the participants were involved in an MA program offered by an Australian university and all were, or had been, English language teachers. Findings indicated that while participants from Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, India, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia all appreciated (to some extent) educational… [PDF]

Gonzales, Sandra M. (2015). "Abuelita" Epistemologies: Counteracting Subtractive Schools in American Education. Journal of Latinos and Education, v14 n1 p40-54. This autoethnographic inquiry examines the intersection of elder epistemology and subtractive education, exploring how one "abuelita" countered her granddaughter's divestment of Mexican-ness. I demonstrate how the grandmother used "abuelita" epistemologies to navigate this tension and resist the assimilative pressures felt by her granddaughter from school by consistently modeling, at home, a love for Mexican language and culture. I argue that grandmothers play a vital role in rooting young people to their linguistic and cultural assets, a sacred function that many Mexican elders have preserved and brought forward from the precontact era in the Americas to the contemporary era…. [Direct]

Tolbert, Sara (2015). "Because They Want to Teach You about Their Culture": Analyzing Effective Mentoring Conversations between Culturally Responsible Mentors and Secondary Science Teachers of Indigenous Students in Mainstream Schools. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, v52 n10 p1325-1361 Dec. Te Kotahitanga is an educational reform project in Aotearoa/New Zealand demonstrated to have significantly impacted the participation, achievement, and retention of indigenous Maori students in secondary schools. In this paper, I share results from a study of culturally responsible mentoring at 4 different schools participating in the Te Kotahitanga reform project. Specifically, I investigated how Te Kotahitanga facilitators (i.e., site-based mentors/instructional coaches) engage novice and experienced science teachers in reflective conversations around culturally sustaining science instruction for indigenous students. I identify four key themes from these mentoring conversations that can serve as a useful framework for culturally responsible mentoring in science…. [Direct]

Spratt, Rebecca (2016). Defying Definition: Rethinking Education Aid Relationships in Solomon Islands. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, v15 n3 p42-56. The discourse of aid–its language, structures and practice–powerfully ascribes roles and attributes to those involved in aid relationships such as developed/developing, partner, recipient/donor etcetera. This discourse is driven by a complex system of diverse and often competing ideas, values, actors and relationships, within which individuals must make sense of their role and agency at both professional and personal levels. While recent years has seen much focus on improving relationships by reordering some of these categories, little research has investigated how individuals themselves make sense of all this, and how it then influences their practice. The research presented in this article investigated the professional subjectivities of a small group of public servants working for the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development in Solomon Islands. The primary aim of the research was to explore the ways in which professional subjectivity is influenced by, and influences,… [PDF] [Direct]

Riley, Tasha; Webster, Amanda (2016). Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities (PALLIC) Building Relationships: One School's Quest to Raise Indigenous Learners' Literacy. Teaching Education, v27 n2 p136-155. In 2011 to 2012, 48 schools in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland participated in the Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities (PALLIC) project. Central to this project was the establishment of positive working relationships between school principals and Indigenous community leaders in order to improve Indigenous literacy rates. Professional development in leadership skills and effective literacy instruction was provided through five professional learning modules. Participants worked together to create an action plan to support the literacy achievement of Indigenous students in their schools and communities. This article presents a case study of one participating school in Northern Queensland that successfully utilised the PALLIC framework to facilitate leadership actions and activities between Indigenous community and school leaders in order to form productive partnerships for the teaching of reading. In particular, the case study highlights the… [Direct]

Emme, Michael; Kirova, Anna (2007). Critical Issues in Conducting Research with Immigrant Children. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n2 p83-107 Apr. In this article, we explore critical issues in research with immigrant and refugee children. In particular, we examine the implications of various critiques of research methodologies, the ethical implications of researching children in the light of the United Nations (UN; 1989) \Convention on the Rights of the Child,\ and the new approach to childhood studies. We provide and analyze examples of creative research methods that we have developed and used in studies with immigrant children in terms of their varying levels of involving children in research. One is a game-playing approach used to study childhood loneliness; the other is a creative, arts-based methodology designed to overcome the limitations of language-based research when participants do not speak the same language as the researchers. Possibilities for involving immigrant children in researching their own experiences are considered through the development of visual narratives in the form of fotonovelas. (Contains 1 figure.)… [Direct]

