Understanding Young Designers: Development and Validation of the Early Design Thinking Scale (EDTS)

STEAM to R-SLAMET Modification: An Integrative Thematic Play Based Learning with R-SLAMETS Content in Early Child-hood Education

Design thinking is a cognitive, iterative process that involves identifying goals, understanding users, and creating solutions. It has changed from a designers’ activity to an all-around approach to the innovation process and become a pedagogical phenomenon. In this article, design thinking method is studied in an educational context among young learners (children aged 5–8) through a literature review. The aim of this review is to gain an understanding of the reasons why and the ways in which design thinking is applied as an educational method in early childhood education and care. Through the review, we aim to find new ideas for teaching craft, design, and technology education with young learners. We present the results of 20 peer-reviewed articles reporting empirical studies of applying design thinking methods in an educational context with young learners. The results show that previous research has identified three themes of reasons to apply design thinking in early childhood education and care: enhancing multidisciplinary teaching, teaching design thinking as a method and supporting children’s developmental domains, and participatory learning. The ways to apply design thinking with young learners also coalesced into three themes: children acting as designers by solving real-life problems, open-ended science problems, and challenges in imaginary play. In conclusion, we consider these findings from the perspective of teaching craft, design, and technology education for young learners.

Stage 1: Survival During Stage 1, which may last throughout the first full year of teaching, the teacher's main concern is whether she can survive. This preoccupation with survival may be expressed in questions the teacher asks: "Can I get through the day in one piece? Without losing a child? Can I make it until the end of the week? Until the next vacation? Can I really do this kind of work day after day? Will I be accepted by my colleagues?" Such questions are well expressed in Ryan's enlightening collection of accounts of first-year teaching experiences (3).

<table id="announcementDescription" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td><p><strong>Guest editors: Dr. Fikile Nxumalo (University of Texas at Austin) and Dr. Nikki Rotas (University of Alberta)</strong></p><p>A growing body of work has illustrated the importance of situating environmental education in current precarious times that disrupt idealized notions of both childhood and nature/environment. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship and from the environmental humanities, several scholars have critically engaged with ways in which the notion of the Anthropocene, as a current epoch marked by devastating human impact on the earth, necessitates a turn away from romantic conceptions of children and nature (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Malone, Truong & Gray, 2017; Ritchie, 2015). This work supports an orientation towards critical and generative pedagogies that are firmly situated within the messy anthropogenic worlds that young children co-inhabit, and that take seriously the inseparability of nature and culture. Importantly, this work has also taken up the Anthropocene as a contested political marker of current times rather than a neutral scientific fact (Lloro-Bidart, 2016; Colebrook, 2016; Saldanha & Stark, 2016; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Taking up the political signification of the Anthropocene in early childhood education includes challenging the figure of the developing human child as future steward – a common trope of nature based education that is rooted in instrumental approaches to teaching and learning (Blaise, 2013; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Taylor, in press). In addition, methodological attention to ‘how’ Anthropocene discourses manifest in early childhood settings and across disciplinary frameworks is important. How, for example, do environmental education practices materialize in schools and communities? In what ways do current environmental education practices affirm the capacity of students and/or reiterate deficit racialized discourses in schools? How might creative and critical practices ‘presence’ (Simpson, 2011) Indigenous land and communities in present place and time? </p><p>Building from these and other insights on the potential invigorations of bringing interdisciplinary perspectives into conversation with early childhood environmental education, this special issue invites further critical and creative interventions into questions of research and practice in early childhood. In this special issue, we invite papers that reconceptualize environmental education in ways that situate teaching and learning within current environmental precarities, intervene into dominant child-nature discourses, trouble normative methodologies, and unsettle the universalisms and omissions of the Anthropocene. In this regard, submissions are invited that are animated by, but not limited to:</p><ul><li>Black studies + environmental education + childhood</li><li>Black/immigrant childhoods in the Anthropocene</li><li>Indigenous land education + environmental early childhood education</li><li>Decolonizing place based early education</li><li>#WaterIsLife + childhood</li><li>Toxic pollutants + childhood entanglements</li><li>Discard studies + environmental education + childhood</li><li>Critical disability studies + environmental education + childhood</li><li>Queering childhood-nature relationships</li><li>Speculative practices + creative methodologies in environmental education</li><li>Material Technologies + Environmental Education + Childhood</li><li>Arts-based early childhood pedagogies for the Anthropocene</li><li>Climate change + environmental early childhood education</li><li>STEM + the environmental humanities in early childhood education</li><li>Multispecies relations + childhood in the Anthropocene</li><li>Affect + Environmental Education + Childhood</li><li>Urban education + the Anthropocene</li><li>New Material feminisms + environmental early childhood education</li></ul><p>We seek submissions that push current boundaries of environmental education with young children by engaging interdisciplinary perspectives in critical, creative and generative ways while disrupting anthropocentric, deficit images of children and families. We welcome submissions in multiple formats, including qualitative and post-qualitative research articles, conceptual essays, digital media pieces, aesthetic works, reviews, and interviews. We also encourage submissions from educators working in early childhood settings for the <a href="/index.php/jcs/about/editorialPolicies#sectionPolicies">Ideas from Practice</a> section of the journal. </p><p>Submissions are due August 1, 2017. Please see the <a href="/index.php/jcs/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions" target="_blank">author guidelines</a> for submission preparation instructions. Please contact Fikile Nxumalo (fnxumalo@austin.utexas.edu) and Nikki Rotas (rotas@ualberta.ca) with any questions. </p><p> </p><p>References</p><p>Blaise, M. (2013). Activating micropolitical practices in the early years: (Re)assembling bodies and participant observations. In R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.) <em>Deleuze and research methodologies,</em> pp. 184–200. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress.</p><p>Colebrook, C. (2016). ‘A grandiose time of co-existence’: Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene. <em>Deleuze Studies, 10</em>(4), 440-454.</p><p>Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). <em>Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy</em>. New York, NY: Routledge.</p><p>Lloro-Bidart, T. (2016). A feminist posthumanist political ecology of education for theorizing human-animal relations/relationships. <em>Environmental Education Research, (23)</em>1, 111-130.</p><p>Malone, K., Truong, S., & Gray, T. (2017). <em>Reimagining sustainability in precarious times</em>. Singapore : Springer.</p><p>Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. & Taylor, A. (2015). (Eds.) <em>Unsettling the Colonialist Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education.</em> New York: Routledge.</p><p>Ritchie, J. (2015). Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective<em>. Journal of Pedagogy, (6)</em>2, 41- 56.</p><p>Saldanha, A. & Stark, H. (2016). A new earth: Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene. <em>Deleuze Studies, 10</em>(4), 427-439.</p><p>Simpson, L. (2011). <em>Dancing on our turtle’s back: Stories of Nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence, and a new emergence</em>. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishers.</p><p>Taylor, A. (in press) Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene, <em>Environmental Education Research</em>.</p><p>Tuck, E. & McKenzie, M. (2014). <em>Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods.</em> New York: Routledge.</p></td></tr></tbody></table>

