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Thousands of early childhood education centres around the world use digital documentation platforms to report children's learning. Yet there is little research into how these platforms are changing work practices in early childhood education. This pilot study tested the usefulness of cultural-historical activity theory to analyse work shadowing observations and follow-up interviews with seven teachers across four centres in Australia and New Zealand. The use of Leontiev's 'hierarchy of activity' of operations, actions and motive objects was found to foreground two actions -- "tagging" and "monitoring" -- that connected basic technical operations with motives for the use of digital documentation platforms. The article reflects on the potential of this theory for future research in digital documentation in early childhood education, and suggests areas for further research, including the emergence of datafication in early childhood education as a new mode of governance of educators' work.

This paper explores the relationship between workforce competence, migration, and quality improvement in the Asia-Pacific through analysis of Early Childhood Education (ECE) policy texts from three East Asia Summit countries. Content (word level) analysis of salient policy texts was undertaken to address two questions: How are culture and diversity "conceptualized" in these texts? How are diverse educators "positioned" in these texts? We show that, despite differing historical trajectories of ECE, policy frameworks in all three countries fail to sufficiently acknowledge the potential contribution of migrant educators to quality improvement initiatives. We conclude by calling for greater attention to workforce mobility and diversity in ECE policies, and for further research into the untapped competence of migrant educators.

This paper responds to pressing calls to better theorise the development of Educational Leadership in early childhood education. Specifically, we examine the usefulness of the concept of "leading identity" for understanding shifts in Educational Leaders' accounts of their leadership practices. Twenty Educational Leaders, recruited from Australian early childhood services, were interviewed before and after a developmental intervention using Change Laboratory approach. Our analysis of these interviews illustrates how "leading identity" can be used to trace shifts in the dynamic interplay of persons and practices in Educational Leadership work. We conclude by reflecting on how our argument might inform theorisation of leadership in early childhood education, the design of professional learning programmes for leadership development, and the methodological potential of leading identity for evaluating such programmes.

This paper reports a rhetorical analysis of policy texts illustrating the emergence of the mandatory Educational Leader role in early childhood services in Australia. We argue that policy texts before 2012 constructed a 'problem' of workforce quality in early childhood education and offered a new leadership configuration as a policy solution. We identify and critically address how this social architecture was constructed and made persuasive through key rhetorical devices, particularly the combined "pathos" of the vulnerable child and a "logos" of quality improvement. Initial analysis indicated an apparent contradiction between the economic rationalism of earlier (policy advice) texts and an emphasis on professional dispositions in the later (policy implementation) texts, when describing the Educational Leader. We argue, however, that these policy implementation documents reinforce, rather than contradict, a neoliberal economistic logos, because they attempt to form Educational Leaders as autonomous moral agents of neoliberal responsibilization. We conclude by considering some potential implications of our analysis for the early childhood field.

This article considers the ethical dimensions of efforts to develop professional practice with others, informed by literature on the ethics of intervention in education. Data are presented from three studies with workplace teams in early childhood education in Australia and New Zealand that have employed double stimulation within Change Laboratory activities. These data are used to exemplify how the use of double stimulation exposes issues such as agency, power, decision-making, cultural representation, and relationality in the transformation of professional practice. The central claim of the article is that researchers employing double stimulation to develop professional practice need to develop a nuanced understanding of the ethical complexities of formative efforts, both for themselves and for their fellow participants. The article concludes with a series of questions for researchers to consider when intervening in professional practice, including: "Who will likely benefit if we implement the changes we are planning?" and "Who and what is being transformed?"

Theories of agency are often borrowed from psychology and sociology; truly educational theories of agency are rare -- theories that not only classify and measure dimensions of agency but enable us to understand how its formation can be pedagogically facilitated. Based on Sannino's recent work on transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), a truly educational approach to agency is gaining traction. In double stimulation, a person or group faces a paralysing conflict of motives (first stimulus) which is resolved by identifying a meaningful artefact that is turned into a sign (second stimulus). Today's critical learning challenges typically do not have obvious or 'correct' solutions. They require a pedagogy that allows learners to face conflicts and construct artefacts to help break out of their paralysis. The paradigm of double stimulation, as explored in the articles in this issue, offers as tarting point for a pedagogy of agentive actions and expanding possibilities.