Jones, Shelley; Norton, Bonny (2007). On the Limits of Sexual Health Literacy: Insights from Ugandan Schoolgirls. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p285-305 Sep. This article makes the case that current conceptions of sexual health literacy have limited relevance to the Ugandan context because they assume that knowledge of unsafe sexual practices will lead to changes in behavior and lifestyle. Drawing on a longitudinal case study with 15 Ugandan schoolgirls in rural Uganda from August 2004 to September 2006, this study argues that despite being well-informed about the risks and responsibilities of sexual activity, poverty and sexual abuse severely constrained options for these young women. Although many believed in the value of abstaining from sexual activity until marriage, they engaged in transactional sex to pay for school fees, supplies, clothing, and food. Further, fear of sexual abuse, early pregnancy, and HIV-AIDS compromised attempts to embrace sexuality. The article concludes with implications of the study for research and policy on sexual health literacy in Uganda and other poorly resourced regions of the world. (Contains 9… [Direct]

Allicock, Sydney; Hately, Lynne; Lickers, Michael; Wihak, Christine (2007). Eagle and the Condor: Indigenous Alliances for Youth Leadership Development. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n2 p135-148 Apr. This narrative describes the growth of an alliance between two indigenous organizations in North and South America, illustrating how a shared indigenous vision of cultural survival and connection to the land led to the creation of an ongoing collaboration for indigenous youth leadership development, which has extended to encompass collaboration with other South American and Caribbean indigenous groups. Allowing organizational relationships to emerge from naturally occurring personal relationships was vital for success. Mutuality of the exchange was key in developing a partnership of equals. Visits to each others' territories, internal stability of the organizations, sound financial arrangements, and the contribution from other aspects of organizational activities to the alliance were also necessary ingredients for strength and continuity…. [Direct]

Shiller, Jessica T. (2007). Educational Reform in the Global City: The Case of the Quality-Schools-for-the-Poor Initiative in New York City. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n2 p127-134 Apr. Globalization has not only created the conditions that have made such educational reforms necessary, but it has also provided market-based ideology to undergird reform efforts from Santiago to New York City. Although a neoliberal approach to education is clearly en vogue, many educators and critics nonetheless have questioned the premises behind the current reforms. Does a market-based paradigm really work to improve schools? Does it indeed improve the educational opportunities for poor families? Can a market-based approach combat social inequality? In this article, the author seeks answers to these questions through a close examination of a prototypical educational reform effort, the New Century Schools Initiative (NCSI) in the United States. Specifically, the author considers how NCSI has appeared to work in New York City, drawing upon 3 years of observations from her work as a staff developer and consultant in 15 NCSI schools. This article is not an empirical study, but a critique… [Direct]

Yang, Wenzhong (2007). Gifted or Not, Parental Perceptions Are the Same: A Study of Chinese American Parental Perceptions of Their Children's Academic Achievement and Home Environment. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n3 p217-234 Jul. This study offers insight into the perceptions of a group of Chinese American parents, many of whom have children who excel at school. The results indicate that the Chinese American parents had high expectations of their children's educational success, placed high value on education and effort, tended to sacrifice for their children's education, and followed a "training" parenting style. When comparing parental perceptions between different groups (parents of gifted-talented vs. average students; fathers vs. mothers; parents of boys vs. girls; and parents of different backgrounds), no significant differences were found between groups except that parents with different occupational status differed in perceptions of their children's academic achievement. (Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)… [Direct]

Abdi, Ali A. (2007). Global Multiculturalism: Africa and the Recasting of the Philosophical and Epistemological Plateaus. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p251-264 Sep. This article focuses on the problematic relation between African worldviews and their attendant educational and epistemological systems, on the one hand, and the dominant European discourses that have attempted to negate the validity of those, both in historical and contemporary Africa, on the other hand. The article first deals with its subtitle (i.e., it critically problematizes and interrogates the way African knowledge systems and cultures have been portrayed mainly in the writings that emanated from the European metropolis) and how this has facilitated not only false and untenable perceptions about the continent and its people but, as well, the continuing psychocultural colonization of Africans. In its domain of analyzing culture and its conceptualizations and practices, the article minimizes the fixed categories of the case and assumes a more active and multidirectional intersection of culture, society, and overall social being. Via its concluding remarks, the article proposes… [Direct]