Care and education have deep historical divisions in the Canadian policy landscape: care is traditionally situated as a private, gendered, and a welfare problem, whereas education is seen as a universal public good. Since the early 2000s, the entrenched divide between private care and public education has been challenged by academic, applied and political settings mainly through human capital investment arguments. This perspective allocates scarce public funds to early childhood education and care through a lens narrowly focused on child development outcomes. From the investment perspective, care remains a prerequisite to education rather than a public good in its own right. This chapter seeks to disrupt this neoliberal, human capital discourse that has justified and continues to position care as subordinate to education. Drawing upon the feminist ethics of care scholarship of philosopher Virginia Held, political scientist Joan Tronto, and sociologist Marian Barnes, this chapter reconceptualizes the care in early childhood education and care rooted through four key ideas: (1) Care is a universal and fundamental aspect of all human life. In early childhood settings, young children’s dependency on care is negatively regarded as a limitation, deficit and a burden. In contrast, in educational settings, older children’s growing abilities to engage in self-care and self-regulate is viewed positively. We challenge this dependence/independence dichotomy. (2) Care is more than basic custodial activities. The premise that care is focused on activities concerned with the child’s body and emotions, while education involves activities concerned with the mind, permeates early childhood education and care policy. Drawing on Held’s definition of care as value and practice, we discuss why this mind-body dualism is false. (3) Care in early childhood settings can be evaluated as promoting well-being or, in contradiction to the meaning of care, as delivering poor services that result in harm to young children. We will explore the relevancy of Barnes’s contention that parallel to theorizing about good care in social policy, “we need to be able to recognize care and its absence” through the cultivation of “ethics sensibilities and skills applied in different practices in different contexts.” (4) Care must be central to early childhood education and care policy deliberation. Using Tronto’s concept of a “caring democracy,” we discuss how such deliberation can promote care and the caring responsibilities of educators in early childhood settings, thereby redressing long standing gendered injustices. We argue that these four ideas can be framed in advocacy messages, in ways that bridge the silos of care and education as separate domains and which open up the vision of an integrated early childhood education and care system. A feminist ethics of care perspective offers new possibilities for practitioners, advocates, researchers, and decision-makers to reposition and reclaim care as integral to the politics and policies of early childhood education and care.

