Joce Nuttall - Böcker

Learning to Lead in Early Childhood Education makes a major new contribution to the educational leadership literature in early childhood education. Three sharply contrasting theoretical and methodological approaches are explained, each with an accompanying case study as a separate chapter. This allows readers to clearly see the relationship between theory, research, and practice, including theory-driven approaches to analysis. By drawing the case studies from three countries - Australia, Norway, and Aotearoa New Zealand, including one involving Indigenous participants - this book allows readers to learn about early childhood leadership policy and cultures in settings with different languages, histories, and national contexts. It will appeal to early childhood centre leaders, early childhood education and leadership academics, and post-graduate students in educational leadership interested in the potential of - and for - multiple approaches to leadership research and learning in early childhood education.

Learning to Lead in Early Childhood Education makes a major new contribution to the educational leadership literature in early childhood education. Three sharply contrasting theoretical and methodological approaches are explained, each with an accompanying case study as a separate chapter. This allows readers to clearly see the relationship between theory, research, and practice, including theory-driven approaches to analysis. By drawing the case studies from three countries - Australia, Norway, and Aotearoa New Zealand, including one involving Indigenous participants - this book allows readers to learn about early childhood leadership policy and cultures in settings with different languages, histories, and national contexts. It will appeal to early childhood centre leaders, early childhood education and leadership academics, and post-graduate students in educational leadership interested in the potential of - and for - multiple approaches to leadership research and learning in early childhood education.

How can schools foster more authentic and meaningful professional learning for their teachers? How do expert and veteran teachers respond to professional development activities? How do teachers’ personal and professional identities affect their commitment, career progression and impact in their classrooms? Drawing on narrative research carried out with working teachers, this book explores how engaging with critical intellectual research can be a site of transformation. It draws out powerful stories that highlight the complexities and challenges of reforming the personal, professional and political dimensions of teachers’ identities, and how they engage with professional learning. Through school-university partnerships and new approaches to postgraduate pedagogy, Transforming Identities] through Research-led Professional Learning reconceptualises the university as an ontological site. It is key reading for teachers, teacher educators, policy makers and researchers with an interest in teachers’ professional learning, underscoring the potential of critical, intellectual knowledge and research work as transformational for veteran teachers.

The book presents a conceptual framework for understanding leadership for effective educator learning in early childhood settings.

The book presents a conceptual framework for understanding leadership for effective educator learning in early childhood settings. The book describes how leaders can move centre practices from crisis to stabilization. It argues that a core component of leaders' work in early childhood settings is to construct and enact epistemological accounts of practice change. The book includes case examples that bring to life the contexts early childhood services and services leaders who participated in the research. The book also describes the application of cultural-historical activity theory to the development of practice in early childhood education. It describes how background theory, literature, and data can be synthesized to create new focal theory in education. Readers will benefit from the theory that is presented, establishing a sound basis for testing in future research in schools as well as in early childhood education. “Joce Nuttall and team are congratulated for their ground-breaking scholarly endeavour in designing, implementing, validating findings, and then writing a book that unambiguously connects theory-policy-practice in enacting leadership in early childhood settings. This book is ambitious, eloquent, and inspirational.  The research was driven by a bold vision to build a new theorisation of early childhood leadership. The writing style of the book makes the complex clear and easy to digest, and thereby strengthening its readability and understanding.  The comparative lens adopted in the study, underscores the neoliberal control of the working lives of early childhood leaders in both Australia and England. The use of case study narratives to explain various aspects including the study design and methodology, was refreshingly engaging. Notes of encouragement addressed to novice researchers such as those embarking on higher degree studies, also provide apt guidance about the messiness of conducting qualitative research. The book is infused with lots of examples demonstrating the transformative power of learning – especially when expertly scaffolded by the research team, and thereby increasing practitioner agency and quality improvement across the early childhood setting. If professional autonomy is the driver of reform and change, then we must find ways to nurture strong educational leaders who can think outside the box. Overall, Nuttall and team succeed in arousing learning-rich possibilities for reimagining early childhood leadership in theory and in practice, and thereby making a magnificent contribution to the scholarship of educational leadership.” Professor Manjula Waniganayake  PhD, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

This volume addresses both 'evidence of impact' and 'impact of evidence' to reveal the complex dialogue between the enterprise of teacher education and evidence of its effects in the early 21st century, taking a critical position on the very notions of 'evidence' and 'impact' that underpin contemporary policy frameworks. Teacher education programs in Australia and internationally are challenged by contemporary policy frameworks to demonstrate evidence of the impact they have on the capacity of graduating teachers to act with confidence and competence in school and early childhood education classrooms. At the same time, the field of teacher education is increasingly working to build a robust platform of research evidence that speaks to these policy frameworks and to broader issues concerning the role of teaching and teacher education in society.

This volume addresses both 'evidence of impact' and 'impact of evidence' to reveal the complex dialogue between the enterprise of teacher education and evidence of its effects in the early 21st century, taking a critical position on the very notions of 'evidence' and 'impact' that underpin contemporary policy frameworks.

It contributes to international debates in teacher education by examining an Australian experience of teacher performance assessments as a catalyst for cultural change and practice reform in teacher education.