Helen May

University of Otago · College of Education

This article is an early commentary on a kindergarten story from Aotearoa – New Zealand during the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown in 2020; detailing community outreach and new ways of providing a kindergarten experience for children at home. A backdrop to this commentary is the political context of a popular Labour-led government managing a pandemic...

This book considers the diffusion and transfer of educational ideas through local and transcontinental networks within and across five socio-political spaces. The authors examine the social, political, and historical preconditions for the transfer of “new education” theory and practices in each period, place, and school, along with the networks of...

The English Malting House School experiment is well known through the writings of its head teacher, Susan Isaacs. This material is reexamined through a lens that appraises the new kind of teacher imagined in an experimental environment framed around Freudian psychoanalytic understandings of children’s social and emotional development, including an...

Soon after the Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Stanislav Shatsky (1878–1934), one of the founders of a settlement for working-class children in Moscow in 1905, who had played a leading role in the propaganda of progressive education in prerevolutionary Russia, promptly set about reestablishing his progressive endeavour, promoting his view on educatio...

The Dewey School, which operated at the University of Chicago from 1895 to 1904, is well known over a century later for being a laboratory for John Dewey’s curriculum ideas. Less attention has been paid to its role as a “pedagogical laboratory” for ideas of teaching and learning, which is the focus of this chapter. The chapter is organised into thr...

The Hietzing School, founded in Vienna in 1927, was small and short-lived. Nevertheless, it served as an incubator of sorts for the psychoanalytic vision(s) of the school’s founders and teachers, including Dorothy Burlingham, Eva Rosenfeld, Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, and Peter Blos. The school was designed and run not by pedagogues but by individual...

This book explores networks and knowledge transfer of new education ideas across an international selection of experimental schools—kindergartens, nursery schools, and one school for children from primary to early secondary—which were at the vanguard of progressive educational ideas in the early twentieth century. This chapter sets out the conceptu...

This chapter revisits the concepts that framed our research and presents reflections emerging from the case studies, bringing together key phenomena cutting across the five schools. The chapters revealed the different ways in which knowledge travelled and pedagogical practices were appropriated. The adaptation of new ideas of teaching and childhood...

This chapter describes and interprets the culture of teaching that formed inside Jardim de Infância da Escola Caetano Campos (1896–1930) in São Paulo, Brazil. The Jardim was the first public kindergarten in Brazil and was affiliated with the normal school. To understand how teaching was carried out in the kindergarten, we try to understand how teac...

Patients at all stages of their lives present for surgery. Some patients have systemic comorbidities, and these are discussed in other articles. This article focuses on those patients that do not necessarily fit a systems-based approach of classification. Many of these patients present challenges to the clinicians involved with perioperative care a...

This chapter summarises five eras of early childhood policy and research development in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the 1970s, there was a divided system of care and education, and the dominant view that childcare was primarily custodial and sessional care educational was questioned by research. In 1980s, policies moved towards integration, maintainin...

This article is about the teacher education experiences of a number of individuals over a number of decades. It begins with a brief exploration of the changing context in which "theory" is taught. Then, drawing on some of our interviewees' experiences as students, teachers and as teacher educators, we share some of their impressions of "theory" in...

The history of early children institutions is littered with debates about how best to educate young children, including in regard to mathematics. In this chapter, definitions of instruction and construction are provided as a way of describing aspects of these debates. Some of those debates are discussed in regard to the filling of “socially empty s...

The nineteenth century colonial setting of Aotearoa NZ is the most distant from the cradle of European Enlightenment that sparked new understandings of childhood, learning and education and spearheaded new approaches to the care and education of young children outside of the family home. The broader theme of the Enlightenment was about progress and...

This paper provides an historical and policy overview of early childhood education in New Zealand. The analysis is framed around the introduction, in July 2007, of the government's policy of 20 hours-a-week free early childhood education for three and four year old children in teacher-led early childhood programmes. This initiative extended a raft...

Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young 'native' children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India, experimenta...

This chapter examines the extent to which disadvantaged children are able to access high quality early childhood education and care in New Zealand. It chronicles the remarkable changes in ECEC policy over the past few decades, with the establishment of a universal entitlement to preschool for three and four year olds, subsidies for children under t...

Introduction Between 1999 and 2008 the centre-left Labour government in New Zealand made radical changes to the provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC). The government introduced funding to support participation in ‘high need’ centres and services, delivered on a policy of 20 hours’ free early childhood education (ECE) per week for t...

This article provides an overview of the progress towards implementing the government’s Early Childhood Strategic Plan 2002-2012 in the context of the election politics of 2005. This highlighted social and economic divides in which the so-called “nanny state” offered some differing solutions for the care and education of its youngest children.

