Research in Comparative
and International Education

ISSN 1745-4999

Volume 3 Number 3 2008

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

SPECIAL ISSUE
Early Childhood Education and Care
Guest Editors: LARRY PROCHNER & AILIE CLEGHORN

Ailie Cleghorn & Larry Prochner. Introduction. Early Childhood Education and Care, pages 222‑223
Peter Moss. What Future for the Relationship between Early Childhood Education and Care and Compulsory Schooling?, pages 224‑234
Martin P. Levinson. Not Just Content, but Style: Gypsy children traversing boundaries, pages 235‑249
William A. Corsaro & Luisa Molinari. Policy and Practice in Italian Children’s Transition from Preschool to Elementary School, pages 250‑265
Amita Gupta. Tracing Global–Local Transitions within Early Childhood Curriculum and Practice in India, pages 266‑280
Darcey M. Dachyshyn & Anna Kirova. Understanding Childhoods In-Between: Sudanese refugee children’s transition from home to preschool, pages 281‑294
Frances E. Aboud, Kamal Hossain & Chloe O’Gara. The Succeed Project: challenging early school failure in Bangladesh, pages 295‑307
Prerana Mohite & Namita Bhatt. From Home to School: mapping children’s transition in the Indian context, pages 308‑316

Introduction. Early Childhood Education and Care

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.222

This thematic issue on early childhood education and care (ECEC) takes the reader from the lead article by Peter Moss to the United Kingdom, Italy, India, Bangladesh, and beyond, to explore a wide range of issues involved in the transition from pre-school settings as well as from the home to formal schooling. The reader will find in these articles that the notion of transition is expanded not only to include an important event in the life of a child, but also to be shown as a cognitive phenomenon and a social process. The collection of articles thus contains several foci: shifts in the culture and language from the home/pre-school setting to school; differences in pedagogical approaches; and a kind of reverse border crossing or transition that the child of immigrant parents engages in as she traverses the socio-linguistic/cultural landscape from school to home, taking on the responsibility of interpreter of the new culture for the parents.

Whilst each article is grounded in the author’s or authors’ own country circumstances, or in the country where their research is located, this volume of Research in Comparative and International Education is international in scope and comparative in several ways: issues, policies and/or practices may be seen in the cross-country comparisons that the reader of all articles will be certain to make, and in the many ways in which the notion of transition is conceived. For example, Peter Moss stretches our thinking about the transition to formal schooling by challenging the reader to think beyond the early years. He notes that the job is not yet done if we resolve the problem of children’s adaptation only in the early years of schooling, or even the adaptation of the school to the child, since formal schooling involves constant transitions from the early years through the end of secondary school with increasing shifts in subject focus, to teachers as subject specialists, to a reduction in the number of female teachers, to an increasing focus on the assessment of competencies and, in some countries, to examinations that determine the learner’s life-chances.

The second article, by Martin Levinson, invites us into the world of Gypsy children in England, underlining the many boundaries that they have to traverse in a now changing world. The long-entrenched value system of the Romani people remains at odds with those of the school, yet parents see the need for formal schooling of their children as their traditional ways of making a living become less and less secure. As is the case in several of the articles in this volume, Levinson implicitly asks that the school make greater efforts to open wider its doors and its personnel’s minds to this very marginalised group of learners.

William Corsaro & Luisa Molinari then bring to the reader the policy implications of the results of a six-year ethnographic study in northern Italy. Here, in Modena, they pinpoint the key events in pre-school that appear effective in preparing children for school. In this regard, readiness for school involves a complex set of transitions in three domains: academic, emotional and social.

Next, Amita Gupta homes in on the ways that India is affected by globalisation, with particular reference to children’s early encounters in urban classrooms. She notes how local cultural and linguistic traditions are giving way quickly to the increasing pressure for instruction via English, and to the fast-growing influence of the media on children’s lives. The difficulties that teachers have in negotiating these shifts for themselves and for children are highlighted.

Darcey Dachyshyn & Anna Kirova consider transition in the process of negotiating roles and identity by examining the experience of young refugee children in an early childhood programme in an urban centre in Canada. Their study reveals the way the shifting roles play out in the interactions of Sudanese children with their parents, as children reveal their different understanding of what it means to be a child at preschool.

