The digital media play an increasingly pervasive and influential role in children’s lives (Rideout & VJR Consulting, 2011). However, whilst there has been extensive investigation into the media use of this age--‐group in the USA and western Europe, there has been little research on the media use of children under the age of 6 in Taiwan. Therefore, Phase 1 of the study began by conducting an online survey (n=535) in order to situate the work undertaken in Phase 2. The results showed that TV dominates the media use of young Taiwanese children. Opinions differ regarding the effects of TV viewing on young children. Some child development specialists warn of the dangers of too much viewing, especially for infants (Christakis, 2008). However, more programmes are designed specifically for young children and many aim to support their learning. Evidence has shown that TV can have a positive impact on learning (Wright, Huston, Scantlin, & Kotler, 2001). The key issue is the extent to which children engage with the programme. The literature into children’s learning from media content indicates that the child’s engagement with the programme is strongly related to their understanding of the programme content (Calvert, Strong, Jacobs, & Conger, 2007). However, little is known about how parents can support their child’s engagement by co--‐viewing children’s TV programmes with them. Therefore, Phase 2 of the study aimed to explore in--‐depth this particular link between parental scaffolding and child engagement. Adopting a social constructive paradigm and using case study methodology, the researcher gathered video recordings of thirteen parent/child dyads of 3--‐ to 5--‐year--‐olds co--‐viewing the same episodes of two animated educational television programmes in natural conditions. In the analyses, measures of children’s engagement and thematic coding of the scaffolding behaviour of the parent were used to deductively and inductively analyse video recordings of the home observations. The findings indicated that there is a positive association between the child’s engagement and the level of parental scaffolding. It is suggested that dissemination of the findings from this study could help parents to understand and appreciate the value of parent--‐child co--‐viewing of educational children’s television programmes and promote children’s learning from the programmes.

Young children’s imaginative play about death and violence is contentious and under-theorised, often approached in normative terms where the play represents the source of or solution for wider ‘social problems’. In contrast, this study offers insights into the complex and shifting social ecology of death/violence play in one London-based nursery and clarifies the processes through which inequitable sociospatial relations are renewed, reworked, and even transformed in such activity. Utilising a critical ethnographic approach informed by critical realism and the social studies of childhood, the study engaged with children’s and adult educators’ perspectives and practices over a period of 1½ years through semi-participant observation, interviews, and multivocal video revisiting. The initial data chapters offer an analytic description of the setting, arguing that contradictory discursive, institutional, and material relations serve to render children’s death/violence play as ‘matter out of place’, paradoxically considered partially recuperable in relation to (boys’) development. The subsequent data chapters, informed by materialist feminist perspectives, point to the way imaginary characters became mobile resources for some children whilst inequalities serve to inscribe characters, including the monstrous, on others. The chapters point to the identifications players made with characters and narratives through a process of intense dialogic embodiment, in the process renewing sociospatial relations linked to normative heterosexuality, hegemonic masculinity, propertied relations, and flexible selves. This thesis, however, contends that ludic activity offers possibilities for overturning the status quo and enacting new social imaginaries. In the study setting, the death trope served as a generative metaphor to provoke caring touch, opening up social relations beyond economic calculation and gendered and generationed aspects of care. Play, it is argued, is a site of struggle, one that can offer a space of ethical-political engagement and radical potential, with implications for pedagogical projects concerned with equality and social transformation.

