Alma Fleet

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Macquarie University

Despite growing international interest in pedagogical documentation, there is limited research investigating this professional practice. In strengthening the knowledge base, this paper offers textual analysis of material written about pedagogical documentation to enable greater understanding of its nature and purposes. The authors of this paper ana...

This article presents installation as a professional learning site for early childhood teachers to visualise relationships between key events, people and places influencing their professional identity journeys. Aesthetic processes of collecting, creating and representing the ways teachers see their evolving identities offer opportunities to reveal...

Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies

This paper illustrates an evaluation model emerging from Australian research. With reference to a range of contexts, its usefulness is demonstrated through application to two professional development initiatives designed to improve continuity of learning in the context of the transition to school. The model reconceptualises approaches to considerin...

Care is an epistemological construct that requires intellectual sensibility and judgment. This chapter offers a way to understand the relationship between our actions and the construction of care as a form of knowledge. Drawing upon the French tradition of examining the richness within the everyday, the concept of ‘le quotidien’, ‘the dimension of...

Understanding how teachers come to know and make sense of teaching is a challenging endeavor. Uncovering elusive strands of thinking through arts-informed approaches has the potential to transform personal understandings of teacher selves and professional practice across diverse early childhood contexts (Clandinin, Downey, & Huber, 2009). Drawing o...

Pedagogical documentation is a metaphor for a way of working that encapsulates teachers and children as co-researchers; being present in the moment while deeply investigating matters of interest over time. Built on responsive relationships and critical thinking, it enables educators, families and children to work and learn together while supporting...

Including narratives of practice across diverse Australian settings, this book fills a gap in the current educational change literature. Building on the experience of the authors and their colleagues, it illustrates the power of practitioner inquiry to extend current thinking and evaluation. Including both pragmatic and informative real-life scenar...

AT A TIME OF RAPID pedagogical and policy change in the Australian early childhood educators' professional context, little is known about the experience of the evolving Educational Leader role. This position is currently mandated in educational settings for young children, but at the time of writing, both the perceptions about the nature of the rol...

IN AUSTRALIA, FEDERAL INITIATIVES have prioritised the education, care and wellbeing of young children through a government agenda delivering an Early Years Learning Framework (DEEWR, 2009) and a package of National Quality Standards (ACECQA, 2011). While research is available on appropriate practices for working with young children, little researc...

This article discusses why researchers and educators might choose to seek children's perspectives. It also highlights some of the key considerations when seeing children as having the right to contribute to decisions that affect them. The article draws on findings from a study that used pedagogically oriented methods for researching three- and four...

Framed as portraiture, this narrative inquiry helps in understanding a potentially contested arena. As two women reflecting on our multiple positionings as teacher educators, we share situated memories as explanations for recommendations about working in cultural borderlands. Sited in Australia, but inviting conversation with others in similar circ...

In giving voice to the experiences of leading educational change in a primary school, this paper frames a story of a change initiative told from multiple perspectives, those of Emma as a school leader and of Alma and Catherine as outsider facilitators. As well as highlighting Emma’s story alongside that of her university colleagues, the situated na...

Little information is available about the employment trajectories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples pursuing university professional qualifications. This article describes a context in which cultural space, issues of identity, pragmatics of employment, family and community and a bureaucratic regulatory environment intersect to create...

Nonstandard entry programs into higher education include worthy goals and problematic processes. Although effective practices in teacher education would seem to be well established, complications arise when good intentions intersect with university protocols, issues of power, history, rights, and cultural complexities. This article reports on an Au...

In Australia and internationally, government policies aim to increase the supply of early childhood teachers and thus improve the quality of early childhood education and care services. In this paper, we suggest that such a policy-quality trajectory in Australia is not as straightforward as policy discourses suggest. From industrial relations and b...

This paper reports on the first phase of a case study that investigated how early childhood teachers experience organisational change. As one of three levels of quality improvement, State government‐funded curriculum initiatives were developed with an aim to promote change. Three curriculum documents, one each focusing on literacy, pedagogy and hea...

This publication is a tribute to persistence and resilience. It brings together a wide range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait early childhood teachers from across Australia to share their stories of hope and survival in pursuing dreams of a university degree. Using the everyday voices of story-telling, it intervenes in issues of access, equity, part...

Demonstrating persistence and resilience, increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander early childhood teachers are gaining university qualifications. This paper explores factors that support and constrain these students on the path to their degrees. Investigated through a cycle of interviews and focus groups, otherwise perceived as...

The "Research in Practice Series" is published four times each year by Early Childhood Australia. The series aims to provide practical, easy to read, up-to-date information and support to a growing national readership of early childhood workers. The books bring together the best information available on wide-ranging topics and are an ideal resource...

This paper describes an initiative aimed at fostering inquiry-oriented learning through the introduction of the core unit Teachers as Researchers into the first year of the undergraduate program at the Institute of Early Childhood, Macquarie University. The unit contained three components: 1) introductory research skills for first-year students; 2)...

Work in early childhood settings is changing. There are pressures exerted by external forces related to shifts in the socio-political context, but there are also shifts related to reconceptualising the work itself Starting with a reference to the influence of ‘fractured time’, this article revisits the fundamental importance of the concept of the c...

This paper challenges traditional perspectives of professional development through a reconceptualization of early childhood professional growth. A review of the early childhood professional development literature reveals the problematic nature of the linear perspectives and deficit models of staff development prevalent in the early childhood field....

Factors which have been identified as contributing to student academic success at the degree and program level in tertiary study include mode of study, student age, previous tertiary qualifications and past academic performance. Limited published Australian research is available, however, on student academic success in individual subjects. This stu...

‘Are you going to provide a school readiness program?’ is a question often asked of teachers of four-year-olds. The answer is complicated. Literature which explores the construct reveals that ‘school readiness’ is difficult to define, and varies according to the perceptions and attitudes of people in diverse settings. While the notion of ‘readiness...

Traditional planning formats may be unduly limiting teachers’ work with young children. The familiar planning grids conceived in terms of developmental domains and/or curriculum areas have a tendency to constrain thinking. These ‘boxes’ completed by staff have often become a routine part of planning without contributing to enriching or empowering i...

This paper reports on a study undertaken by two university‐based teacher educators into an aspect of professional practice. The feasibility and desirability of assessing reflection demonstrated by student teachers studying early childhood literacy was investigated. While reaffirming the importance of developing reflective practitioners, the study h...