Frances Aboud, Kamal Hossain & Chloe O’Gara take a concrete look at a particular pre-school programme in Bangladesh called ‘Succeed’, to document that children with pre-school experience in this programme, whether implemented at home or in a formal pre-school setting, perform better on specified competencies in Grade 1 than children without any formally planned pre-school experience. This article implicitly raises the debate over outcomes-based education and its appropriateness in assessing the situation of Grade 1 children anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, the results of the Succeed project contribute solid evidence that at least this kind of pre-school experience is better than none for children’s early adaptation to and performance in school, and is in line with defined outcomes criteria that are becoming more and more global in nature.

Finally, Prerana Mohite & Namita Bhatt bring us back to India, where policies extol the importance of paying attention to home–school transitions, while practices are mostly left unplanned or develop in an ad hoc fashion. Nonetheless, the non-formal quality of teacher–child social relations in preschools is a good match with patterns in the home, seeming to ease children’s transition and hopefully improve learning outcomes.

In sum, the authors of this thematic issue invite the reader to reconsider and to debate a number of issues in early childhood education. The articles raise many as-yet-unanswerable questions. For example, why has the ECEC field been so preoccupied with the initial adaptation to school when that is just the start of about 12 years of transitions? In today’s very multicultural world where children are moving from the majority world to the minority world, from the newly arrived immigrant/refugee home to the school, from one culture and language to another, from one set of conceptions of what it is to be a child to another, how are we educators and researchers to re-orient our thinking so that we can accommodate this array of difference in this very diverse world? This is the challenge, and there are no set answers, as there are no set criteria (nor should there be) upon which we can determine the best paths to follow.

Ailie Cleghorn & Larry Prochner

What Future for the Relationship between Early Childhood Education and Care and Compulsory Schooling?

PETER MOSS Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.224

The relationship between early childhood education and care (ECEC) and compulsory schooling is the subject of increasing research and policy attention, as attendance at both grows globally, as the discourse of lifelong learning emphasises that learning begins at birth, and as investment in early childhood is increasingly advocated for the returns it brings in later education. Having discussed the structural and cultural framework that contextualises the relationship, the article considers four possible types of relationship: preparing the child for school, stand off, making the school ready for children, and the vision of a meeting place. It concludes with a discussion of some critical questions and of how the relationship between early childhood and compulsory school should not be confined only to the first few school grades: full resolution requires inclusion of secondary education.

Not Just Content, but Style: Gypsy children traversing boundaries

MARTIN P. LEVINSON University of Exeter, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.235

The policy to integrate English Gypsy children in schools tends to overlook the difficulties facing such youngsters in their attempts to negotiate between contrasting practices and values at home and school. Contradictions between such practices/value systems at home and school entail not only knowledge/skills, but also differing modes of instruction/transmission. Informed by learning theories and New Literacy discourse, along with evidence from previous accounts of Romani learning practices in the home context, this article draws on findings from an ethnographic study of English Gypsies (1996‑2000), and data from a follow-up study, involving original and additional participants (2005‑6). The article explores attitudes across age-groups, outlining, in particular, the knowledge/skill base valued in the home setting, highlighting the mismatch between home and school expectations, and the difference of expectation in child–adult relations in each context. It argues that policy-makers need to consider the wider impact of school education on identity and group membership.

Policy and Practice in Italian Children’s Transition from Preschool to Elementary School

WILLIAM A. CORSARO Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
LUISA MOLINARI Department of Psychology, University of Parma, Italy

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.250

This article considers educational policy and practice in a preschool and an elementary school in Modena, Italy in terms of their effects on children’s transition to and progress in elementary school. The study is based on a six-year longitudinal ethnographic study that involved direct observation of teacher–student and peer interactions. The ethnographic observations were supplemented with interviews of students, teachers and parents both before and after the children’s transition to first grade. The article focuses primarily on what the authors term ‘priming events’, which are activities that prepare preschool children for the transition to first grade academically, emotionally and socially. The findings are placed in the context of preschool and elementary school policies in Italy and how these policies are put into practice in Modena and more generally in the Emilia-Romagna province of northern Italy.