A challenge for early childhood (EC) educators internationally is how to increase the integration of popular culture, media and digital technologies in EC settings to promote children's learning with digital media. But an ongoing puzzle is why the practices of some educators change, while others remain the same. Much research about teaching practice positions the locus of change in teacher beliefs, attitudes, values and knowledge. Re-mediation by cultural tools (i.e., concepts and artefacts) offers an alternative explanation, but this still does not consistently result in hoped-for shifts in practice. To gain further clarity, we investigated the idea of multimodal play as a 'threshold concept' for EC curriculum. Multimodal play integrates popular culture, media and digital technologies in ways that can promote children's learning. Considering multimodal play as a threshold concept may assist educators to adopt new practices in response to children's significant interest in and rapidly changing life worlds of popular culture, media and digital technologies.

This paper reports from a pilot study investigating the ways digital documentation platforms are changing educators' work in early childhood education. Digital documentation platforms are secure websites or application software, enabled by computer, smartphone, or tablet technologies, allowing educators to record observations of children's learning as text or in visual forms, to which interpretations or commentary from educators, family members, and children are added. This paper examines how these platforms orient the ways educators see and articulate young children's learning. Video stimulated recall interviews with educators (six in total) at four ECE sites across Australia and New Zealand were analysed. Key concepts are offered in relation to how digital platforms shape the learning that is seen by early childhood educators: tag-ability, trackability, completeness, and co-constitution. Each of these concepts is problematised in relation to contemporary ECE practices and the persuasiveness and ubiquity of the visual in discourses of documentation.

This paper examines workforce reform in early childhood education in England, specifically the policy trajectory that led to implementation of the Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS) qualification in 2014. Taking a critical perspective on policy analysis, the paper uses rhetorical analysis to make sense of the how EYTS is understood within workforce reform. From an assemblage of salient policy documents, we report our critical analysis of two key texts: "Foundations for Quality" and "More Great Childcare." Both documents identify policy levers and drivers for reform, but from markedly different perspectives and with contrasting recommendations. By using rhetorical analysis to examine how these policy texts construct not only problems but also preferred solutions, we illustrate the paradoxical nature of early childhood policy in England as it relates to aspirations to raise the status of the sector and improve quality through the implementation of EYTS.

This paper attempts to move beyond a critique of historically dominant ways of thinking about teaching and learning relationships to offer a conceptualization of relational pedagogy from a theological perspective. It offers commentary on the potential of relational pedagogy for Christian faith-based schools informed by the scholarship of German theologian Karl Rahner and the dialectical child psychotherapy of D. W. (Donald) Winnicott. An argument for a theological-relational pedagogy is outlined, followed by discussion of three features linking Rahner, Winnicott, and relational pedagogy: realizing our human-ness through relationships with others; the role of a dialectical unity between self and other; and the mystery of human subjectivity. The paper concludes by signalling some of the implications for faith-based curriculum and pedagogy arising from our argument, centred on the emergence of a new theology of childhood.

This paper discusses characteristics of converged play for early childhood education. The characteristics were derived from a four-year study of teachers' interpretation and use of 'web-mapping' as an explicit conceptual tool, designed to mediate teaching practices and learning outcomes according to a definition of pedagogy as the relationship between teaching and learning. Three characteristics of converged play were identified via detailed analysis of ten core converged play 'episodes' drawn from teacher exemplar cases. The characteristics were 'multi-modal', 'global-local', and 'traditional-digital'. The characteristics of converged play presented can help teachers understand teaching and learning in the digital age, providing a starting point for an early childhood pedagogy in which children and teachers can engage in well-established opportunities for play-based learning alongside multi-modal, global-local, and traditional-digital activities in early childhood education and care settings.

