SIG Meetings

More information TBC

The SIG gender balance invites to its 12th research conference. The research conference has developed as a space for discussing issues of gender equality and diversity in ECEC on a global level. It is giving room for progressing the participants’ individual research development by mutual support of well-experienced colleagues as well as early career researchers.

The SIG continues to focus on the situation and the impact of men and women, and more gender diversity, in the ECEC work force. In the past decades the network has grown and included researchers from all over the world. We include global and regional perspectives from a wide range of national contexts. At some places, men are accepted as part of the work force, but the topic of men in ECEC has been pushed in the background by discourses on gender diversity. Elsewhere, there
are still controversies about having men in the field at all. For the further development of genderrelated research in the field, it is necessary to take such contextual and cultural differences into account.

In the context of this year’s EECERA theme of “Developing sustainable early childhood education systems”, we focus on three topics: (1) strategies and policies for gender equality in ECEC and the challenges of bringing this into practice, (2) the role of researchers’ own gender for research strategies and results, and (3) children’s perspectives on gender issues in the work force.

Based on the ongoing scientific exchange in the network, we plan to develop a proposal for a special issue, following the EECERJ special issue 2015 and the Early Years special issue 2020. Every session of the conference will be finished with a brainstorming on possible content for the special issue.

The meeting is the Annual meeting of the EECERA Special Interest Group Gender Balance, and as such it is open to all interested researchers.

DOWNLOAD CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Conference fee: approx. 50 € including tea/coffee & lunch, to be paid on the conference in cash, either in GBP or in €. Participation in the welcome & exchange round and in the final round is free of charge.

We are looking forward to meeting you!

This year’s SIG Gender Balance team:
David Brody (Israel) · Zhuoran Chen (China/United Kingdom) · Halah Elkarif (Egypt/Germany) · Ricardo Goncalves (Brazil/Sweden) · Charlotte Jones (United Kingdom) · Joanne McHale (Ireland) · Tim Rohrmann (Germany)

To register for this event, please fill in this form and return to Joanne McHale.

More information TBC

More information TBC

The Multilingual Childhoods SIG invites conference delegates to an EECERA pre-conference meeting

“Developing Sustainable Early Childhood Education from a Perspective of Inclusive and Translingual Practice in Multilingual Settings”

In this SIG meeting, we focus on the overall conference theme “Developing Sustainable Early Childhood Education Systems: Comparisons, Contexts and the Cognoscenti” from a Perspective of Inclusive and Translingual Practice in Multilingual Settings. We have invited two experts (details of the sessions below) in the field who will shed light on this topic from different theoretical perspectives, research experiences and multilingual contexts.

Each researcher will give a 20-minute introduction. This session will be chaired by Martina Norling, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro University. We then invite you all to a fruitful discussion on the topic “Sustainable Multilingual education” Inclusive and Translingual Practice in Multilingual Settings.

Young children’s language socialization to translingual practice in their small, rural, Indo-Fijian community

Alexandra Diamond, University of South Australia, Australia

Research indicates that when largely monolingual English speakers encounter “non-native” speakers of English, they tend to make meager efforts to achieve mutual understandings (Dooley, 2009). Such behaviours prevent genuine inclusion of linguistically marginalised voices in deciding actions towards a more sustainable, postcolonial world. Translingual practitioners however, habitually use specific semiotic strategies to establish shared understandings across interlocutors’ linguistic differences (Canagarajah, 2013).

This presentation explores how, prior to formal education, young children in a small, rural Indo-Fijian community (“Dovubaravi”) develop dispositions and strategies for translingual practice. It draws on qualitative, ethnographic data generated across two years by eleven young Dovubaravi children, their mothers and extended families.

The findings indicate that in Dovubaravi: i) mothers hope their children will become adept translingual practitioners, ii) speakers demonstrate translingual practice in familial interactions with and around young children, and iii) young children develop translingual dispositions and strategies by observing and actively participating in these interactions.

The presenter will facilitate discussion about how findings may be used to support teachers’ and young children’s development of translingual practice in multilingual classroom contexts, and thereby come to include multiple kinds of languagers in democratic decision-making.

References:

Canagarajah, A. S. (2013). Translingual practice, global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge.

Dooley, K. (2009). Intercultural conversation: Building understanding together. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(6), 497-506.

Inclusive Language Pedagogy for sustainable Early Childhood Education in Sweden

Annika Åkerblom, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Increased diversity in Swedish preschools requires preschool teachers to develop pedagogical methods to facilitate successful language teaching. While preschool teachers use multilingual pedagogies to create opportunity for multilingual children’s language development, it also produces compensatory pedagogies (Harju & Åkerblom 2020), and exclusion for the children (Åkerblom & Harju 2021). If we wish to generate educational opportunities for diversified populations, there is an urgent need to educate preschool teachers to facilitate sustainable language development in ECE.

This presentation asks, how language development is negotiated for children in preschool, and how everyday language practices provide opportunity and/or constraint for children to participate and acquire language in a way that is socially just and sustainable.

The analysis draws from theories of translanguaging (Li 2018), which has proven historically significant for scientific efforts to understand how learners’ language acquisition and learning is tied up with negotiations of language pedagogy in institutions.

Through social engagement in the multilingual, pedagogical environment in which these children are participating on an everyday basis, it is understood to have a potentially profound and sustainable effect on the development of their language. The children are viewed as agents and participants in everyday institutional activities and the ways these children position themselves, are taken into account.

References

Åkerblom, A., & Harju, A. (2021). The becoming of a Swedish preschool child? Migrant children and everyday nationalism. Children’s Geographies, 2021, Vol. 19, Iss. 5, 19(5), Children’s Geographies, 2021, Vol. 19, Iss. 5.

Harju, A., & Åkerblom, A. (2020). Opening up new spaces for languaging practice in early childhood education for migrant children. International Journal Of Early Years Education, 2020, Vol. 28, Iss. 2, Pp. 151-.161, 28(2), 151–161.

Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30.

This meeting is open to all delegates and earlier registration is not required.

Martina Norling & Gunhild Tomter Alstad  (SIG Convenors)

EECERA Multilingual Childhoods SIG

More information TBC