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Schoolteacher and early childhood educator wellbeing is associated with their ability to provide high-quality educational experiences to students and children in their care. Given the importance of this topic, this systematic review sought to (1) identify available evidence-based wellbeing initiatives for educators and schoolteachers, (2) appraise the quality of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of these initiatives, and (3) summarise the characteristics of these initiatives. In total, 23 studies on 19 distinct initiatives were identified. Although most initiatives improved schoolteacher wellbeing, the quality of available evidence is modest, especially for early childhood educators. Existing teacher and educator wellbeing initiatives predominantly target individual and not systematic determinants of educator wellbeing, even though wellbeing of these groups is determined by a combination of personal and education setting influences. More research is needed to improve the evidence on teacher and early childhood educator wellbeing initiatives, as well as development of initiatives that aim to change workplace demands and education setting culture.

Teachers have the ability to influence a child's sense of belonging and peer relationships in the classroom which are important for a child's social development. Currently, little is known about the ways in which they do this. Vygotsky's concept of the social situation of development and Hedegaard's model for learning and development were used to discuss the conditions teachers created that promote peer relationships within the classroom. Digital video observations and interview of one grade 1 classroom teacher from the western suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria were analysed using Hedegaard's dialectical-interactive approach. This paper demonstrates how the societal demands on institutions influence the activity settings that students participate in and argues that teachers need to create conditions for peer interactions that satisfy societal needs as well as being meaningful for their students and their social situation of development.

There is a consensus that the crises children encounter during the transition period might impact negatively on children's learning and development. However, from cultural-historical perspective, qualitative leap in development can hardly be achieved without crises. This paper, drawing upon cultural-historical theory as the framework and by using 'role adjustment' as the unit of analysis, discusses what the crisis means for children's learning and development. Through a case study of two second generation Chinese Australian children's role adjustment in school transition, this paper finds that the crises provide both potentials and dangers depending on how the crises are managed within the child's social situation of development. It argues against the advocates for making children's transition seamless, as it is important to utilize the developmental potentials of crises instead of eliminating them. It also enriches the cultural-historical studies by exploring not only the developmental aspect but also the dark side of the crises.

Although abundant evidence demonstrates that play is the source of development for preschool-aged children in various cultures, few studies have investigated the role of adult-children collective play in supporting the development of children in institutional care settings. This study examined whether and how a play-based programme created developmental opportunities for children in an orphanage in China. The focus child, Shanshan (pseudonym), three years and seven months old, was observed in the natural setting of an orphanage. Relevant to this paper, digital video observations and fieldnotes were used for data collection. The cultural-historical concepts of play and the social situation of child development were used to analyse how Shanshan changed through a ten-week intervention. Findings suggest that even within a short period of time, the implementation of collective play changed the social situation for the child in institutional care, and had considerable impact on the child's play development and engagement. This study contributes to understanding how collective play can act as an effective intervention strategy for children in institutional care.

Three Australian Government reports released between 2011 and 2017 highlight a child development theory-practice gap in Australian early childhood initial teacher education. This qualitative study explores what informs university lecturers' teaching of child development theory in tertiary programmes. Grounded in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, four themes are discussed from a Freirean inspired perspective. According to those interviewed, institutional culture and the practice focus of regulatory bodies strongly informs the teaching of child development with systemic practices often experienced as oppressive. The minimisation of early childhood content in combined early childhood/primary degrees also informed practice, but fostered a sense of marginalisation for many. Liberation was also evident as participants indicated that, despite many challenges, professional values, including commitment, tenacity and respect, informed their teaching practice. Implications for Australian universities and regulatory bodies are discussed with findings serving as a case example with international applicability to tertiary education policy and practice review.

