Reading Practices with Multilingual Children in Norwegian Kindergartens

<p>This thesis investigates Samoan parents and their primary school aged children’s experiences and perceptions of learning to read and the role this plays in home reading practices. A key purpose was to investigate what can be learnt from Samoan born parents regarding their cultural values and understandings around learning to read. Gaining understandings of the influences and experiences these parents have had when learning to read in Samoa would provide insights into the home reading practices being used with their own children. By examining the parents’ cultural values and practices, possible connections or disconnections between home and school reading practices can be drawn. While home and school partnerships are deemed to be important in New Zealand primary schools and by the Ministry of Education there needs to be improved understandings of the cultural values and practices that are taking place within many Samoan households regarding reading instruction. The valuing of these practices also needs to be considered with the understanding that there are diverse forms of literacy across cultural communities. The focus has been on how school reading practices can be implemented into the home environment rather than what can be learnt from home practices. This thesis has aimed to amend this by acknowledging and giving voice to Samoan born parents through discussing their own reading practices and experiences, and the influence this has had on the strategies they use when reading with their children. Pasifika students’ learning and achievement within New Zealand schools has been identified as a key priority for the Ministry of Education. The recent Pasifika Education Plan 2013-2017 (Ministry of Education, 2013) has outlined specific goals and targets aimed at improving Pasifika educational achievement that include establishing stronger connections between home and school for Pasifika learners. If connections are to be made the influence of social and cultural factors on students’ learning and achievement needs to be identified and valued. The methodology used was qualitative in design. A case study approach that integrated a socio-cultural perspective and the practices of Pasifika research methodology were used to allow for literacy to be seen as social practice where peoples’ views, values and experiences are used to enhance understandings of the role social and cultural factors play within education. Data collection was through Talanoa1 individual interview sessions with five Samoan born parent participants individually. Two Talanoa sessions were held with each parent. The parent participants’ eldest children were then interviewed in pairs. The voices of the participants were used to gain insights into cultural perceptions of reading practices within school and home contexts. The parent participants’ knowledge of school reading practices was also sought. The research data was analysed by using Rogoff’s three planes of analysis (1995). Rogoff’s framework was used to interpret the key themes as they relate to the connections and/or disconnections between home and school reading practices. The research findings indicate that strong cultural reading values and practices are in place for these Samoan parent participants. The practices being employed have been formed from their own experiences and memories of learning to read as children, in Samoa. These reading practices are based on the cultural values and actions that have been previously identified in literature on Samoan literacy (McNaughton, Amitanai-Toloa & Wolfgramm-Foliaki, 2009; Duranti & Ochs, 1993; Duranti, Ochs & Ta’ase 2004; Tagoilelagi, 1995; Tuafuti, 2000). As parents, these participants have continued to use these reading strategies and practices with their own children in New Zealand. Another key finding was that the parent participants’ knowledge of school reading practices in New Zealand was found to be limited. This finding in combination with the cultural home reading practices being employed has strong implications for home and school connections between Samoan communities and primary schools within New Zealand.</p>

Food and meals in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings play a vital role in health promotion and sustainable development because they constitute a significant part of the children’s total diet and considerably influence their eating habits and preferences. This paper aims to find and identify traces of sustainability in food practices in a Norwegian kindergarten by analyzing each of the four dimensions of sustainability relevant to ECEC: ecological, economic, and social/cultural sustainability, and good governance. Primary data sources for this paper include interviews with kindergarten staff, supplemented with non-participatory observation during mealtime. By looking into how this kindergarten integrated sustainability thinking into their practices and organizational structures—from designing a menu to managing a meal and incorporating children’s voices in the process—this study shows that purposefully designed food provision may promote sustainability in ECEC. In addition, it draws our attention to how the kindergarten environment can serve as an arena for children to act as change agents for sustainable food practices in kindergarten settings and beyond.

