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Since 2004 and the enlargement of the EU, increased migration from Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to the UK necessitates sustained research on the implications for children, their families and practitioners in the early years. This paper draws upon a sociocultural approach to bring into focus family story-sharing practices. We report findings from an interpretivist study to foreground the experiences of two families living in Scotland. The findings indicate that story-sharing practices can potentially be a meeting place for early childhood practitioners to engage with children's linguistic and cultural heritage and can provide opportunities to listen to and build upon diverse cultural traditions. The findings also highlight that children's sense of their cultural and individual identities, as well as their sense of belonging, entail a complex set of interactions and that embedding them into curricula and pedagogy requires a sensitive criticality and open dialogue between practitioners, children and families. As a result of the findings, it is recommended that early years practitioners build upon story-sharing practices as a means to engage critically with issues of culture and identity and to facilitate the participation of CEE children and families in early years settings.

Commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is an urgent public health concern. Given the dire consequences for exploited youth, growing attention has been focused on the importance of preventing, identifying, and responding to CSEC in school settings. Despite calls for schools to be prepared to identify and respond to CSEC, limited specific guidance is available to prepare and inform school personnel about how to recognize and address CSEC. In this article, we will describe a sample protocol that delineates how schools can respond to CSEC concerns, identifications, and disclosures. Our protocol was created as part of a larger project to develop CSEC awareness and response materials to be used within middle and high schools. It is our intention that this sample protocol will stimulate additional practice, policy, and research attention on how to effectively recognize and address CSEC in schools.

This article contests the emphasis that is frequently placed upon child-friendly methods in research with young children. Focusing upon a series of research encounters from a doctoral study of play in an early years classroom, I examine my interactions with the children and their social and material worlds and draw upon these encounters to highlight some emergent and unpredictable elements of research with young children. I argue that these elements call for a decreased emphasis upon the implementation of method towards an openness to uncertainty and an ethical responsiveness to the researcher's relations with children and their everyday lives. An ethical responsiveness to uncertainty has implications throughout the research process, including through the ways in which we choose to read, interpret and present the data. This article offers original contributions to contemporary debates regarding what might become possible when uncertainty is acknowledged and embraced in research with young children.

Children's interests are widely recognised as pivotal to meaningful learning and play in the early years. However, less is known about how children's diverse interests may contribute to relationships and interactions within peer cultures. This article builds upon previous studies to argue that participation in sociocultural activity generates interests informed by funds of knowledge that children reconstruct in their play. It reports findings from an interpretive study that used filmed footage of children's play as a provocation to explore the perspectives of children, parents and teachers. The article presents original insights regarding some ways in which mutually constituted funds of knowledge afford opportunities for children to co-construct meaning. The findings also indicate that interests arising from diverse funds of knowledge may contribute to the interplay of power, agency and status within peer cultures. This raises some issues regarding how matters of inclusion and exclusion are understood and responded to within early years settings. The article recommends that teachers and researchers engage critically with children's individual and collective funds of knowledge in order to better understand the complexities of play cultures.

College instructors often teach scientific thinking by asking students to review and analyze a primary research article. The main purpose of this study was to explore how classroom response systems (CRS) could help impact the quality of written analysis papers submitted for this assignment by students taking 100-level biology courses at a medium-sized suburban, two-year college in the northeastern United States. Students in all participating course sections received written instructions on five key elements of critical analysis (CA) to include in scientific study analysis papers. Classroom instruction on recognizing these key elements in primary research papers was provided either via CRS or via an instructor-facilitated classroom discussion enhanced by the same PowerPoint presentation. A rubric, designed specifically for this assignment, was validated prior to its use in this study. Fifty students participated in the study, and those who received the CRS intervention achieved significantly higher CA scores for identifying implications of study findings, while the group that received only written instructions achieved significantly higher CA scores for discussing the credibility of the references used by the authors in planning the critiqued study. The implications of this study are discussed along with ideas for future research.