Quality early childhood education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is increasingly recognised as an important component of a contemporary education for all children. In order for this to happen, teachers need to be well prepared to teach all elements of STEM in early childhood contexts. While we have seen progress within many areas of STEM in early childhood, there are fears that early childhood teachers remain unsure of how to integrate technology meaningfully within an early childhood programme. We live in an era characterised by increasingly prevalent digital tools and rapid technological change. Many early childhood teachers are reported to be nervous or negative about having the knowledge to use digital technology with young children. This attitude impacts their confidence and ability to design high-quality educational experiences for young children. The aim of this chapter is to present the results of a small qualitative study that explored the responses to an online teacher education subject that was designed to influence early childhood teachers’ beliefs and confidence using digital technologies in early childhood settings. The students in this graduate entry degree programme were already early childhood educators and consistently entered the programme with fear of, or negative attitudes towards, the role of digital technologies in early childhood settings. The learning content and the assessment tasks were based on constructivist theories of learning where the early childhood educators were supported to build knowledge and confidence using digital technologies through the active and reflective experience of using digital technologies in their own online learning. Data is presented to show the changes in confidence and beliefs of the participants after undertaking the course of study.

<p><strong>Bullying in early childhood is a globally recognised issue, yet it remains relatively under-researched, especially in New Zealand. Early childhood teachers and parents play crucial roles in supporting young children’s social development. Early childhood teachers provide opportunities for children to practice social skills and resolve conflicts, while parents and whānau model appropriate social behaviour and teach children about managing emotions at home. However, distinguishing between bullying and aggressive behaviour can be challenging, as these behaviours often overlap. Accurate identification of bullying behaviour is essential for effective intervention strategies by parents and teachers. Bullying may be overlooked in early childhood due to various factors, including a normative belief that downplays its significance. Nevertheless, bullying can have severe consequences for both victims and perpetrators, leading to physical and emotional harm and social and behavioural problems, respectively. Understanding early childhood teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of aggressive and bullying behaviour among young children, as well as their preferred intervention strategies, can inform the development of educational programmes to address and support affected children.</strong></p><p>This doctoral research comprises one quantitative study with two parallel data collection strategies investigating early childhood teachers’ and parents’ responses to hypothetical scenarios depicting different types of aggressive and bullying behaviour in early childhood contexts. Participants’ ability to recognise aggressive behaviour from bullying behaviour, their perceptions of seriousness, their sympathy toward victims, their likelihood of intervention, and their preferred intervention strategies were assessed. Study phase A involved 272 early childhood teachers who responded to six scenarios depicting physical, verbal, and relational aggression and bullying behaviour. The majority of participants were full-time teachers (80%), with over half having more than ten years of experience (52%). Study phase B involved 107 parents, predominantly mothers (93%), responding to scenarios in which their child was the perpetrator. Most parents held a university degree (77%). Data collection for both phases utilised separate anonymous online surveys.</p><p>The findings revealed that early childhood teachers and parents were able to distinguish aggressive behaviours from bullying behaviours, with physical bullying scenarios being more easily identified as bullying compared to verbal and relational bullying scenarios. Consequently, both groups rated bullying scenarios as more serious than aggressive scenarios, with physical incidents considered the most serious, followed by relational incidents, and verbal incidents being perceived as least serious. Additionally, both early childhood teachers and parents demonstrated high levels of sympathy toward victims of bullying scenarios, indicating a greater likelihood of intervention in bullying incidents compared to aggressive incidents. For physical and relational bullying scenarios, parents and early childhood teachers proposed a cluster of intervention strategies, while for verbal and all types of aggression scenarios, one or two strategies were suggested.</p><p>In summary, the findings suggest that early childhood teachers and parents share similar attitudes toward aggressive and bullying behaviour. Notably, both teacher-child interactional style and parenting style influenced participants’ perceptions of the hypothetical scenarios to some extent. The results highlight the need for educational programmes to enhance early childhood teachers’ and parents’ awareness of covert forms of bullying behaviour in early childhood settings, as these behaviours can be as harmful as physical bullying.</p>