The English government is significantly expanding the number of free nursery places for two-year olds; but little is known about what sort of training and professional development might help early years practitioners to offer appropriate styles of early education and care for such young children. This thesis explores a project to offer professional support and development to eight early years practitioners working with two-year olds in a highly socially disadvantaged area in London. The project began with the participants being trained to use a structured child observation tool, and developed through fortnightly group meetings over a three-month period. These provided an opportunity for the participants to engage in dialogue and critical reflection about their data. The data were interpreted using a qualitative research methodology drawing on grounded theory and constructivist grounded theory. Evidence from the study suggests that the participants developed skills in “keen observation” (Dalli et al. 2009), and that they used the data they had gathered to develop their understanding of the children’s learning. The findings from the research increase the visibility of the practitioners’ theories: in particular, their theory that their work enables the children to act more autonomously in the nursery settings. Both the methodological approach used and the small size of the sample mean that no generalisations can be made from these findings. However, widely-held assumptions that early years practitioners are lacking in the capacity to reflect on and theorise their work are not supported by this research. Future studies might continue to make practitioners’ own theories about their work more visible, in order to explore them more deeply. This would enable the further development of approaches to training which engage with and enrich the practitioners’ own thinking.

Early-years education in Wales is provided through a mixed economy of maintained and non-maintained settings. In 2008, the Foundation Phase curriculum was introduced for children aged 3-7 years. This research draws from Bernstein’s (1996, 2000) concept of recontextualisation and the thesis analyses two substantive areas to investigate how the curriculum is: produced, relocated and reproduced. The study occurred between 2012 and 2013 and included a range of methods. First, semi-structured interviews with four early years’ advisors who were involved in the initial stage of the pedagogy’s production generated insight into the challenges and complexities of knowledge transformation. These accounts introduce the various themes and theories appropriated, as the policy moved from its official domain of the State to be relocated, recontextualised and reproduced by twelve practitioners located across three preschool sites. The two non-maintained settings and one statutory setting provided variation, to investigate the structuration of the curriculum as positioned in the context of space, material culture and pedagogical practice. In view of the localised values and other embedded distinctions, exposed through interviews with the practitioners, the second part of the investigation focuses on the children. Findings, created through the administration of specially designed instruments, helped to investigate how thirty children interpret the Foundation Phase’s material culture and the spaces that they occupy, as part of their everyday preschool experiences. Drawing from research by Ivinson and Duveen (2005, 2006), the instruments included ten pictures, representing artefacts and spatial contexts that the children were already familiar with within their preschools. A series of tasks, administered through one-to-one interviews, helped to explore how children recognised and interpreted the material culture of the setting, as instantiated by the practitioners. The study also included over sixty hours of non-participant observations, to explore the children’s movements as they negotiated between the aesthetic, textural and positional layering of the curriculum’s indoor and outdoor spaces. Findings from the tasks and observations expose new concepts and contexts of preschool pedagogical experiences that are relevant for further investigation. This research has found that practitioners recontextualise and reproduce the Foundation Phase curriculum in relation to their values and beliefs in what the child’s development requires. These intentions become instantiated in the material culture of the setting and become recontextualised by the children, as part of their everyday preschool experience.

In this thesis I explore how gender features in the experiences of nursery age children in South Wales, using a new feminist materialist theoretical framework to inform an analysis that moves away from the binary separation of the social and material spheres. Drawing on a year of ethnographic data produced through participant observation in a state school nursery located in a deprived suburban area, I examine small ‘moments of emergence’ where gender is produced within the spaces and relationships of the nursery. I take a posthumanist stance to these emergences, where I do not locate the children themselves as agential producers of gender, but instead trace how human and non-human bodies and discourses work through space and time to delineate subjects and objects in gendering ways. Through doing so I shift focus from a purely social understanding of how gender roles are transferred to young children and instead encourage a holistic view of how environments, matter, and temporality combine with discourse through multiple and complex pathways to create continuous and flexible (re)iterations of gender emergence. I argue that it is only when we appreciate the complexity of these emergences that we can seek to positively impact children’s gender experiences in effective ways.