Wright, Handel Kashope (2007). Is This an African I See before Me?. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p313-322 Sep. In this speech, the author uses five moments of his own existence to speak to how he thinks the West conceptualizes and depicts Africa and Africans. This involves autobiography in a sense because he used his own life, but the discussion is not about him. It is about western conceptions and representations of Africans as reflected in the following five contextual moments, namely the present, his birth, his initial move to Canada, his more recent move to UBC (University of British Columbia), and the possible future. The author speaks mostly to how the academic disciplines in the west have contributed to western conceptions of Africa. He choses to play on Macbeth's soliloquy for the title of his talk to convey the idea that, in his view, Africa and Africans have been continuously mis-recognized and overdetermined by western academic discourses, seen not in reality, but as Africans of the Western mind, a false creation, proceeding from the collective historical and contemporary… [Direct]

Kendrick, Maureen; Mutonyi, Harriet (2007). Meeting the Challenge of Health Literacy in Rural Uganda: The Critical Role of Women and Local Modes of Communication. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p265-283 Sep. This article seeks to better understand the relation between local and traditional modes of communication and health literacy within the context of a rural West Nile community in Northern Uganda. Drawing on social semiotics (multimodality) and Bakhtin's notion of the carnival, the focus is on a group of women participating in a grassroots literacy program and their use of local modes of communication to address the endemic problem of malaria in the West Nile region of Uganda. The argument is that women and local modes of communication can serve a critical role in disseminating primary health care information in particular and in community health care development in general. This article also makes a case for adopting a more holistic approach to health literacy promotion; one that brings together local and new modes of communication and knowledge with desperately needed health care services and trained personnel. (Contains 4 footnotes.)… [Direct]

Guo, Yan (2007). Multiple Perspectives of Chinese Immigrant Parents and Canadian Teachers on ESL Learning in Schools. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n1 p43-64 Jan. Interest in home-school communication has paid little attention, to date, to the experiences of English as a second language (ESL) parents. This article examines recent Chinese immigrant parents' and Canadian teachers' perspectives of ESL learning presented at Parents' Night. On the basis of observations of three annual Parents' Nights, interviews of teachers and bilingual assistants who served as interpreters for parents and focus groups, the study reveals a deep division between the two on both what and how students should learn. Teachers believed that the ESL classes help socialize students into Canadian school and social cultures and develop language and study skills and appropriate attitudes to help prepare them for entry into mainstream classes. In contrast, in the parents' views, the current ESL program has many problems, such as the lengthy time students stayed in the program, the lack of exams, mixed grades, the low level of content, and the lack of grammar instruction…. [Direct]

Affolter, Friedrich W. (2007). Resisting Educational Exclusion: The Baha'i Institute of Higher Education in Iran. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n1 p65-77 Jan. This article explores the motivational causes for learning and community service of students, faculty, and volunteer supporters of the Baha'i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE) in Iran. BIHE is a grassroots initiative launched by Baha'i academics, who–after having been expelled from public universities as a result of their allegiance to the Baha'i faith–opened up an alternative Institute of Higher Education, which services equally discriminated and marginalized Baha'i youth. The article presents results of a descriptive cultural/phenomenological study that distills the essence of experiences of 180 BIHE students, faculty, and staff performing under unusual sociopolitical circumstances. BIHE presents a minority community initiative that successfully created a "social space" needed by Baha'i students and staff to remain academically and socially engaged; and to bond and share with peers and colleagues equally suffering from persecution and sociopolitical marginalization…. [Direct]

Morehouse, Maggi M. (2007). The African Diaspora: Using the Multivalent Theory to Understand Slave Autobiographies. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n3 p199-216 Jul. In simple terms, diaspora can be defined as the identity community that is formed when people move. Although the term African Diaspora seems relatively new, a number of 20th century scholars have utilized a diasporic framework to explain the commonalities among people of African descent around the world. The earliest scholars did not use the term; however, scholars post-1950 have consistently used the analytical concept when studying and describing Black communities that were dispersed from Africa and germinated in the New World. This article highlights the competing attempts at theorizing the African Diaspora from its earliest proponents to its more contemporary adherents. Finally, this article illustrates the usefulness of the multivalent concept by applying the framework to slave autobiographies…. [Direct]

