Many governments have launched the top-down early childhood curriculum (ECC) reforms to enhance the accountability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. The present discourse analysis of latest ECC policies across four diverse but representative countries -- Australia, China, New Zealand, and Singapore -- aims to examine the…

There is a consensus that the crises children encounter during the transition period might impact negatively on children's learning and development. However, from cultural-historical perspective, qualitative leap in development can hardly be achieved without crises. This paper, drawing upon cultural-historical theory as the framework and by using…

Parents as partners in their children's learning is predicated by a notion of a mutual understanding of the learning as shared by educators. Documenting learning in early childhood education and care (ECE & C) settings has evolved from more traditional developmental approaches to include photographs, artefacts and social stories to make…

Self-talk has been recognised as an important tool used by children to regulate their thinking and behaviour. Existing studies typically characterise children's self-talk according to broad categories that do not allow for investigation of self-regulatory aspects of children's internalised self-talk. The findings reported in this paper are based…

Introduces three philosophical issues to consider when developing curriculum for mentally retarded children: (1) the role of content versus learning processes and teaching methodology in curriculum decisions; (2) the principle of normalization and its implications; and (3) the child's right to choice in curriculum content. (DST)