This article explores how critical multicultural pedagogy (CMP) can support work with religious diversity in Norwegian kindergartens. It investigates whether CMP aligns with the Ethics, Religion, and Philosophy section of Norway’s Framework Plan for kindergartens, and with staff intentions and practices. While the Framework Plan acknowledges cultural and religious diversity, previous research suggests that practice often privileges majority traditions and marginalizes minority perspectives. Drawing on poststructuralist theory, this study uses CMP as an analytical framework in a critical review of the Framework Plan and group conversations with kindergarten staff. The findings reveal a dual gap: between policy and practice, and between staff intentions and their pedagogical implementation. The article argues that CMP can serve as a valuable tool for promoting inclusivity and equity in early childhood education. However, realising this potential requires a collective and sustained effort, both within kindergartens and in the education of future kindergarten teachers.

During the last decades, early intervention has become a major concern across political parties in Norway. In line with the discourse of early intervention, kindergartens are perceived as important arenas for identifying children at risk and initiating intervention. Equally important in the kindergarten sector is the discourse of diversity, in which a tolerance for behaviours that deviate from the majority norm is assumed. Drawing on an institutional ethnography in Norwegian kindergartens, and in particular the concept of ruling relations, I compare these two discourses in this article and discuss how kindergarten staff have to negotiate between different, and sometimes conflicting, institutional discourses that can justify different interventions. As a consequence, and despite good intentions, kindergarten staff can end up treating children with different backgrounds unequally.

This paper will examine the role of affect as a key force in the experience of reading. I argue reading is an experience rather than an instrument of cognition. The latter, I suggest, gives way to dehumanizing and violating forms of reading as instrument or nomenclature or categorization. I suggest that new relations can be made in, within and from practices of reading that conceive it as a fragile, faltering practice of knowledge production. My reconceptualization of reading derives from Derrida’s notion of deconstruction as learning to read the trace of affect unraveling the normative and/or binary procedures cohering privileged and/or prejudicial understandings of the text. Reading for affect asks researchers to engage in an analysis of the felt and non-evident of people, events and texts. Rather than comprehend in the sense of cognition, we feel the trace of meanings cathected in signs before we know what the sign might mean. My paper will expand on reading as conveying affectivity or the unheard embedded in text. Increasingly there is a demand to read the other’s words with greater attention to feeling for what they do and do not say, can and cannot speak. In studies that purport to do research with humans, it seems to be imperative to engage in a practice of reading that attends to the other meanings indicated by words. This requires the development of a critical or close research reading practice that attends to affect or the interior meanings of articulations and text that words cannot easily convey.

Digital text has become the dominant medium for participation in higher education. Yet little is known about the consequences from the shift to digital text usage on the academic reading practices of specific groups of students. Using a unique data set of higher education students, we analyse differences in digital reading skills, practices, perception, and experience for female students and male students. Then we explain these differences by social inequality related to gendered reading practices and artifacts and reveal that the digitisation of academic reading is reproducing gender inequality in higher education.

Culture is the life blood of a society, which influences people’s worldviews, values, and behaviours. Research has confirmed that children’s participation in culture helps develop thinking skills, builds self-esteem, and improves resilience. This paper aims to explore how a purposely designed project can foster cultural sustainability through a case study of a neighbourhood project conducted in Chinese and Norwegian kindergartens. A qualitative research methodology is utilised. Major data sources are an overall project plan prepared by one of the Norwegian university researchers, project descriptions and PowerPoint presentations from the kindergartens, as well as workshop notes taken by one researcher during the workshop, complemented and triangulated by the follow-up reflective narratives from three kindergartens. Qualitative content analysis and comparative analysis are used to analyse the collected data. Findings have indicated that kindergartens hold similar views on culture and cultural stainability. Though the actual activities are diverse and implemented in different ways, the goal of fostering cultural sustainability is achieved in all participating kindergartens. Children not only have gained knowledge of their neighbourhood and problem solving and social skills but also have developed sense of belonging and emotional link with their local culture through the active participation. More importantly, this study has indicated that purposely designed projects/activities can promote early childhood education for sustainability and quality of early childhood education. It is thus recommended cultivating student teachers’ and kindergarten teachers’ competence to design projects/activities integrating different dimensions of sustainability in early childhood teacher education

The current research is an in-depth study of four pre-service teachers’ own experience of reading in various contexts and for different reasons. The aim is to analyse what has been significant regarding reading in a life history perspective by the use of narratives. A socio-cultural perspective on reading is used as analysis tool. The over-arching result from analysing pre-service teachers’ narratives is that reading is a relational process regardless of the context reading takes place in. The emerging themes allow a deeper understanding on critical aspects for developing reading in various contexts and at different levels. Significant others seem important in every reading practice, from new readers in primary school to pre-service teachers’ reading at university level. The narratives reveal a need for bridging the gaps that arise between the reading practices in the various contexts that students meet in school and university. Key words: pre-service teachers’ narratives, reading contexts, reading trajectories, significant others.