The research work is in the area of architectural design guidelines and more particularly in the interior design of kindergartens in Palestine. The aim of this research is to enhance the quality of learning environment of kindergartens in Palestine by developing a new design and monitoring guidelines. The research focuses on the methodology of developing the interior learning environment of kindergartens, which based mainly on understanding the key players’ needs, difficulties and problems in this sector in Palestine. The study uses three international case studies from (Japan, Austria and South Africa) in addition to cases from the UK. The international studies hold general concepts that could be considered international criteria, from which the future Palestinian kindergartens building regulations can learn and take advantage, after re-moulding them in the Palestinian culture and characteristics. It is believed that, regardless of the disadvantages and difficulties of the current Palestinian kindergarten buildings, these buildings carry unique principles and characteristics that can enhance and enrich the Palestinian learning environment. Furthermore, this study has a three local case study from Palestine, which are used to make a comparison between: the Palestinian unique principles; the international principles; and the missing principles in the current Palestinian kindergarten buildings. As a result of this comparison it will be determined what should be kept or excluded from the previous three drivers, while suggesting new ‘drafts’ and recommendations. These drafts are discussed with key players to outline the main difficulties they may face in applying them or monitoring them by MOHE. This will enable the study to generate the best final recommendations that can meet the Palestinians’ needs and aspirations. These final recommendations will be considered as the base that MOHE can rely on in forming their own regulations in the future.

The current research aimed to examine children’s understanding of cardinality by looking at their ability to use several quantitative concepts that underpin this understanding: correspondence, counting and equivalence in the context of sharing. Understanding cardinality requires children to develop knowledge about the relations between these quantitative concepts which is important for the development of mathematical reasoning. The first study aimed to investigate how flexibly children can use correspondence to build equivalent sets in different types of sharing scenarios: equal sharing, reciprocity and equity. In some situations two characters each received one object at a time, and in others one character received double units while the other character received single units. After children shared blocks between the two characters, they were asked to make a number inference about the cardinal of one set after counting a second, equivalent set. Children had more difficulty sharing in the reciprocity and equity conditions than the equal sharing condition. The majority of children were able to make number inferences in the equal sharing and reciprocity conditions where both characters received equivalent shares in the end. A second study with new groups of four and five- year-olds investigated whether children were using visual cues about the relation between double and single blocks to help build equivalent sets and make number inferences. It was predicted that the use of coins would be difficult and would increase the difference between the equal sharing and reciprocity conditions. In half of the trials children shared Canadian $2 and $1 coins and in half they shared blocks. There are no visual cues about the relation between $2 and $1 coins because they are the same size. Children were allowed to use counting or correspondence to build equivalent sets to compare their use of both strategies. Contrary to the first study, the reciprocity and equal sharing conditions were not significantly different. This may be due to the appearance of a new sharing strategy in the reciprocity condition termed “equalizing” where children first counted each set, dealt singles to make the two sets equal and then shared blocks or coins on a one-to-one basis. There was also no significant difference between the trials using coins and trials using blocks. The majority of children were able to answer the number inference questions correctly, however 25% of children made the number inference after sharing all singles but not after sharing doubles and singles, suggesting that using different units did impact their understanding of the equivalence of the two sets. A third study aimed to investigate children’s ability to coordinate cardinal and ordinal information to determine the cardinal of a single set, and their ability to coordinate counting principles with knowledge of equivalence to determine the cardinal of an equivalent set. Children in this study were asked to make a numerical inference about a set of blocks after watching a puppet correctly or incorrectly count an equivalent set of blocks. Many children were able to identify that the puppet did not count correctly, but struggled to correct the mistake. This indicates a gap in their knowledge about ordinality and cardinality in the context of a single set. The miscount also impacted their ability to make a correct number inference. Children performed significantly better on trials where the puppet counted correctly than trials where he made a counting error. This suggests that while children have good knowledge of counting principles in isolation, they are still developing an understanding of how to coordinate these principles with ordinal information and knowledge of equivalence to establish the cardinal of one set and to infer the cardinal of an equivalent set.