Capar, Ismail; Reisman, Arnold (2007). The German-Speaking Diaspora in Turkey: Exiles from Nazism as Architects of Modern Turkish Education (1933-1945). Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n3 p175-198 Jul. This article discusses a little-known aspect of higher education history. The Republic of Turkey was established in 1923. The system of higher education Turkey inherited from the Ottomans totaled some 300+ Islamic "madrasas", one of which was converted into a fledgling university at the turn of the century; and three military academies, one of which was expanded into a civil engineering school around 1909. Starting in 1933, Turkey reformed its higher education using invitees fleeing the Nazis, for whom America was out of reach because of restrictive immigration laws and wide-spread anti-Semitic hiring bias at its universities. Almost overnight, the University of Istanbul was referred to as the best German university in the world. Historians of higher education might have difficulty matching so significant a qualitative transformation implemented at the national level in so short a timeframe. One country's great loss was another country's gain, and a third country's benefits… [Direct]

Doerksen, Rose (2016). Looking Inward to 21st Century Pedagogy. McGill Journal of Education, v51 n3 p1197-1203. Through the lens of a student, this Note from the Field responds to a historical research project which engages pre-service teachers in critical citizenship and social imagination. Looking inward facilitates a personal learning experience of identity that is applied to learning in the 21st century. When 21st century pre-service teacher education looks inward rather than forward and outward, we learn to live in the 21st century rather than envision it…. [Direct]

Hughes, Janette Michelle; Laffier, Jennifer (2016). Using Critical Digital Literacies Pedagogies to Reframe Preservice Teachers' Work with "At-Promise" Students. AERA Online Paper Repository, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Washington, DC, Apr 8-12, 2016). Public education's distinctive and primary challenge is to ensure all children, across all communities, have access to the skills and knowledge required for their full participation in democratically regulated social, cultural, and vocational life. This is an aspiration increasingly difficult to realize under present-day conditions of austerity in both K-12 and post-secondary education. However, a clear and undeniable relationship between income and educational achievement long pre-dates today's distinctively digital 'divide' (Gorski, 2014). In this research, we explore the outcomes for preservice teachers of a program intervention with a group of youth in care, focusing specifically on improving student achievement and increasing preservice teachers' capacity, experience and specific fluency and expertise with technologies supporting critical digital literacies pedagogy…. [Direct]

Newman, Linda; Obed, Loveth (2015). The Nigerian Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy: Perspectives on Literacy Learning. South African Journal of Childhood Education, v5 n1 p125-141 Jun. Many scholars and researchers now have a broadened vision of literacy that encompasses the social practices that surround literacy learning. What accompanies this vision is a shift towards thinking that children, and their families, can contribute actively to literacy learning by drawing on their strengths and life experiences to create and draw meaning from a broad range of everyday sources. For many, reading and writing from print-based texts is no longer considered the only, or most desirable, avenue to literacy learning. It is now recognised that children's social and cultural lives should be used as a resource for literacy learning. Using four literacy learning lenses, we examine the Nigerian National Policy for Integrated Early Childhood Development. These lenses are: collaboration with families, the role of educators, literacy-rich environments, and diversity and multimodality. Recent research around early literacy learning underpins our analysis to identify where the policy… [PDF]

Mammadova, Aida (2017). Development of Fieldwork Activities to Educate the Youth for the Biological and Cultural Preservation in Rural Communities of Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. International Journal of Environmental and Science Education, v12 n3 p441-449. In order to achieve the regional sustainability and bio-cultural preservation, environmental education of youth will be critical, however due to the lack of the specific subject of regional studies at the educational curriculum, students are not able to achieve the skills to understand the local environment and feel isolated from nature. We decided that, it would be very important to create active nature fieldworks where students can connect with nature by using five senses of perception (hearing, seeing, smelling, touching and tasting), to educate the feeling of connection and belonging to the nature and later develop the awareness of nature-human-culture interactions through the on-hands participatory fieldworks with local communities. Fieldworks were divided in two main parts; biodiversity experience with nature activities (NA) to increase the sense of belongings to the nature, by using five senses; visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), tactile (touching), gustatory (tasting), and… [PDF]