In this study, the notion of ‘multilingual children’ is differentiated by problematizing overgeneralizations or homogenizing of children with potentially different experiences of language(s). The aim is to generate knowledge of how minority language–speaking children use their language(s) outside the education system through teacher–parent dialogue. The terms family language(s) and minority/majority language(s) are argued to capture the situated character of language(s) and to avoid labelling children’s languages from an outside perspective. The analysis conceived as abductive is based on 33 dialogues. The findings imply the children participating in multilingual practices including English as an additional language, and the opposite: the children are rather monolingual in their language use. A conclusion drawn is that being a multilingual child/parent in early childhood education in a monolingual society can be understood in terms of how the space for participation is facilitated and countered.

Our language for the truths of literature is reformist and nominalist; our experience of reading is, by contrast, habitual and idealist. Contrary to the way we talk about what kind of new, liberatory truths literature expresses, our reading practice itself is grounded in long-standing forms of recognition. Every time we interpret we recall deep seated, ingrained and circular protocols that give us access to truths immanent within the separate realms of literary experience. As interpreters, we depend on préjugés that produce recognition of already existing truths. Literary knowledge, that is, is dependent on recognition. We know because we knew. Literary cognition is fundamentally a matter of re-cognition. This default position for reading is certainly at odds with any revolutionary pedagogic program that prizes originality and pure novelty, wholly freed from the strictures of the past. The default practice of “recognitional” reading proposed here is not, however, at odds with a reformist and a nominalist interpretation of a work, since the recognitions of literary experience are not instances of mere repetition; on the contrary, the literary recognitions we care about are memorable because we see a truth—we know the place, we see a face—as for the first time, and as unique. The recognition is old and general; the force of the recognition is reformist and very particular.

In this research, based on the theoretical and methodological framework of narrative inquiry (CLANDININ; CONNELLY, 2000; 2015; MELLO, 2005), I aimed at understanding, narratively, the reading experiences of a patient, in the context of an ophthalmological office of a clinics hospital, and analyze, also narratively, my own experiences in attending to that patient. Accordingly, the participants in the study were Helena, a person with low vision undergoing prolonged treatment in the low vision service of the referred hospital, and I, as a researcher-participant, who was seeking to understand my own practice. Thus, my research was developed during my psychopedagogical services at the Low Vision Service of the ophthalmology outpatient clinic of a clinics hospital in a city in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais. This thesis was, then, developed based on the field texts which I composed, taking into consideration the three-dimensional space of narrative research. As for the composition of meanings, I took as a basis the theoretical assumptions of Clandinin and Connelly (2011, 2015) and Ely et al. (2001). My initial questions were as follows: When rethinking the material I have used for the visual rehabilitation for my patients’ reading process, I ask myself: Are they adequate? Does the process of showing them letters and words out of context really help? How can emotions affect the reading process? What is my role as a psychopedagogue when patients show their emotions during the process? Why does reading cause so much emotion for my patients? What are the boundaries between my vision-oriented care and the reading process experienced during outpatient care? In order to write this thesis, I constructed narratives based on the experiences lived by the research participants, Helena and I. As for the theoretical foundation for the analysis, I used the concepts of “literacy” (SOARES 2004, 2009; TFOUNI, 2010; STREET 2012, 2014; MENEZES DE SOUZA 2011; FREIRE; MACEDO, 2017), of “emotion” and of “emotional literacy” (MIGUEL, 2015; BARCELOS; SILVA, 2015; BARCELOS, 2015, 2021; NABÃO, 2020). When looking at Helena's experiences, lived, narrated and retold, I understood that the right moment for the patient to have the experience of reading what he/she wants may start from the first consultations. I could see that reading experiences in the office can arouse many emotions and feelings, which is why I must be attentive to the subjective issues that permeate the reading process in visual rehabilitation. I learned from the research that literacy practices in visual rehabilitation can be experienced in different ways by people with low vision. Thus, the experiences with Helena allowed me to reflect on my professional practical knowledge. Each individual can tell me a lot about their own literacy process, if I have an attentive listening to what each one brings to my psychopedagogical service. For that, I need to try not to get stuck to the techniques and procedures prescribed in that medical context and go beyond, as far as reading practices are concerned.

