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Child-centred and teacher-directed curricula have long been presented as mutually exclusive approaches to early education. Interestingly, recent research suggests a 'balance' of the two yields the best child outcomes, yet how this balance is struck varies considerably across contexts and even studies. In this paper, we use the writings of Russian cultural-historical scholars to examine the orientations of adult and child perspectives. We propose a unifying theoretical model to describe the hypothetical extremities of child-centred and teacher-directed activities as a way that educational leaders may chart children's activities across this spectrum. Given the moral imperative to provide balance, the model is proposed as a way to approximate it across the child's day. We also offer two central classroom techniques as pedagogical moves to redress the tension between child-centred and teacher-directed approaches and ensure the morally imperative inclusion of children's perspectives.

Recent early childhood education and care (ECEC) reforms across the globe are placing greater emphasis on the intentionality of educators' pedagogy. In Australia, a National Quality Agenda (NQA) has significantly reformed ECEC through the country's first national learning framework, which demands educators take a more intentional (active) role in teaching a play-based curriculum. Because educators' capacity to confront these challenges will be reflected in their perspectives, a case study of educators' perspectives on learning through play was conducted shortly after the new framework's introduction to the field. A cultural-historical framing provided a contextualised, deductive analysis of educators' practices and values. Findings indicated educators believe children's learning from their play was associated with educators' passive rather than active practices. Rather than intentional, it seemed to be merely "coincidental" that child-chosen play resulted in learning of curriculum content. Consistent with other countries where educators appear torn between curricular demands for adult-driven outcomes and a pedagogy of play, findings indicate educators were adept at justifying child-determined learning in relation to adult-determined curricular demands. However, the findings pinpoint exactly where and how educators lacked support to actively engage with and extend child-initiated play for learning.

Early literacy is largely acquired through child-led learning, yet current ways to support and enhance it may present problems of coercion and adult control. The "Following in our Footsteps II" intervention sought to circumvent such problems by teaching parent and educator pairs of 46 preschoolers how to make everyday literacy and numeracy processes (attention control condition) visible to children. Mixed-design ANOVAs indicated that children's literacy- and numeracy-related play increased significantly after four weeks of demonstrations. Reading and writing performance improvements were significantly greater in the Literacy group than in the Numeracy group. The results indicate that preschoolers' exposure to parents' and educators' everyday code-related literacy practices can enhance preschoolers' literacy interest and learning. They highlight an innovative way to increase exposure to code-related literacy skills and circumnavigate possible problems of coercion and adult control. Implications for literacy learning in play-based settings are discussed.

As societies become more aware of the importance of early socio-emotional skills for children's later success, teachers report that they are ill-equipped to support and enhance these skills within their 'traditional' teacher role. This paper turns to the contributions that Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his adherents have made to our understanding of emotional development in early childhood. Following several main ways that his developmental theory described development through play, it proposes an extra social-individual dialectical relationship to explain emotional development specifically. The model supposes a special role that educators must assume to enhance emotional development through play: allowing children to understand and experience their "perezhivanie" at an individual level such that it is not relegated to only the social, as is the case in many cultures (e.g. when anger is admonished). This role adds to the recently proliferating literature on the adult's active role in pedagogical play.

Previous research has indicated that young children's executive functions (EFs) can be bolstered through role-play [e.g. the 'Batman™ effect'; White et al.]. However, what is not clear is whether it is the role-playing of another's perspective, or something about the role played, which is responsible for the Batman™ effect. The current experiment investigated the effects of role-play of different roles (protagonist, villain, and sage) with different traits (benevolence, malevolence, skill) on 80 five- to six-year-old children's EF performance. Results indicated significantly improved cold -- but not hot -- EF scores for the Sage and Control groups. Consistent with Vygotsky's theory that children transfer imagined content into real-world applications, this study provides preliminary evidence that pretending to be someone with EF skills can bolster young children's cold EF performance.

Young children's digital play environments comprise an increasingly large part of early learning experiences, and are likely to have ongoing and enduring impacts throughout life. Research on early childhood educational (ECE) apps has been predominantly considered from researchers' perspectives, with little consideration of all stakeholders. At the same time, these perspectives bear little influence on app developers, who continue to produce apps with short and unsustained uptake. In this paper, the authors consider how ECE app quality is perceived from four categories of stakeholders' perspectives: top-down, bottom-up, outside-in and inside-out. In doing so, they offer insight into discrepancies in what and how demands for quality are viewed. This insight provides preliminary explanation for why ECE app quality is not meeting each stakeholders' demands, and how a negative feedback loop might be redressed and more stakeholder demands met.