There has been an early childhood convention every four years since 1975. In a keynote address to the Eighth Early Childhood Convention held at Palmerston North in September 2003, the author presented an overview analysis of these conventions in the pedagogical and political landscape of early childhood in Aotearoa-New Zealand. The resulting conven...

In the context of missionary endeavours of the early nineteenth century there were considerable similarities in the religious and education blueprints for providing the “blessings of civilisation” to the young native “heathen” child in various parts of the British Empire. The three case studies presented illustrate a relatively undocumented aspect...

Over a sixty-year period, staff working in childcare have been transformed from childminders into teachers on a path towards pay parity with teachers in the kindergarten, primary and secondary school sectors. Similarly, childcare provision has shifted from being deemed potentially harmful for children, and unnecessary except in exceptional situatio...

This paper proposes that ‘being Froebelian’ is also about advocacy for social and political change. Reconsidering the nature of this advocacy in the light of current international policy interest and investment in early education is presented as a conclusion. From an Antipodean perspective this paper outlines the changing contexts of advocacy in re...

Eine neuseeländische Fallstudie beschreibt den Kontext der Entwicklung eines Curriculums fir unterschiedliche kulturell und philosophisch orientierte Einrichtungen der Früherziehung. Sie geht auf die Frage ein, ob und inwieweit ein nationaler Bildungsplan fir Fachkräfte und Kinder ein Gewinn sein kann. In der Maori-Sprache bedeutet Te Whäriki „eine...

The archipelago of Aotearoa was discovered by Maori who sailed in canoes from the Western Pacific approximately 1000 years ago. A tribal society was established. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European exploration in the Antipodes led to colonisation by Britain in the nineteenth century (Salmond, 1991). During early contact, the use...

During the past decade a number of countries have developed national curriculum statements and frameworks for schools and/or early childhood services. New Zealand is one of these. Margaret Carr and Helen May co-ordinated the early development of Te Whaariki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum. The development of Te Whaariki posed particular...

This article sketches some historical maps of the child institutions in Aotearoa — New Zealand. These reveal a dynamic process of accommodation and resistance by early childhood constituencies to shifting political and pedagogical agendas. The landscape for these maps are, however, multi-layered set against a backdrop of colonial values which portr...

This New Zealand project was intended to develop and test a framework for early child care practitioners to undertake their own evaluation of implementation of Te Whariki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, in a range of early child care centers. This report marks the completion of the project's phase 1, involving focus group interviews an...

Early childhood institutions underwent a dramatic transformation in the twentieth century, with the perceptions of children not attending preschool reflecting shifts in political, educational, and social opinions regarding the best place for the rearing and education of young children. This lecture presents some historical "maps" of early childhood...

This paper outlines the policy context of evaluation and quality in New Zealand, and describes a Ministry of Education funded ethnographic research study in a range of centres. The research addresses the question: What are the key elements of programme quality in relation to the Strands and Goals of Te Whaariki, the New Zealand National Early Child...

The “Century of the Child” was so named in 1900 by the Swedish writer Ellen Key. In its concluding year, this chapter sketches some maps of childhood in “Aotearoa New Zealand” in terms of: changes in how our society has viewed “children before five”; the emergence of institutions outside of the family to care and educate the “before fives”; differe...

In 1988 the New Zealand Government released two significant reports for early childhood education: Education to be More (The Meade Report) and the government response Before Five. These heralded a new era for early childhood education which brought all services into a more cohesive partnership with government, which for most services meant an incre...

In a climate of increasing concern with educational accountability and quality, it has been important to reappraise the issues of assessment and evaluation in relation to early childhood care and education. This document is comprised of three papers describing approaches to assessment and evaluation used in Te Whariki, a national curriculum stateme...

The New Zealand Ministry of Education is producing the final draft of Te Whaariki the national early childhood curriculum (Ministry of Education 1993). Once formalised all early childhood services will be required to demonstrate that their programmes are operating according to the Principles, Aims and Goals outlined in Te Whaariki (a Maori name mea...

Most studies on the history of educational ideas have focused on what influential educational theorists and policy-makers have said and written at particular times, constructing a "view from the top." The project from which this article is derived focused on the ways theoretical debates have been "lived" by teachers in New Zealand, particularly how...

Describes development of New Zealand's national early childhood curriculum guidelines, called by the Maori phrase for "woven mat." Examines the government's changing role in early childhood education, the curriculum development process, and sources and principles of the curriculum. Details the curriculum's specific aims for children. (HTH)

This paper reflects on the process of developing national curriculum guidelines for early childhood from the experience in New Zealand. Developing national curriculum guidelines in New Zealand during 1992 involved accessing current knowledge of child development, of learning, and of international early childhood practice. The development also invol...

The period of this study covers two generations of New Zealand social history and traces the context of life for two groups of Pakeha women during their childrearing years. It is not a compare and contrast exercise as the changes between generations are cumulative, as well as being variable amongst different groups of women. The women in this study...