Browsing by Author "Hewes, Jane"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Animating a curriculum framework through educator co-inquiry: co-learning, co- researching and co- imagining possibilities
    (2019) Hewes, Jane; Lirette, Patricia; Makovichuk, Lee; McCarron, Rebekah
    The shift toward a pedagogical foundation for professional practice in early childhood along with the introduction of curriculum frameworks in early learning and child care, calls for approaches to professional learning that move beyond transmission modes of learning towards engaged, localized, participatory models that encourage critical reflection and investigation of pedagogy within specific settings. In this paper, we describe ongoing participatory research that explores educator co-inquiry as an approach to animating a curriculum framework. A story of curriculum meaning making that opened a hopeful space for critical pedagogical reflection and changed practice serves as a basis for deeper reflection.
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    Learning through play: a view from the field
    (2010) Hewes, Jane
    The summary of research on learning through play provided in the CEECD articles and accompanying commentary by Howe comes at a time when many play advocates believe that play is “under siege.” It also comes at a time when many Canadian early childhood educators are striving to secure a pedagogical focus on play in the development and implementation of early learning curricula. These reviews provide a valuable foundation for interpreting the available evidence on learning through play, as well as raising more fundamental questions about the significance of play in early childhood.
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    Let the children play: nature’s answer to early learning
    (2006) Hewes, Jane
    Play is a universal phenomenon with a pervasive and enduring presence in human history. Play has fascinated philosophers, painters, and poets for generations. Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes the significance of play in the lives of children, acknowledging play as a specific right, in addition to and distinct from the child’s right to recreation and leisure. Early childhood educators have long recognized the power of play. The significant contribution of play to young children’s development is well documented in child psychology, anthropology, sociology, and in the theoretical frameworks of education, recreation, and communications. Being able to play is one of the key developmental tasks of early childhood. Play is “the leading source of development in the early years”: it is essential to children’s optimal development.
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    Passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy: exploring intersections between discourses, experiences, and feelings...knitting new terms of belonging
    (2020) Whitty, Pam; Lysack, Monica; Lirette, Patricia; Lehrer, Joanne; Hewes, Jane
    We are five early childhood researchers, from across Canada, thrown together amongst a series of alarming discourses, where developmental, economic, and neuroscientific rationales for ECEC drown out alternative theoretical perspectives, as well as personal experience, values, subjective knowledges, and the fierce passion we feel for our work. In the midst of this "throwntogethness" (Massey, 2005), how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? How do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the Canadian ECEC field as we knit together alternative ways of being, doing, and acting, figuring out what resonates in localized situations (Osgood, 2006)? To begin to answer these questions, we think with feminist theory (Bezanson; 2018; Langford et al., 2016; Prentice, 2009); the politics of the event of place, (Massey, 2005) and relational and spatial networked discursive entanglements (Massey, 2005; Nichols et al., 2012; Ingold, 1995; Haraway, 2016) as we untangle three vignettes related to advocating for a competent universal public ECEC system; writing post-developmental curriculum frameworks; and weaving productive relationships between university researchers and early childhood practitioners. These vignettes illuminate our struggles to "stay with the trouble," as Haraway (2016) suggests, stubbornly hanging on to the hope of producing new terms of belonging (Burns & Lundh, 2011) as a form of resistance, allowing us to open up spaces to imagine, tell alternative stories (Moss, 2014), and create real change within our local contexts.
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    Playing, early learning and meaning making: early childhood curriculum unfolding
    (2017) Makovichuk, Lee; Lirette, Patricia; Hewes, Jane; Aamot, Brittany
    Play, Participation, and Possibilities: An Early Learning and Child Care Curriculum Framework for Alberta is a sociocultural curriculum framework intended to provoke dialogue on and thinking about young children’s playing and learning. Viewing curriculum as situated, contested and always-already happening in early childhood programs, the authors draw on a mini-narrative of children’s play and educator practices to make visible what it means to co-construct curriculum in the here and now with young children. They describe curriculum-meaning-making processes that support deep and further complexified thinking, including pedagogical dialogue, critical revisiting of pedagogical documentation and curriculum crosschecking. Through honouring young children as mighty learners and citizens, and co-imagining possibilities, multiple new potentialities for children’s play and learning are revealed.
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    (Re)encountering walls, tattoos, and chickadees: disrupting discursive tenacity
    (2018) Whitty, Pam; Hewes, Jane; Rose, Sherry; Lirette, Patricia; Makovichuk, Lee
    In this article, three pedagogic encounters — “Encountering the Wall,” “Encountering Young Tattooed Parents,” and “Encountering Chickadees”—conceptualized as curricular meeting places, are theoretically reconceptualized within alternative bodies of literature. Theoretical reconceptualization revealed complexities of early childhood pedagogies and the tenacity of dominant discursive practices of developmentalism, constructed, in these instances, through age-segregated settings, parenting programs, and nature pedagogy. Theoretical reconceptualizing of these encounters worked to disrupt embodied subjugations of age-segregated children, mothers and fathers, chickadees, educators, families, and researchers.
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    Seeking balance in motion: the role of spontaneous free play in promoting social and emotional health in early childhood care and education
    (2014) Hewes, Jane
    There is accumulating scientific evidence of the potential of play and playfulness to enhance human capacity to respond to adversity and cope with the stresses of everyday life. In play we build a repertoire of adaptive, flexible responses to unexpected events, in an environment separated from the real consequences of those events. Playfulness helps us maintain social and emotional equilibrium in times of rapid change and stress. Through play, we experience flow—A feeling of being taken to another place, out of time, where we have controlled of the world. This paper argues that spontaneous free play, controlled and directed by children and understood from the child’s perspective, contributes to children’s subjective experience of well-being, building a foundation for life-long social and emotional health. The paradoxical nature of young children’s spontaneous free play is explored. Adaptability, control, flexibility, resilience and balance result from the experience of uncertainty, unpredictability, novelty and non-productivity. These essential dimensions of young children’s spontaneous free play typically produce play which is experienced by adults as chaotic, nonsensical and disruptive. The article concludes with a preliminary discussion of the challenges and possibilities of providing for spontaneous free play indoors, in early childhood care and education programs.