Children's early mathematical abilities are fundamental to their later academic achievement. An interest in mathematics in the early years is likely to establish a positive attitude to later mathematical learning, hopefully sustaining continued interest in mathematics and mathematical learning. Approaches to early mathematics teaching in the early years, however, are typically adult-initiated, which may fail to capture children's interest. Given the importance of children's motivation and sustained interest, the study described here strove to spark children's interests in mathematical problems in everyday life. The study sought to determine if children would incorporate more numeracy-related concepts into their free play if exposed to adult demonstrations of age-appropriate numeracy activities such as patterning. For at least 15 min three times weekly, participating children's parents and educators demonstrated numeracy problem-solving nearby, while children engaged in other activities. Demonstrations were thought to ascribe social value to the problem-solving activities. If children became interested in participating, adults told them to wait until the demonstrations finished, further indicating social value. Results show these children chose to play with numeracy-related activities in their free play time at preschool significantly more than children in a control group. These results suggest that seeking to foster children's interest in mathematics through child-initiated play, rather than prescribing adult-initiated mathematics activities, may be an important means of laying the foundation for lifelong mathematics learning. Ascribing social value to numeracy applications is proposed as a new approach to teaching mathematics in the early years.

Play is traditionally considered the foundation of learning in the early years. Because play is characterized by free choice, it can be difficult for adults to ensure all learning is useful for children. The intervention described here took a novel approach to this problematic. It exposed 17 four-year-olds to different adult demonstrations to see if they influenced what children were interested to play with. It was theorized that by demonstrating certain problem-solving activities to children over four weeks, value would be ascribed to these literacy or numeracy activities and children would play with them. In doing so, they would learn literacy and numeracy skills. Results indicate that children exposed to numeracy demonstrations played significantly more with numeracy concepts, and those exposed to literacy demonstrations improved on reading measures. What children are exposed to may influence their interests and learning. Implications for early childhood education and parenting are discussed.

As young children's perspectives are increasingly "taken seriously" across disciplines, the pursuit of authentic and ethical research with young children has become the subject of recent discussion. Much of this relates to listening "authentically" to (or understanding) young children, focusing on research design, ethics, theory, methods and data analysis. However, the literature on data analysis provides insufficient guidance to help researchers move from "listening" to young children to truly "understanding" them. To illustrate the deficit, this article draws on data from a study of young (two- to five-year-old) children's perspectives on their learning. The argument is supported with a discussion of the challenges of analysing data. The article concludes by suggesting how a robust theorisation of the key concepts of a study is one way all adults can move from "adultist" assumptions towards more valid understandings of young children's perspectives.

Around the world, if and how young children learn through their play in early childhood education and care contexts has been the subject of much debate. Yet rarely has the debate heard from the young children themselves, often due to the pervasive belief that they do not understand learning. To redress this, a qualitative case study was conducted on 28 two-five-year-olds' perspectives about what they believed they were learning through play. Some 772 comments on learning in 683 episodes of play were analysed using cultural-historical theory, revealing how children as young as two are authorities on their own learning. Findings challenge popular ways of understanding young children's thinking and provide educators with concrete means to understand children's perspectives, learning and how educators can more effectively guide play towards learning outcomes, as expected in contemporary curriculum frameworks across the globe.

Participatory research methods argue that young children should be enabled to contribute their perspectives on research seeking to understand their worldviews. Visual research methods, including the use of still and video cameras with young children have been viewed as particularly suited to this aim because cameras have been considered easy and fun to use for young children. However, how children learn to use cameras introduced into early childhood classrooms for research purposes is not well understood. In terms of visual research methodologies, this is a problem because participant use of cameras is associated with understanding the nature of visual data generated during the recording process itself. In this paper, we consider observational data of young children playing with video cameras introduced into their classrooms for research purposes. Drawing on the concepts of culturally mediated tool use and epistemic and ludic play, we theorise these observations to generate a new framework for understanding how children learn to use cameras through play-based activity. This framework suggests that research with children using still or video cameras may need to accommodate this learning within research designs and procedures in order to take full advantage of this medium. Pedagogical implications for using the framework to support young children's technological play are also considered.

Previous research has indicated that young children's executive functions (EFs) can be bolstered through role-play [e.g. the 'Batman™ effect'; White et al.]. However, what is not clear is whether it is the role-playing of another's perspective, or something about the role played, which is responsible for the Batman™ effect. The current experiment investigated the effects of role-play of different roles (protagonist, villain, and sage) with different traits (benevolence, malevolence, skill) on 80 five- to six-year-old children's EF performance. Results indicated significantly improved cold – but not hot – EF scores for the Sage and Control groups. Consistent with Vygotsky's theory that children transfer imagined content into real-world applications, this study provides preliminary evidence that pretending to be someone with EF skills can bolster young children's cold EF performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]