What is wellbeing, and how does it develop? What situations and experiences in the first three years help to build resilient wellbeing in adolescence and young adulthood? This mixed-method research study investigated the development of resilient wellbeing from birth to three. A review of the literature established that children’s very early environments and relationships make a lasting impact on their long-term development. The review generated an ‘a priori’ set of constructs as the components of wellbeing. Three studies were undertaken, with three main objectives: to put to the test the ‘a priori’ constructs, and in the process to elaborate them; to identify situations and experiences from birth to three which facilitated the development of the foundations of wellbeing; and to identify implications for research, policy and practice in relation to the wellbeing of the youngest children and their families. Study 1 was a survey in which one hundred mothers of children under five were interviewed; Study 2 involved nine case study families over a period of twelve months, collecting video and audio data; and Study 3 was a series of focus group seminars in which researchers, policy makers, managers and practitioners were consulted. The ‘companionable’ approach taken in the research was found to be a fruitful process, with the ‘voices’ of the babies and very young children being an important aspect of the video data. The proposed conceptual model was found to be a robust framework within which to explore the development of resilient wellbeing. Among the situations and experiences that were found to be fundamentally important in the development of individual wellbeing were companionable learning, or ‘diagogy’; and companionable play. Wellbeing was found to be not only individual but also collective, in families and in communities.

Literacy is a 21st Century fundamental human right and children who struggle to break the code to literacy continue to be challenged in learning and to experience a poorer quality of life. In spite of a whole body of literature concluding that structured multisensory literacy instruction (SMSLI), which embraces basic linguistic knowledge, is effective in improving reading skills, early educators are either unaware or misinformed about explicit language knowledge they need to know in order to address early literacy in the classroom. When compared to studies on reading, little research on teachers’ knowledge and early literacy instruction has been done. Such research has never been addressed on a national scale. The author decided to undertake this research path following years of immersion in education in Malta and perceived lacunae in early educators’ knowledge. The purpose of this research is to explore early educators’ awareness and knowledge of SMSLI. A mixed methodology approach was employed in order to explore this issue on a national level (questionnaires), as well as investigate professionals’ experiences of the effect of SMSLI training on their professional development (focus groups). Descriptive statistics indicate an incomplete and incorrect body of knowledge. Results highlight marked deficits in basic language constructs knowledge and awareness of SMSLI, and indicate that exposure to training increases the required language constructs to address SMSLI. In theory, the conclusion from this research is that awareness of SMSLI leads to students’ increased reading success. Professionals indicating knowledge in SMSLI evidenced more confidence in knowledge and abilities to teach early reading skills than they actually have. Relevant recommendations for formal training, continued professional development and further research with professionals, parents and pupils’ literacy scores are suggested.

This thesis analyses the development of the Froebel movement in Britain from 1900-1939, a critical period with challenges to Froebelian hegemony in early childhood education from new pedagogical models, organisations and disciplines, and from critiques of conservative orthodoxy. It argues that Froebelians were successful in meeting these challenges through pedagogic revision and through realignment of British Froebelians’ focus on the kindergarten to encompass children in junior schools. The findings build on previous studies, providing an in-depth account which concludes that by 1939 Froebelians had a revitalised central organisational structure and a sound base for what had become a major national movement. The thesis claims that revisionist Froebelian pedagogy provided the foundation for practice in nursery, infant and junior schools, reflected in the recommendations of the Consultative Committee Reports of 1908, 1931 and 1933. These successes were driven by relationships formed by the Froebel Society, with organisations, notably the Nursery School Association, and with modernising officials in the Board of Education. The thesis argues that Froebelian women achieved some success in negotiating gendered power relations and presents biographical snapshots to show how ambitious career paths were pursued to advance Froebelian agendas. A qualitative approach was employed, drawing on interpretive frameworks from history, history of education, sociology, gender and cultural studies, with documentary analysis of private records from Froebelian organisations and the Nursery School Association, public records from the Board of Education and the London County Council and secondary published sources. The thesis concludes that despite successes Froebelians were not able to overcome contemporary patriarchal discourse which granted low status to women’s role as nursery and infant teachers and to the education of young children. Froebelians remained an élite and overwhelmingly chose careers in private schools, but nevertheless achieved some success in implementing Froebelian approaches in state nursery, infant and junior schools.