Play is a fundamental concept in early childhood development and education. As partners in the child's learning, parents play a crucial role in how play is defined, valued, and practised. The present study explores the constructs of parents' beliefs about and engagement in young children's play in two coastal cities in China. A sample of 483…

Gholam Hussein Sa'edi is one of the greatest Iranian writers of short stories in the present era. Sa'edi's stories are based on the existence of fanciful and dreamlike settings in which he attempts to establish the endings of the stories to be the direct result of the characters' psychological reaction against their dreams. The linguistic and…

This article presents findings from a rhetorical analysis of job advertisements posted by the fastest growing companies in the United States (Inc. 5000 rankings). The analysis suggests that companies rely on standard rhetorical figures and share similar rhetorical visions of novelty that likely effect their organizational culture, paradoxically…

Russell Hoban died in December 2011. In this article, Victoria de Rijke celebrates this mysterious writer's huge contribution to children's literature over 52 years; a career which began and ended with two mythological books: "The Mouse & His Child" (1967) and "Soonchild" (2012). Published in "CLE" over…

Mothers are essential facilitators of early Theory of Mind development and intrinsic to the acquisition, as well as the content, of many basic schemas learnt in infancy. In this article it is argued that the "mother" schema in children's literature can ease a child's transition into literary discourse by exploiting the child's…

This article details findings of an analysis of a third grade classroom's read-aloud discussions spanning a 6 week period. Data were analyzed first using the constant-comparative method, followed by an analysis of selected interactions in which the teacher revoiced students' utterances. Findings suggest students co-constructed knowledge through…

Often young children already have some ideas about what they want to do in the future. Using data from a large UK cohort study, we investigated the individual determinants of seven-year-old children's aspirations, controlling for parental socio-economic background and parental involvement in learning. At age 7, not all children's aspirations were…

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened…

Many current theories and models include creativity as a component of giftedness, conceptualizing the construct in numerous ways that complement giftedness. Variations in creativity have also been studied among different academic disciplines, suggesting that although there may be higher levels of creativity for some, major choice is a complex…

The aim of this article is to present a wholeness perspective on the relation between creative imagination and children's activity when playing with toys. This is explored through a case retrieved from a 4-month experimental research project, specifically from a social fantasy play session. In order to analyse and examine children's play, the…

This article considers children's engagement with the "Ologies", a series of postmodern texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. It follows on from a text-based analysis of the series published in this journal (22(3) 2015). Data collected from 9-12 year olds demonstrate how actual readers took up the invitation offered by…

In early childhood education and care, Nordic social pedagogy approach is challenged by a learning orientation that often results in unproductive "either/or" thinking. Therefore, based on the two approaches and by analysing several dimensions of Froebel's ideas and prevailing social-historical activity (play) theory, the author deduces…

Based on a cultural-historical perspective, where play is conceptualized as the creation of an imaginary situation, the study reported in this paper examines how parent-child playful interactions create shared imaginary situations for mediating scientific learning. The main focus of this paper is to reveal sign-mediated learning process through…

Research in the learning sciences is often motivated by the goal of shaping a better future through design. Architects and urban planners share this goal, and the history of their more ambitious designs provides clear examples of how attempts to build the future can turn out. After discussing similarities and differences between design in the…

This research aims to highlight the importance of developing creativity in the school environment by promoting quality education to gifted students, with contributions from Vygotsky and Piaget. For Vygotsky creativity is inherent in the human condition, and it is the most important activity because it is the expression of consciousness, thought…