Conference Agenda

Problem: Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy, practice, and research all emphasise the importance of adult-child pedagogical interactions at home and in ECEC settings for children’s development. However, separate bodies of knowledge have emerged concerning these interactions at home and in ECEC settings. Ongoing development of inductive statistical methods offer a means of bridging these bodies of knowledge. These methods provide a practical and efficient means of understanding how interactions in both locations work together to shape development. Thus, the use of these methods has the potential to yield new ECEC insights, innovations, and practice.

Research question: In what ways can adult-child pedagogical interactions in the home and preschool combine to shape the development of preschoolers’ verbal reasoning?

Context: Advancement of contemporary knowledge that informs ECEC policy and practice.

Methods: Secondary statistical analysis of a nationally representative dataset using a contemporary inductive statistical method: Mixture Regression Modelling.

Data Sources/evidence: Data from the Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) study: 2,857 children and families using 141 ECEC settings across England from ages 3 (entry to preschool) to 4 years (exit from preschool).

Results: Four distinct groups were identified when considering the contextualised associations between adult-child pedagogical interactions at home and preschool and the development of verbal reasoning from 3 to 4 years of age.

Confirming previous EPPE research, adult-child pedagogical interactions in the home mattered for all – particularly how frequently a child was read to – and irrespective of a child’s verbal reasoning at 3 years or the development of this reasoning to age 4 years.

Extending the previous EPPE findings, the four groups also differed from each other in how verbal reasoning developed from 3-4 years and how this development was related to adult-child pedagogical interactions in homes and preschools. Three (inductive) findings stood out:

First, adult-child pedagogical interactions in ECEC settings were found to matter more when there were less frequent interactions in the home, and when interactions in preschool were higher in quality. This suggests possible preschool-origin boosts to equity in preschoolers’ development of verbal reasoning.

Second, that adult-child pedagogical interactions in preschool concerning ‘language reasoning’ and ‘science and the environment’ may have a prominent role in this equity boost.

Third, that family income was only weakly related to adult-child pedagogical interactions: Both richer and poorer families could experience more/less frequent pedagogical interactions in the home and higher/lower quality of pedagogical interactions in preschool. Thus the above equity effects matter for more children.

Educational importance of this research for theory, practice, and policy: Findings from EPPE have shaped ECEC policy, practice, and research for two decades. Therefore new EPPE findings matter -- especially because the EPPE data may be more comparable to conditions in England now versus 6-7 years ago. The ongoing development of inductive statistical methods aids the identification of conditions under which ECEC can facilitate equity in child development.

Connection to the conference theme: This paper illustrates how contemporary inductive statistical methods can help researchers: innovate in education, generate new insights/inquiries, and inform professional learning.

Critical thinking in education has been much discussed for its benefits in enhancing the quality of students learning and life opportunities (OECD, 2019). Critical thinking is essential in early childhood for many reasons; for one, the ability to think critically reduces the chance of children being guided by false or misinformed information. Although critical thinking is considered a core 21st competency that could be supported at all levels of education, there is the lack of research on critical thinking at a preschool level (O'Reilly et al., 2022). This paper aims to describe and present findings from a pedagogical intervention designed as part of a PhD project to nurture critical thinking in preschool children based on oral storytelling with dialogic inquiry. For this paper we will address two research questions: (1) what critical thinking skills are observed in preschool children? and (2) what conditions draw out critical thinking in preschool children? Seventeen preschool children and two preschool practitioners volunteered to participate in this study. From a sociocultural perspective, central to this research is the idea that children are capable, competent and willing to engage in critical discourse when provided with the right conditions to nurture this type of classroom interaction. The study was conducted as a design-based research intervention; this approach is interactive and participatory (Bakker, 2018). Research instruments include classroom observations, audio-video recording and textual data. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, which allows reflection on data in context (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Results indicate that oral storytelling combined with dialogic inquiry and educator scaffolding provides the conditions for preschool children to engage in critical thinking. The elements of critical identified include; communicating with clarity and accuracy, constructing ideas, inferring, reasoning, and problem solving. The research makes a significant contribution to early childhood research, policy, and practice as the first study in the Republic to identify specific elements of critical thinking in preschool children together with a teaching strategy to nurture these skills in the early years. The results generate future research in teacher education and continued professional development for teachers and school leaders to implement strategies to nurture critical thinking in preschools at a national level. In addition, findings call for further research to explore how policy and practice could work in partnership to improve young children's opportunities to engage in critical thinking in the classroom. Ethical permission was granted in December 2020 by the Trinity College Dublin research committee. This research was funded by the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship GOIPG/2020/19.

It is widely accepted that all schools possess a particular duty of care towards their students. However, this duty of care falls unevenly across schools, with those serving working-class communities experiencing it most acutely within the wider context of structural social inequalities (Crean et al., 2023; Moss et al., 2020; Reay, 2022). Moreover, these care-related responsibilities experienced by such so-called disadvantaged schools coexist alongside an increasing emphasis on performance in standards-based assessments, arising from neoliberal reforms targeting the effectiveness of schools in education systems across the globe (Lynch, 2022; Devine & McGillicuddy, 2016; Noddings, 2005). Previous research has conceptualised these responsibilities as competing areas of interest for schools serving working-class communities, creating the impression of a binary opposition between the two (Jeffrey et al., 2013; Martin & Amin, 2020). Distinctions have also been drawn between different forms of caring in schools (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006; Valenzuela, 1999), ranging from those which centre on children’s academic learning to those more concerned with their well-being and welfare. Others recognise the need for schools to carry out a dual role and cater for both forms of caring (Crean et al., 2023; Devine & McGillicuddy, 2016), conceptualised by Antrop-González and De Jesús (2006) as ‘hard caring.’ In this paper, we further conceptualise the nature of care in disadvantaged schools, drawing on the broader literature base to propose a ‘nurturing pedagogies typology,’ a biaxial continuum along which some of the aforementioned conceptualisations of care can be situated. The vertical axis of the typology represents the degree to which schools emphasise academic outcomes in their enactment of care, while the horizontal axis reflects the extent of affective relationships between children and teachers. While we concur with critiques of an academically instrumentalist enactment of caring in schools (Dadvand & Cuervo, 2020), we argue that hard caring, characterised by high levels of caring in both the academic and affective domains, is necessary in order to enable children to flourish in schools. In addition, this paper presents findings from the Children’s School Lives study (www.cslstudy.ie), Ireland’s first national longitudinal study of primary schooling. We draw on qualitative accounts from children, their families, and school personnel to highlight the application of the typology in practice with respect to three DEIS Band 1 primary schools, the most severe categorisation of educational disadvantage in the Irish context. Our findings point to differences between schools in relation to the nurturing pedagogies typology, with factors including school leadership, culture, and mission being particularly influential during the period of Covid-19 school closures. Further, we present findings relating to children’s varying perspectives on caring across the three schools. Cumulatively, the conceptual framing and findings presented in this paper offer valuable implications for educational policy and practice, supporting the effectiveness of schools serving working-class communities in pursuit of social justice for the children under their care. Moreover, with this paper, we aspire to stimulate purposeful discussion around the recognition of nurturing pedagogies in initial teacher education and continuing professional development for teachers and school leaders.