The increasingly neoliberal course of Higher Education is linked to rises in student anxiety around assessment and increased fear of the consequences of failure. Making mistakes is an inevitable part of any learning process (and of life generally) and managing failure in a productive and positive way is crucial for success and wellbeing beyond…

Game based-learning have been widely promoted to overcome the difficulties encountered by beginners to learn programming. However, there are many issues to address for the implementation of game-based learning. Indeed, game-based learning is not limited to adding game elements such as rewards to a learning situation, but it rather consists of…

In 'The role of play', the fifth article we are highlighting from the extensive "FORUM" archive available online, Maggie Gracie draws on material and observations she had collected during a year of study in an infant and reception class in the mid-1970s to develop ideas about the need to enable pupils to develop genuine autonomy of…

Purpose: This short article takes the play and passion of children's literacy as its focal point. Rather than orienting reading and writing around what should be taught or how children should respond and understand written text, in this short reflective essay we aim to explore the play and passion inherent in children's literacy practices. We do…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

Playful learning has garnered supporters and research evidence, and also can be seen as nebulous and, therefore, reliant on practitioners' intuitions in early education settings. In this paper, we offer an explicit theoretical account, grounded in developmental psychology of how play might support the acquisition of broad skills and dispositions…

The paper brings Froebel's philosophy into conversation with that of Deleuze. We focus on "the fold" and "on self-activity" as key concepts that hold a special place in the monist philosophies of both thinkers. One point at which their (very different) ontologies coincide is their conceptualization of a cosmos in which…

The purpose of this article was to re-examine the empirical research focused on the creation and recreation of pre-school teachers' identity and their practices with multilingual children and language development. The analysis was based on empirical sequences from previously published qualitative analyses with the assistance of an interactionist…

The opposition between learning as a process of self-cultivation ("Bildung") and learning as a form of vocational training for the workplace ("Ausbildung") is becoming ever more deeply entrenched in the twenty-first-century university. In language education in particular, the distinction between these two competing aims…

An important milestone in early childhood education and care is reached in 2021 as "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia" is reviewed. The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) was groundbreaking. It has been influential in providing national guidelines around pedagogical principles, practice…

The views that early childhood teachers have of children and childhood are informed by the rhetoric and theories of early childhood, their cultures, life stories, philosophies, and ongoing practices as teachers. In Aotearoa New Zealand, "Te Whariki," the legislated national curriculum for early childhood education, further guides early…

In an environment that encourages co-construction and participatory practices, and especially in an educational environment saturated with media and images in which children are considered to be valid and competent contributors to knowledge construction, children's visual literacy becomes increasingly important to the development of educational…

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is the past president of the International Society for Infant Studies, served as the Associate Editor of "Child Development" and is on the governing counsel of the…

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…

Teachers face a growing call for implementing inquiry-based teaching and learning in a current pedagogical environment that contradicts this through educational practices that silo content, disseminate knowledge, and produce classrooms of passive learners. We address a hot topic in the United States on how a push for more "academics" is…