Carolyn Bjartveit

• University of Calgary

Professional learning communities (PLC) can build partnerships among diverse stakeholders that support transformative change and uphold social justice. In this dialogic, reflexive piece, the authors explore how a newly formed PLC in Alberta is engaging individuals in relational practices and discussions about cultural diversity in early childhood e...

The program approach in specialized early learning programs may result in adults focusing too intently on therapeutic treatment reports and disabilities and not on the stories children share through play. Observing, listening, and documenting play scripts can shift adults’ focus and make the self of children and their interests visible. Exploring d...

In an online graduate-level early childhood education course, the authors sought to playfully disrupt and transform educators’ conceptions of children’s “dark play,” as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the course participants problematized and expanded their thinking concernin...

In this chapter, we discuss how in an online graduate course concerning current issues in Early Childhood Education (ECE), we invited the ghost of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) to class, as a way to re-image critical historical and sociocultural notions of childhood in Western curricular traditions and inheritances. Rousseau spoke d...

While running on a forest path, we imagined the Greek god Hermes flying alongside and interrupting our progress. Similar to navigating alternative routes while running with Hermes, the immigrant educators interviewed for Carolyn Bjartveit’s doctoral study veered from a single curriculum course and playfully exchanged and challenged cultural and Wes...

In this article, the authors discuss how Shaun Tan's graphic novel The Arrival (2006) opened a polyphonic dialogue with culturally diverse early childhood educators. Using visual, graphic and symbolic languages provided alternative ways for the research participants to express their experiences and understandings of being recent immigrants. Analyzi...

This article describes how storytelling can develop early literacy skills and focus young children on nature. Over a nine-month period in two program years, children, parents, and educators at St. Andrews United Church Preschool in Calgary, Alberta worked collaboratively to tell and write The Stories from the Garden. These Stories from the Garden e...