BackgroundPrior researchers developed an instrument to measure perceived design thinking ability of first‐year students interested in engineering, and they validated the instrument through exploratory factor analysis.Purpose/HypothesisOur study uses the previously developed instrument to evaluate perceived design thinking ability of senior engineering students. We make a cross‐sectional comparison of this measure on a national scale.Design/MethodWe surveyed a national sample of senior engineering students in 2018 and conducted a cross‐sectional comparison with results from a 2012 national sample of first‐year students who were interested in declaring an engineering major. Two‐way analysis of variance tests compared average design thinking scores across sample groups. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to improve the design thinking instrument.ResultsFirst‐year students who intended to declare an engineering major score significantly higher (2.80) on the design thinking scale than senior engineering students (2.59) with a medium effect size of 0.4. The senior engineering sample performs significantly worse on the feedback seeking and experimentalism instrument items, but significantly better on the integrative thinking and collaboration items. We found no significant differences in perceived design thinking ability among engineering disciplines among senior students.ConclusionsFeedback seeking and experimentalism are traits that engineering educators should develop in their students to improve perceived design thinking ability. Incorporation of user‐centered design and divergent thinking in the engineering classroom are recommended as avenues to foster feedback seeking and experimentalism. We also offer recommendations to improve the design thinking instrument for future research.

Children are able to make greater gains in their early development when the teachers possess the necessary competencies to provide quality experiences (Litjens &Taguma, 2010). However, in Uganda, despite the existence of early childhood teacher education training, teachers still lack key creativity competencies to use learning materials to enrich children’s learning experiences (MoES, 2018). This study was conducted in two teacher training institutions located in urban-rural Uganda to examine how the Art World Design Thinking Process can be used to improve teacher material utilisation creativity in early childhood teacher education. A quasiexperimental design used a concurrent embedded mixed-methods design of nonequivalent groups (Bhattacherjee, 2012). The study worked with 64 participants from two cohorts, the control group and the experimental group. The treatment was a one-month experiment using the Art World Design Thinking Process. The data collection instruments used were the teacher creativity observation tool and the focus group interview guide. Quantitative data was analysed using a t-test for independent groups, whereas qualitative data was analysed using thematic content analysis. Results from the post-test data showed that teachers had developed personal creativity in material utilisation. In conclusion, the study shows that the Art World Design Thinking Process has the potential to improve the development of material utilisation creativity skills for early childhood teachers. The study contributes to the discussion on how the Art World Design Thinking Process can be used to develop teacher creativity in Early Childhood education.

Physical inactivity has become increasingly prevalent among young children in early childhood education and care settings. One promising way to intervene and promote physical activity in these settings is to develop children’s physical literacy. Where most children spend their weekday in early childhood settings in the care of early childhood educators, the educators are viewed as ‘change agents’ and become responsible for developing children’s physical literacy. Thus, early childhood educators must possess adequate skills, knowledge, and practices to promote such development. However, research has yet to conceptualize a theory which identifies the significant capabilities and competencies that make early childhood educators, what we propose, an Effective Early Childhood Physical Literacy Pedagogue. Therefore, this paper draws on early childhood research regarding physical literacy, physical activity, and active play, to present a conceptual model theorizing an Effective Early Childhood Physical Literacy Pedagogue. Within this model, we propose educators’ professional identity and implementation of play-based pedagogy are essential characteristics of an Effective Early Childhood Physical Literacy Pedagogue. Furthermore, educators’ physical literacy capabilities (psychomotor, affective, social, and cognitive) are recognized as the vehicle that drives the aforementioned characteristics to be the Effective Early Childhood Physical Literacy Pedagogue. This conceptual model provides implications for future research to appropriately assess and target physical literacy interventions towards early childhood educators.

