Children’s play in schools is often tightly controlled, shaped by adult beliefs and concerns about safety and appropriateness. Play in school settings can reflect expected school norms and follow rules set by adults, but free play also allows for rough, risky, mischievous, and subversive actions. This research, guided by an affordance framework, examines spontaneous, child-initiated outdoor free play to understand how children navigate and reinterpret the boundaries of play. Using critical naturalistic inquiry and participatory methods, the study data includes children’s videography that captures dynamic interactions and shifts in agency among peers, go along interviews that track boundary negotiations in real-time, and detailed researcher field notes documenting the nuances of play interactions. Findings show that children actively construct, co-construct, and deconstruct knowledge, culture, and actions that demonstrate agency, adjusting their play based on the presence or absence of adults and uninvited onlookers. Children’s videography further reveals their ongoing renegotiation of established play norms and the complex ways they form play identities. These insights underscore the need to critically examine how educators frame and support children’s play cultures within play spaces, especially when considering the inherent tensions between school norms and children’s play cultures.

Participatory research methods have a focus on facilitating research processes that engage with participants and, as such, aim to promote individual voice, facilitate richer reflection and dialogue, and enable the articulation of participants' unique experiences. To explore the degree to which participatory practices are enacted in visual art education research, the present study critically examines the agentic positioning of children and youth in school‐based, visual arts experiences through a systematic, methodological literature review. Findings from this review serve to ground proposed recommendations for the inclusion of supportive research practices that carefully attend to the unique considerations that arise during participatory work with children and youth in formal educational environments. Such considerations include ethical concerns, individual agency limitations, and power inequities throughout all phases of the research process. In addition, findings reveal the need for increased researcher attention to students' participatory access during critical decision‐making points in both the research process and the development of their creative work to ensure that students can shape and share their experiences through authentic engagement.

Children’s picturebooks have long been understood as a powerful medium for exploring aspects of children’s lives, experiences, and identities serving as mirrors which allow children to see themselves reflected, as windows through which they can gain insight into the experiences of others, and as sliding glass doors when children are connected to the story and characters in meaningful ways. Utilizing a critical content analytic approach, this research examined the identity markers and engineering practices found in contemporary children’s picturebooks with an engineering focus. The analysis yielded key themes that highlight the ways children can interact and connect to the characters and engineering content through both visual imagery and storyline. As the reviewed books held limited social, cultural, and personal identity representations, study findings hold implications for early childhood educators as they highlight the importance of affirming and connecting engineering and design work to the diverse, multifaceted identities of the students in their classrooms. Recommendations from this research call for extending traditional classroom building and construction experiences through the inclusion of engineering-focused children’s literature to enhance and extend children’s understandings of design and engineering work.

At present, research exploring educator’s understandings of displays of student work is scant yet such displays are regularly exhibited within the community spaces of early learning and elementary schools. These displays communicate messages to those within the space about teacher and student agency, curricular priorities, children and their work, and the relationship between teaching and learning. Grounded in a framework of documentality and teacher vision, this paper explores the ways in which preservice teachers (PSTs) understand teacher-cultivated, student work documentation. This research used a Photo-Elicitation Interview methodology to develop a descriptive account of PSTs' visions and understandings of teacher-cultivated, classroom documentation and displays of children's work. Findings reveal that PSTs held paradoxical views of student work documentation teetering between an appreciation of an adult-centered aesthetic disconnected from their academic and creative capacities to an expressed valuing of an agentic positioning of children in the experiences of the classroom.

High quality, easily accessible professional development is needed to ensure that service providers are well-qualified to facilitate early intervention (EI) that targets caregiver learning during visits with children and families. This research evaluated a multi-component, technology-mediated inservice training course entitled, Using Adult Learning Strategies to Support Caregivers during Early Intervention Visits. This 6-week course included ongoing, embedded support and was provided for nine EI service providers. A mixed methods intervention evaluation was conducted using a within-subjects pre-post-test design to determine the effects of participation on: 1) service providers' use of four EI adult learning strategies (e.g., reflective conversation, caregiver practice with feedback, collaborative problem-solving, and joint planning); 2) providers' changes in knowledge about adult learning and how to apply learned strategies; and 3) providers' perceptions of course effectiveness. Analysis of pre-post videos revealed increases in the use of caregiver practice with feedback and collaborative problem-solving strategies with participation in the course. Participants showed a statistically significant gain in knowledge, with very large effects, especially related to applying adult learning to EI service delivery. All participants rated the overall training as 'excellent' and strongly agreed the format was more effective than a single workshop.

