This paper presents data from interviews undertaken with teachers and parents of children who attend Australian bush kinders (kindergartens). The bush kinder approach is a recent adaptation of the European and UK forest school approaches, one that continues to gain momentum as increasingly teachers and parents come to understand the benefits…

The aim of this paper is to analyse how Swedish grade three children are discursively positioned as pupils when they are taking national tests in mathematics and when they reflect on the testing situation afterwards. With support from theories about affective-discursive assemblages, we explore children's body language, emotions, and talk in light…

In this paper we conduct a deductive analysis, using Sutton-Smith's "rhetorics of play," of the published kindergarten programs that have guided Ontario kindergarten teaching since 1944. Our analysis is used to gain an understanding of how we in Ontario have arrived at a point where play-based learning has been taken up by developers of…

The article draws on the elements of poststructural theory to explore the mismatches and alignments in language and literacy teaching discourses in urban Fijian primary schools. More specifically, it compares the liberal progressivism of whole language and literacy pedagogies with the culturalism that informs a key reading resource in the teaching…