The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected children's care and education worldwide. This article reports on patterns of participation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) across Australia as influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic and national policies. Using ECEC data from Xplor -- a software platform used across Australian childcare…

Past studies have shown that kindergarten teachers find it challenging to integrate science into their instruction, but little is understood about factors that influence their science teaching in Indigenous areas. Our study aimed to investigate the associations between kindergarten teachers' experiences, attitudes, self-efficacy, outcome…

The Victorian Government has engaged in multiple reforms in early childhood education and care, marketed to support quality education and increase investment in social reform. Initiatives accompanying reforms, aiming to assist teacher knowledge and skills. However, with each new initiative more pressures are placed on early childhood…

Research shows that epistemic cognition can support reasoning about the inclusion of diverse children. We argue that, to engage in such reasoning, children need the capacity to consider and evaluate competing knowledge perspectives (epistemic cognition) and to be cognitively flexible. Cognitive flexibility involves a subset of skills within the…

The body is the very basis of children's self-growth and their understanding of the world. However, children's body experiences of growing up have rarely been studied. This paper uses a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to study the body experience of 35 kindergarten children aged 5-6 from Nanjing, China. We found that children's body…

Bush kindergarten programmes (known as bush kinders), where preschool children learn in, about and with nature, are proliferating in Australian early childhood education. This scoping review reports on, and analyses, the research literature pertaining to how ethnography has been applied to the bush kinder context. We included studies conducted in…

Despite the urgent need to provide kindergarten teachers with professional development (PD) in music and movement, little is known about their needs, motivations, and preferences in this area. This interview study explores Hong Kong kindergarten teachers' prior music and movement educational experiences and their self-perceived usefulness of such…

This paper examines how early childhood teachers employed in kindergarten, understand and manage their changing roles regarding digital technologies. Nineteen participants were involved in the study. Symbolic interactionism provided the theoretical lens to investigate each early childhood teacher's lived experiences and grounded theory provided…

This paper argues that whilst inclusive education in early childhood is gaining wider acceptance in the equity and diversity movement, the value and contribution of educators' voices about what is working and challenging are frequently ignored. This small-scale research explored five early childhood educators' understandings and experiences of…

Phonological awareness (PA) and alphabet knowledge (AK) are two of the strongest predictors of reading acquisition, and evidence shows that many New Zealand children are entering school with low levels of emergent literacy (EL) skills. The current research showed that four-year-old children identified as having low levels of EL, who participated…

This paper reports on findings from four case studies, as part of a large-scale study undertaken to evaluate the KindiLink initiative across Western Australia in remote, regional and metropolitan communities. KindiLink is an educator-led playgroup initiative in public school sites in Western Australia targeted at Aboriginal children and their…

Early childhood teachers have a myriad of possible employment options, with birth to eight years degree qualifications preparing graduates to work in a range of early childhood settings, including prior-to-school. At the same time, early childhood workforce policies in Australia, and elsewhere, are increasingly requiring degree-qualified teachers…