Sharryn Clarke – Författare

This volume explores concepts of mentoring, leadership and issues faced by early childhood teachers. Foregrounded against inadequate leadership and mentoring training in this sector, this book looks at how mentoring is exercised through Facebook. Mentoring through Facebook provokes a strong sense of freedom in terms of speech and influence. The benefits for using social media in mentoring includes minimizing costs and reaching mass numbers of mentees globally where knowledge can be shared and information gained. Whilst there is also a positive and active approach to mentoring, there is the danger of mentoring that misinforms, disempowers and alienates. This book will help active players in the early childhood sector in understanding the crucial nature of mentoring and its impact when used through Facebook and similar social media sites.

Partnerships with Families and Communities: Building Dynamic Relationships is a comprehensive and accessible resource that provides pre-service teachers with the tools required to build effective, sustainable and proactive partnerships in both early childhood and primary educational settings. This text introduces models of home-school-community partnerships in educational contexts and presents a comprehensive partnerships approach for best practice in applying and leading effective relationships with key stakeholders. It explores essential underpinning policies, legislation and research theories that position strong, positive and proactive partnerships as a systemic solution to children's learning development. Key topics covered include diversity in partnership work, reflective practice and tools for evaluating working partnerships. Each chapter includes focused pedagogy, key terms and definitions, scenarios and review questions, which enable readers to deeply engage with new concepts. 'Proactive Partners' boxes explore real-world scenarios and encourage readers to link theory with practice.