This paper presents the design, implementation, and findings of a situated professional development programme—MoMAg—developed to enhance teacher empowerment in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) within disadvantaged urban contexts. Conducted in preschools in the Barriera di Milano district of Turin, the programme integrates Italy’s pedagogical heritage—Montessori, Agazzi, and Malaguzzi—with contemporary research on cognition and learning. Grounded in participatory and context-sensitive methodologies, MoMAg engaged 23 teachers in laboratorybased training, collaborative environment design, job shadowing, and reflective practice. Qualitative data from focus groups, observations, and documentation indicate significant changes in teachers’ awareness of sensorial processes, renewed attention to the educational environment, and the emergence of a shared professional lexicon. Challenges included reconciling guided instruction with play-based pedagogy and limited institutional time for reflection. Findings suggest that sustainable professional development in ECEC requires embedding learning within real contexts, fostering collective reflection, and valuing local pedagogical traditions as resources for innovation. The study contributes to the international debate on teacher empowerment and offers an empirically grounded framework for professional development that bridges pedagogical heritage and evidence-informed practice.
In low- and middle-income countries, children from birth to 5 continue to be enrolled in informal, unregistered programmes. They face persistent vulnerabilities in care and learning due to structural and systemic inequalities. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, Early Childhood Development (ECD) in South Africa has been positioned as a lever for transformation, seeking social justice and addressing inequalities through a rights-based approach. Despite progressive policies, access and quality remain a concern. In light of the development of a national quality assurance framework, this article examined the affordances and challenges associated with quality assurance, using a qualitative approach with 15 participants. A triadic theoretical lens of affordance, policy implementation and agency theories provided analytical purchase to make sense of lived experiences at the frontline. Data was produced through individual, paired and focus group interviews. The findings identified significant strengths, including valuing of holistic policy intentions, an emphasis on child development, and encouragement of practitioner-led improvement initiatives. However, systemic barriers frustrated these efforts: a fragmented governance structure, top-down compliance mechanisms disconnected from realities on the ground, complicated registration processes, dysfunctional municipal support, insufficient specialised training and the persistence of school-oriented curricula. A call is made for context-specific quality assurance through a district-based model that is multi-sectoral, equity-focused and anchored in municipality reforms, which includes a range of support to shift quality assurance from compliance to transformative practice.
This study explores early childhood student teachers’ perceptions of their preparedness to integrate technology during internship experiences in the United Arab Emirates, framed through Danielson's Framework for Teaching (2007, 2013) and analysed using a framework-informed qualitative approach. Drawing on reflective narratives from a purposive analytic subsample of 14 student teachers selected from a broader cohort of 30, the study examines how preservice teachers articulate their knowledge, confidence, and professional learning needs in using technology to enhance early learning. The findings indicate that while student teachers recognize the importance of technology integration, they require further support in selecting, applying, and evaluating digital tools appropriate for young learners. Specific areas of concern include technology integration strategies, advanced and AI-enabled platforms, technology-supported assessment and reporting, and early childhood-specific digital pedagogy. The study contributes empirical insight into technology-related learning needs during internship and develops the Tech-Enabled Reflective Practitioner (TERP) model as a theoretically informed framework for aligning TPACK, Danielson's domains, mentorship, and reflective practice in early childhood teacher preparation. Implications are offered for internship design, teacher education curricula, and supervised professional development in the UAE and comparable education systems.
This qualitative study investigated the use of shadows, light, and movement as tools to support English language learning in early childhood classrooms. Twenty children aged 6–8 years participated in a six-week Shadow Literacy intervention, which included shadow storytelling, silhouette theatre, descriptive shadow activities, light-based problem-solving, and shadow puzzles. Data were collected through video recordings, field notes, and children’s reflective logs, and were analyzed using thematic and multimodal approaches. Findings revealed that children actively employed embodied interactions to construct meaning, demonstrated creative and spontaneous language production, collaborated to co-construct narratives, and engaged in problem-solving and exploratory behaviors. The study highlights the role of environmental affordances and physical movement in mediating language learning, illustrating how low-cost, playful, and multisensory strategies can support engagement, vocabulary use, and collaborative skills. The findings illustrate the applicability of Embodied Cognition and Sociocultural Theory into novel, environmentally mediated learning contexts and offer practical implications for early childhood educators seeking accessible, innovative approaches for low-resource classrooms. Shadow Literacy may provide a potentially adaptable framework that integrates creativity, movement, and social interaction to foster language development, suggesting promising directions for both pedagogy and research in EFL education.
Drawing on Ochs and Phillips’s educational policy borrowing theory, this study explores how children aged five to six in a mainland Chinese early childhood education (ECE) context internalise their drama experiences through creative understanding. Adopting a qualitative case study design, the study employs a draw-and-tell approach to analyse children’s drawings and verbal accounts following a Drama in Education (DiE) activity, focusing on how they revisit, interpret, and reconstruct their drama experiences. Through thematic analysis, different forms of creative understanding of drama experiences were identified among the participating children. This study offers a children’s perspective on how a Western-originated pedagogy may be internalised in the context of Chinese ECE. While previous research has suggested that imported pedagogies may encounter resistance in Confucian-influenced Chinese ECE contexts, this case suggests that DiE may be meaningfully enacted within a local classroom and internalised in ways that support children’s creative understanding of their drama experiences. The children’s responses suggest that they did not simply reproduce the drama but reconstructed and extended it by integrating their own experiences, knowledge, and imagination. In addition, the study offers an exploratory conceptualisation of children’s internalisation within educational policy borrowing theory.
