Search

The calls for family-school partnerships have been strong within the literature and educational policy within Australia, however, there is little research that demonstrates what such partnerships might look like. Much of the research demonstrates a one-way street approach where schools focus on educating families, particularly parents, to build their alignment with the already defined direction of the school. This paper draws from cultural models theory to explore the artefacts and practices within the figured worlds of two South Australian primary schools. It focuses on the sites' re-imagining of family engagement as part of their participation in the South Australian Collaborative Childhood Project, inspired by the educational principles of the Reggio Emilia Project in Italy. This paper argues that an early childhood perspective on family engagement provides valuable insights in re-imagining practices and artefacts to support authentic family-school partnerships in primary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of community has been widely recognised in the field of early childhood education. However, the various ways it has been conceived, together with taken-for-granted notions of education, have made it difficult to actualise the processes involved in contextually meaningful ways. This article draws on cultural models theory to explore educational leaders' re-imagining and redesigning of early childhood educational learning communities in a range of diverse settings. The examination of the processes and artefacts used to promote democratic identities and agency highlights the significance of establishing shared principles, sociality and challenging power relations to engage in processes of communing that are contextually meaningful, sustainable and democratic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociology: Theory, Methods, Marketing is the property of Institute of Sociology NAS of Ukraine and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents the findings from a case study focused on understanding how cultural models of education are brought together in dialogue to re-imagine education. The use of cultural models theory provided a useful framework for exploring how teachers, leaders, children, and families at Westside Primary School orchestrated multiple perspectives to re-imagine their figured world as culturally responsive. Findings suggest the principles from two cultural models of education – Reggio Emilia and a pedagogical framework called the Nunga Way, informed by local Australian Aboriginal First Nations peoples – were significant for local culturally responsive pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the lived and sometimes clandestine professional experiences of early childhood teachers who exist within contexts where dominant discourses of professional are competing with teacher's own understandings of their professional identities. Cultural models theory is used to shed light on the secrete and undercover work of public preschool teachers as they resist the prevailing managerial discourse and assert their understandings of their professional identities behind the closed doors of their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human agency is significant to the understanding of professional identities and actions. It is through human agency that individuals can become powerful in changing or authoring their own identities. Stemming from a larger narrative inquiry focused on understanding the professional identities of public preschool teachers, this paper draws on cultural models theory to explore identity, agency and professional practice through the lived stories of CeCe, an African-American public preschool teacher from the United States. Findings demonstrate the influence of CeCe’s lived experiences to her developing sense of human agency and highlight the importance of critical incidents and voice to identity and human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much interest in understanding the operation of shared collective constructs. Cultural models theory is one of the frameworks in cognitive anthropology engaging the interaction between the individual and collective levels of culture in the process of cultural transmission. The present study attempts to produce the cognitive ethnography focusing on shared understanding of prosocial morality in Sweden. It draws on cognitive data associated with the organization of prosocial ideas (formulated as values) in Swedish society, and uses multi-item scales to explore the distribution of this cultural model across the individual minds and on the group level. The study tests a hypothesis that cultural and individual values priorities have distinct demographic predictors when examined separately, and that these predictors reflect their respective differences in the transmission channels. I stress the importance of the interdisciplinary research to account for the process of consolidation of shared collective knowledge into cultural models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]