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Many scholars and researchers now have a broadened vision of literacy that encompasses the social practices that surround literacy learning. What accompanies this vision is a shift towards thinking that children, and their families, can contribute actively to literacy learning by drawing on their strengths and life experiences to create and draw meaning from a broad range of everyday sources. For many, reading and writing from print-based texts is no longer considered the only, or most desirable, avenue to literacy learning. It is now recognised that children's social and cultural lives should be used as a resource for literacy learning. Using four literacy learning lenses, we examine the Nigerian National Policy for Integrated Early Childhood Development. These lenses are: collaboration with families, the role of educators, literacy-rich environments, and diversity and multimodality. Recent research around early literacy learning underpins our analysis to identify where the policy could more strongly refer to the role of families and educators and to argue that there is scope for greater attention to early literacy learning in the policy.

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) can have positive effects on the learning and development of children. Adults and peers have a critical role in harnessing the potential. The authors’ attention in this article is on teacher practices. Through case studies of four early childhood teachers’ pedagogical roles and practices while children were using ICTs in Shanghai preschools, the authors reveal four main roles: facilitator, observer, guide and knowledge transmitter. Teachers were predominantly instructing and transmitting knowledge and were rarely observed to take responsive mediating approaches, despite proactive Chinese ICT policies which however lack specific curriculum guidance on pedagogy. Teachers were falling back on their traditional training and practices, leading to misalignment between policy which advocates guidance and democratic practice, and teachers’ actual practices. Drawing on Vygotsky’s concept of mediation, the authors advocate further learning about sociocultural approaches that have been shown to be beneficial in supporting teachers to take active and dynamic pedagogical roles and to employ a range of interactive and democratic strategies to empower children’s learning. Further investigation is needed to ascertain whether such teachers are rejecting interactive pedagogical approaches, or have not yet learnt about effective interactive strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]