Let's put a national child care strategy back on the agenda

Early childhood teachers making multiliterate learning environments: The emergence of a spatial design thinking process

Based on Rogers’ (2003) Diffusion of Innovations Theory, this study aims to describe the construction and validation of the “Perceived Attributes of Computer Use” (PACU) scale to measure pre-service early childhood teachers’ (N=581) tendency towards computer use for instructional purposes in early childhood settings. The development and validation process of PACU scale, reworking on the structure and item numbers of the original English scale ‘Perceived Characteristics of Innovating’ (Moore & Benbasat, 1991), was accomplished in four steps, namely (1) translation and adaptation procedure, (2) Q-Sort method, (3) exploratory factor analysis, and (4) confirmatory factor analysis. A five-factor scale with 23 items was revealed and a good fit between the data set and the proposed Turkish version scale was confirmed (NNFI=.92, CFI=.93, RMSEA=.97, χ2/df=2.58). Moreover, the reliability value of the scale was found .90. In the end, the overall measures and evidence validated a ready-to-use scale for prospective early childhood teachers.

The concept of as used in industry and construction, was first applied to education and the social services in the 1980s. Since then the question of how to define and describe quality in early childhood services has been a matter for debate, both in New Zealand and internationally. Recently I spent time in Norway and Japan, observing very different early childhood contexts from our own. While each country promotes its practices as quality, the cultural contexts that shape our understandings of children, development, goals, and philosophies differ considerably--and so, as a result, do our early childhood settings. In this article (1) I discuss definitions of drawing on examples from Norway and Japan to demonstrate the differences in our understanding of this concept as it applies to early childhood education. Definitions of quality The concept of quality has often been taken to mean something that is real, measurable, knowable, and assessable; in other words, out there to be discovered. For example, the work on quality in early childhood education (ECE) has often looked at the structural features of services, such as organisation, resources, and environments. In the mid 1990s Harry McGurk (1995) defined quality in terms of structures and processes. Structures were those things that are the easiest to measure: physical space, equipment, staff qualifications and conditions of employment, health and safety, staff-child ratios, and so on. Indeed, there appears to be general international agreement over these as determinants of quality. Quality processes, however, are harder to describe, but refer to children's actual experiences in their early childhood settings: for example, their interactions with staff; a curriculum that is appropriately linked to their interests, exploration, and culture; relationships between staff; staff morale; and relationships between staff and parents. There are many different opinions on the impact these factors have on quality (Ceglowski, 2004; Clifford, 1995; Moss & Pence, 1994; Smith, 1996; Textor, 1998). Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence (1999) sum up this position when they state: We recognize that the discourse of quality might be particularly useful for certain highly technical issues, perhaps, for example, food hygiene or building standards to ensure the physical safety of young children in early childhood institutions ... a comprehensive and reliable system of information on subjects as the supply and use of places, the costs of running institutions and the gender, ethnicity, training and other details of the workforce are necessary conditions for a system of well organized and well resourced early childhood institutions. (p. 119) Since the mid 1990s the New Zealand Government has been attempting to support both structural and process quality indicators through initiatives and incentives such as the 1996 Quality Funding Rate, Quality in Action (Ministry of Education, 1998), The Quality Journey (Ministry of Education, 1999), and most recently Pathways to the Future (Ministry of Education, 2002). The Education (ECE) Regulations 1998 and Revised Statement of Desirable Objectives and Practices (DOPs) for Chartered Early Childhood Services (Ministry of Education, 1996) provide a legislative platform for agreed standards for ECE provisions. It is agreed that these structural features do improve what is happening for children (Clifford, 1995, Early Childhood Education Project, 1996). In New Zealand, as well as understanding the usefulness of these structures and systems in promoting we now also officially recognise their interrelationships in Pathways to the Future. Nga Huarahi Arataki. A 10 year Strategic Plan for Early Childhood Education (Ministry of Education, 2002): Children only benefit from participation in quality ECE services. That quality is achieved through a number of interacting factors. …

This paper aims to focus on the international studies regarding early integrated STEM education and its importance for developing 21st-century skills in young children to prepare them for an ever-changing world. The paper reviews the importance of integrated STEM education in early childhood settings and how it supports the development of scientific concepts and 21st-century skills such as critical thinking and problem solving through play-based learning based on the current literature. Adding to the importance of STEM education, the paper explores what STEM education means in early childhood and how different types of play-based learning can support early integrated STEM concepts and skills in young children concerning the literature from different parts of the world. Furthermore, the literature presents the role of teachers in implementing STEM practices and the challenges encountered by teachers. The literature indicates low self-efficacy and confidence in teachers as the main factor affecting the delivery of STEM teaching and suggests ways to overcome this through STEM professional development to enhance the STEM practices in early childhood. The paper concludes with further recommendations and implications for stronger policies, and more research in this field to achieve high-quality integrated STEM education in early childhood.