This research sought to develop an initial understanding of how mandated policies related to lockdown safety drills are enacted in response to active shooter scenarios within PK-Grade 12 public schools. In light of a scant research base exploring the effectiveness and impacts of such policies and procedures, we explored the question, What are school counselors' lived experiences with lockdown drills?. Using a phenomenological design, we interviewed 26 school counselors from five school districts from the Southeastern United States during the 2019 academic year. Findings center around four key themes: Awareness of School Violence, Necessity and Variability in Preparation, Paradox of Safety, and Communication as Support and Challenge. We will discuss the tensions, or push and pulls/contradictions, that are a part of both drills and actual incidents across these themes. To conclude, we present recommendations for further research and policy to support informed, reflexive action.

Even with increasing calls for both researchers and educators to attend to the "E" in STEM from within the larger field of STEM education, little is known about the practices that serve to support early educators' pedagogy and related content knowledge of engineering design. Using multiple methods in a revelatory, embedded, single-case design, this research provides an explanatory account of preservice teachers (PTs) engagement during a structured field experience with preschoolers designed to foster their understanding of design-based engineering though collaborative learning and teaching experiences. Research Findings: Findings reveal that the PTs developed more robust understandings of design-based engineering and stronger self-efficacy beliefs related to their practice following participation in the learning and teaching collaborative project. PTs also voiced concerns over perceived challenges of integrating engineering instruction within the pedagogically and content restrictive environments of contemporary early childhood classrooms. Practice or Policy: Additionally, this research suggests that guided teaching and learning partnerships can support early childhood teacher preparation programs in developing preservice teachers' understandings of the interrelationships between engineering and other aspects of the curriculum using emergent curricular approaches and interactional, play-based pedagogies.

Providing readers with a robust, practical understanding of how young children build knowledge, this book offers a critical examination of the ways traditional homework fails young children, and how alternatives can better build collaborative engagement with families while supporting learning across all content areas. Grounded in culturally sustaining practices, the first section breaks down the pedagogies that support deep learning, while later chapters emphasize the role of critical and creative thinking, project-based learning, and student choice in the development of engaging, personally relevant home learning experiences. Embracing Alternatives to Homework in Early Childhood is a critical text for anyone seeking to reimagine homework practices as both equitable and agency-building in PreK-3.

Little is known about the role of prompts to help learners solve ill-structured learning problems. Instructors do not devote adequate time to formulate pedagogically useful prompts, and the usefulness of different types of prompt is unclear. This mixed-methods study examined the role of argumentative prompts in the writing of essays based on business case studies. A significant (p < .001) relationship with a large effect size was found between the type of argumentative prompt (rhetorical and dialectical) and argumentative depth. Alternative argumentative positions were found to significantly (p < .001) mediate the relationship between argumentative prompt type argumentative depth with a large effect size. Verification and elaboration strategies were utilized in a similar way across both rhetorical and dialectical prompts. Dialectical prompts did not appear to be more effective than rhetorical prompts when using evidence strategies. Rebuttal appeared to be utilized more in response to dialectical prompts. The implications are that instructors should ensure that both rhetorical and dialectal prompts are provided in assignments involving ill-structured learning problems.

Early childhood collective impact organizations are increasingly being used in communities to support the availability and use of birth to five services for children and families. Collaboration across sectors and services allows for greater ease of access to quality health and education services for families seeking or eligible for such services. Knowledge about the logistics of establishing a CI and the activities that lead to sustainment is critical for lasting impact; however, research documenting these aspects of early childhood collective impact models is scarce. This single-case design details how an early childhood collective impact model united stakeholders across a community to create a collaborative system of early care services. Findings offer insight into guiding principles that can serve to initiate and ultimately support collective impact endeavors for the purpose of improving early care and school readiness for children.

This study identifies factors that influence undergraduate students' selection of a source of help. Learners engage in intentional decisions to seek help from human and non-human sources to resolve gaps in knowledge. Previous research in academic help-seeking assumed learners sought only human sources of assistance, resulting in a narrow understanding of how learners resolve knowledge gaps. Methodological trends in help-seeking research consistently favor quantitative, survey-based tools with pre-defined options. As a result, the factors that influence the selection of a source in a real-world setting with both human and online sources remain unexplored. The findings support including online sources in help-seeking models. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate the importance of relationships and underscore the need for an integrated framework of help-seeking. A new theory of source selection emerged which integrates academic help-seeking and information-searching behavior.

Lockdown drills are used in pre‐K–12 public schools throughout the country; however, little research exists regarding their impact on students and school staff (Ilk, 2018). Because of school counselors' role in both prevention of and response to school gun violence (American Counseling Association, 2018), we used a phenomenological approach to investigate their experiences with lockdown drills (N = 26). Results included the following three themes: (a) school counselors' sense of duty to follow school protocol, (b) unintended emotional consequences related to lockdown drills, and (c) school counselors navigating complexities. Implications for school counselors and corresponding school procedures are discussed.