Variations in cultural practices between families and schools have emerged as central to many studies (Rogoff, 2003) and these dynamic variations have been named as "repertoires" of cultural practice (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). Emerging from this literature has been a recognition of the dynamic tension between the cultural practices of Western education and the cultural practices of communities who have a different cultural heritage. This tension and its resolution have been captured through the concept of "third space" (Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, & Turner, 1997). Going beyond a third space theorization, this paper draws upon the cultural-historical concepts of "demands" and "motives" (Hedegaard, 2012) in order to understand the development of new repertoires of practices evident in an Australian playgroup where traditional early childhood practices are used by Indigenous families. Nineteen families were video recorded interacting together at a local playgroup (20h). The findings show how participation structures for learning supported by the families, and the demands they placed upon children's day-to-day interaction, highlight new understandings of playgroup practices which go beyond the dominant Western early childhood education cultural repertoires of practice.

This study investigated the practice of two early-childhood educators and their interactions with 24 children (mean age 5.2 years) in an inner-suburban Australian preschool setting. The study specifically examined the nature of how educators 'intentionally teach' concepts to young children in a child-centred programme. Six hours of educator-child digital video observations and three hours of educator interviews were gathered and analysed using Kravtsova's (2009) concept of 'subject positioning'. The findings suggest that it was challenging to teach intentionally in a child-centred programme based on children's interests. This research is the first phase of a larger study. It is argued that the tensions between educators' beliefs about child learning and their role in relation to fostering children's conceptual development in child-centred programmes could make it difficult for educators to implement intentional teaching as presented in the Australian Early Years Learning Framework (DEEWR, 2009).

Problem Based Learning (PBL) has been used with increased frequency in Higher Education settings since first introduced by Barrows and Tamblyn during the 1980's. Since this time PBL has been used in medical, engineering and education faculties to support pre-service students in the acquisition of skills and content knowledge relevant to their disciplines. This paper explores the perceptions early childhood and primary pre-service teachers held regarding their participation in a unit of study structured around the use of a PBL scenario. The paper examines the frustrations pre-service teachers experienced within the PBL scenario as well as the perceived benefits regarding their participation in the unit of study.

Postdevelopmental perspectives in early childhood education and care increasingly reference alternative ways of understanding learning, growth and development in early learning. Drawing on these ideas, this paper examines research findings which focused on early childhood teachers' understandings of multiage grouping. The findings suggested that teachers used predominantly developmental approaches to describing their experiences of multiage grouping, and proposed that the use of postdevelopmental perspectives in multiage grouping research has the potential to realise new ways of understanding learning and development as both concepts and practices within the multiage classroom. (Contains 2 tables.)

Increasingly, graduates across a range of professions are required to possess the ability to critically evaluate information, solve problems and participate in collaborative group work. Problem Based Learning (PBL) is a pedagogical approach to learning that emphasises student centred engagement with real problems or situations, involving learners in active decision making processes and in using theory to inform practice. This paper reports the perceptions a group of pre-service educators had to their participation in a unit of study conducted using a PBL scenario. The paper examines issues associated with teacher education, such as skills acquisition and the notion of the "gap" between theory and practice. The findings reported here indicate that PBL offers the opportunity for pre-service educators to participate in a learning experience that supports them in developing skills appropriate to their profession and in understanding how theory may be related to practice.

The telling of fairytales has been a longstanding practice within the field of early childhood education in many communities across the Asia Pacific region. But what do we know about how educators use fairytales for the development of emotions for preschool aged children? In drawing upon culturalhistorical theory (Vygotsky, 1971, 1987, 1999), this paper presents the findings of a study into how fairytales were introduced to preschool aged children (n=30; from 3.3 to 5.3 years with mean age 4.2 years) and theorises the value of fairytales for the development of children's emotions in the context of the pedagogical conditions that are created through the use of fairytales. A pedagogical framework is introduced which captures the unique characteristics of fairy tales in the context of the pedagogical features that were used by the educators in the study presented. The key concept of affective imagination or emotional imagination is used to discuss the fairytale of "Jack and the Beanstalk" from the data set of 74 hours of digital video observations gathered over 16 preschool sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]