Tracing Global–Local Transitions within Early Childhood Curriculum and Practice in India

AMITA GUPTA School of Education, The City College of New York, USA

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.266

Taking the view that curriculum and pedagogy are complex processes related to history, politics, economics, culture and knowledge, and influenced by interactions that occur between students, teachers and the larger communities, this article will discuss how curriculum takes shape and is negotiated in some early childhood classrooms in post-colonial urban India. The article draws on empirical and published research, and includes a discussion on the influence of recent local and global forces on teaching and learning, focusing specifically on issues such as: the deep divide between private and public education in India; the challenge of sustaining local government schools in India in the face of the global emphasis placed on knowledge of the English language; the recent increase in the emergence of private schools in low- as well as high-socio-economic-class neighborhoods in India; the more recent neo-colonial influences of western media on children’s lives in their homes and schools; and early childhood teachers’ perceptions on the transitions between ‘western’ and ‘Indian’ values.

Understanding Childhoods In-Between: Sudanese refugee children’s transition from home to preschool

DARCEY M. DACHYSHYN Eastern Washington University, Cheney, USA
ANNA KIROVA University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.281

Canada receives over 30,000 refugees each year, approximately 10% of whom are under five years of age. While to varying degrees the factors influencing the experiences of adult refugees have been identified and researched, the experiences of young refugee children ‘living in-between’ has only recently begun to capture researchers’ interest. This article considers what the experiences are of young refugee children in their day-to-day living between languages and cultures as they make a transition between home and Canadian early childhood settings. More specifically, the question addressed is: What roles do refugee children play in mediating the host culture for their parents in the hybrid place created by play? The authors propose that play in early childhood does serve, for refugees experiencing resettlement, as a site of cultural mediation, contestation, and identity negotiation. An analysis of three Sudanese refugee mothers and their four-year-old sons’ use of common early childhood artefacts – wooden building blocks – is used to demonstrate how young refugee children who experience child care outside their home for the first time not only learn to ‘be a preschooler’, but learn to ‘interpret’ this role to their parents.

The Succeed Project: challenging early school failure in Bangladesh

FRANCES E. ABOUD McGill University, Montreal, Canada
KAMAL HOSSAIN Save the Children, Dhaka, Bangladesh
CHLOE O’GARA Save the Children, Washington, DC, USA

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.295

This evaluation research compares the first-grade competencies of two cohorts of Bangladesh children who attended ‘Succeed’ preschools, with a control group who did not attend preschool. Testing of these groups occurred in 2006, 2007, and 2005, respectively. The Succeed program aims to improve children’s learning and children’s school success by developing and testing an affordable, sustainable preschool model that can be implemented in school, community and home settings. Researchers assessed the quality of school- and home-based preschool environments using the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) plus two curricular subscales that tap program quality. An independently developed test based on government-defined competencies assessed school achievement of Grade 1 children. Results showed that children who attended Succeed preschools performed better in four of the five competencies relating to reading, writing, and oral math, compared with children without any preschool experience. Better quality preschool environments were positively associated with children’s competencies in Grade 1. There were no statistically significant differences in first-grade performance between children from home-based preschools compared with school-based preschools, both using the same Succeed program.

From Home to School: mapping children’s transition in the Indian context

PRERANA MOHITE & NAMITA BHATT Department of Human Development Family Studies, Faculty of Family and Community Sciences, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, India

doi:10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.308

The education and care of young children has been rooted in Indian culture as reflected in ancient scriptures and documents, and has continued to be a significant engagement during the pre- and post-independence period and in the contemporary realm of education. Yet, in the present situation, the progress and understanding of early childhood care and education (ECCE) leaves much to be desired. This article offers an analysis of current policy developments in ECCE and their implementation across diverse socio economic settings with the focus on transition from home to preschool. The key issues surrounding cultural and linguistic transitions that accompany a child’s introduction into a world outside the home are discussed, drawing on data from an ethnographic study of early childhood thought, policy and practice carried out across four semi-rural and tribal areas in Gujarat, India.

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