Socio-dramatic play is an everyday occurrence in early childhood education as children create narratives together in shared imagined worlds. The teacher's role in this type of play is less clear and this paper draws on a study using Lindqvist's "playworlds" approach to gain insight into how teachers participate in children's play. In applying Kravtsov and Kravtsova's concept of children's "double subjectivity" in dramatic play, the paper argues that teachers can also maintain dual affect roles—those of teacher outside the play, and co-player within the play—to co-create with children in their dramatic play narratives. In this study, four teachers in Melbourne, Australia participated in weekly playworlds with the researcher in their kindergarten rooms, resulting in identification of a third affect role for teachers—that of "public performer." This third affect was found to hinder teachers' capacity to maintain simultaneous subject positions of themselves as teacher and a co-player, thereby minimizing the improvised narrative trajectory and potential of the dramatic play. We argue this third affect should be acknowledged to support teacher participation in children's play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural-historical perspectives on human activity argue that changes in cultural practices, such as teaching in early childhood education, can be fostered by introducing new conceptual resources, a process known as "remediation". We report from an ongoing study that aims to change early childhood teachers' curricular practices in response to children's everyday experiences of the convergence between popular culture and digital play. To date, convergence has only marginally influenced contemporary early childhood curriculum. Seventeen teachers were interviewed after implementing a new cultural tool called 'web-mapping' that mobilises the concept of convergence to foster digital and popular culture play in preschools. This paper theorises the re-mediation of teachers' curriculum decision-making by examining the dynamic relationship between cultural tools and the object motives identified in interviews with the teachers. It concludes by reflecting on the implications for future professional development initiatives that aim to change curricular practices in early childhood education through the introduction of new cultural tools.

There is considerable literature describing the use of Change Laboratory as a simultaneous research and intervention methodology in workplace settings. However, there is limited literature describing Change Laboratory from the researcher-facilitator perspective. This paper examines the ethical dimensions of Change Laboratory from this perspective and specifically how a 'rule of care' became a conscious rule. The context is a series of Change Laboratories implemented with Centre Directors and Educational Leaders from early childhood education and care centres in Darwin and Melbourne, Australia. Based on our analysis we attribute the emergence of this rule to a particular vulnerability of the participants: that they were all recruited from centres that had been publicly designated as Working Towards National Quality Standard requirements for quality early childhood education and care practices. We present evidence of this 'rule of care' in our work as researcher-facilitators from our data. We conclude that attention to a 'rule of care' is necessary to support transformation, particularly for vulnerable participants such as Educational Leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critiques the usefulness of double stimulation, a key concept in Vygotskian analyses of human development, with leaders in early childhood services in Australia. A series of formative interventions was conducted to identify and address systemic tensions that were confounding leaders' attempts to realise a central object of activity in their work: the development of their staff in order to enhance children's learning. An example of double stimulation is drawn from workshop comments and interviews with one of the participating leaders. The article elaborates on a tension identified between explicit cultural expectations of professionalism and an implicit division of labour that position leaders as having the primary responsibility for solving problems of practice. The article concludes by reflecting on the usefulness of double stimulation in fostering sustainable leadership practices in early childhood education.

Research Findings: This article reports on family child care providers' views about their engagement with professional development programs, including providers who were and were not participating in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems in Los Angeles, California. Most providers participating in the study were taking active steps to improve their work with children, but only a few providers described themselves as satisfied with the programs available. First, we report on why providers chose to engage (or not) in formal professional development activities; specifically, we explore the relationship between career phase and engagement and the levels of participation reported by seasoned providers. Second, we describe the way many providers strategically self-customized their quality improvement (QI) activities by drawing flexibly on available programs or by finding a coach who would work with them on their specific needs. Practice or Policy: Our findings suggest that in order to increase engagement with formal QI systems, designers of professional development supports must better align these supports with the needs and interests of family child care providers in terms of content and modes of delivery. We propose the concept of just-in-time professional development as 1 way to make QI offerings more responsive to some family child care providers' needs.