In this paper the author describes a study undertaken at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)) to explore the influence of the Internet on the reading habits of students. The study showed increasing familiarity with information technologies and the Internet and that reading practices are changing as a result. There is a need for libraries to take a lead in promoting broader reading experiences.

This chapter explores reading diaries to illustrate the bibliographic world in which individual readers encountered novels. From the recording of a baffled enjoyment of Tristram Shandy, through the conjuring up of the ‘excessive’ teenage delights taken in the illustrated novel, and on to the pleasures of dismissing emergent new genres as ‘too Highlandish’, the evidence presented here suggests just how much pleasure readers gained from novels. Readers engaged with fiction in a number of different forms during this time and textual context subtly altered the kind of reading that it was possible to produce. Similarly, anecdotal accounts of reading aloud recognizes reading as a material act, which brings the body as well as the mind into play. Moreover, it is worth remembering those everyday gestures of reading, such as hurrying to the library for the next volume, that were such an important part of the novel reader's experience during this period.

In this study, we analyzed the classes of early childhood teachers with experience in utilizing AI and their awareness and needs for AI-based classes. To this end, we conducted a survey of 215 teachers of 3-5 year-old children in kindergartens and daycare centers in Seoul, Gyeonggi-do, and Incheon who had experience in using AI for classes, and the collected data was analyzed using SPSS 27.0. The results of the study were as follows: First, early childhood teachers’ AI-based classes were most often about providing assistance with learning activities. In terms of institution type, kindergartens were slightly higher than daycare centers in terms of AI utilization capacity, but daycare centers were more likely to develop AI-based class expertise. In terms of career, early childhood teachers with less than 5 years of experience were more likely to utilize AI. Second, AI-based education was most often provided once or twice a month, and awareness of AI-based classes by career was high for those with less than 5 years of experience, and AI-based education was most often about ‘helping with collecting activity data.’ Third, early childhood teachers’ needs for AI-based education were that AI is a teaching assistant, and securing time to prepare AI-based classes and developing and distributing learning materials were the most common for establishing AI-based classes. This study is significant in that it provides basic data for the necessary capabilities related to AI utilization, support measures for early childhood teachers who utilize AI, and activation of AI-utilizing education.

Research Findings: Early childhood workers (ECW’s) play a pivotal role in shaping children’s emotional competence. This study examined the efficacy of Tuning in to Kids for Kindergarten Teachers (TIK-KT) used with CLASS observations to improve ECW’s emotion socialization, kindergarten emotional climate and children’s functioning. Five hundred and forty-eight ECW’s and leaders from 49 Norwegian kindergartens (children 1–5?years) were cluster randomized into intervention or control. Senior employees from intervention kindergartens received a two-day TIK-KT training, ECW’s participated in a one-day training to learn emotion socialization skills and then ECW’s received supervision to use emotion coaching with the children. Baseline and 10-month follow-up measures included questionnaires with ECW’s and parents, and observations of kindergartens. Compared to controls, intervention ECW’s reported a significant decrease in emotion dismissing and distraction, and a significant increase in emotion coaching. Intervention but not control kindergartens were observed to have significantly increased positive climate, teacher sensitivity, regard for student/child perspective, and behavior guidance. There was no change in parent reported child behavior; however, floor effects at baseline and a short follow-up during the COVID pandemic may have made change difficult to detect. Practice or Policy: These findings provide preliminary support for use of TIK-KT as a universal intervention. Trial Registration Clinical Trials Registry No. NCT03985124