Bec explores the relations between learners, families, communities, educators, and technology. She is a passionate ally for young people and their well-being, working in diverse social contexts as an educational researcher and public administration consultant to build the capacity for education systems to deliver culturally inclusive education and care.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explicate the links between public pedagogy, ethics of car... more PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explicate the links between public pedagogy, ethics of care and storying as a methodology and method in Oceania.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explores the role of extended families as First Teachers in iTaukei and Indo-Fijian Early Childhood contexts in Fiji. Using storying as methodology, the authors, three Australian and four Fijian academics, present three portraits to make visible the pedagogical entanglements of public pedagogy research in diverse community contexts. These portraits reveal the intersection and integration of extended family with the authors' community–family–child–informed pedagogical approaches, and the advantages of culturally located standpoints when working with iTaukei and Indo-Fijian communities. This article's unique contribution lies in its demonstration of the importance of an ethics of care approach in site-specific and contextually emerging pedagogical encohttps://libkey.io/libraries/1964/articles/586755572/full-text-fileunters.FindingsThe findings demonstrate ...
This research examined the conditions under which codesigned approaches to educator professional ... more This research examined the conditions under which codesigned approaches to educator professional learning in multilingual, birth to five settings were accessible and supportive of children's social and emotional development across diverse types of Australian early childhood services. The research sites, in the suburbs of a capital city, comprised a long day childcare center, two short term informal community creches for birth to 5-year-old children of migrants and refugees attending English classes, and a family hub short term informal community creche for children of Afghan refugees. Professional learning mentors visited the participating sites eight times for 2 h every 2 weeks for 16 Weeks in 2021, demonstrating resources and strategies to assist young children to identify their own and others' emotions and engage with social settings. Over 20 weeks, 97 participants provided data, commencing before and extending after the professional learning program. Participants included professional learning mentors, staff and volunteers, parents, and children via observation. Using Reggio Emilia principles, the research identified that professional learning, flexibly delivered over time, enabled educators and volunteers to build their social and emotional development knowledge, and to try resources and strategies with children in their care. Recruiting educators who shared children's home or community languages, in addition to professional learning, supported multilingual children to engage with emotional literacy resources, while still developing spoken English. The research affirmed that educators, volunteers, parents, and children benefitted from a sustained focus on children's social and emotional development in the early childhood education and care settings.
The critical participatory action research project discussed in this chapter was situated in thre... more The critical participatory action research project discussed in this chapter was situated in three communities in Fiji. Across three years, children, families, community leaders and mentors, research partners, and university researchers collaborated to build community capacity for fostering preschool children’s multilingual literacies in their home languages and English. An agreed goal was to co-create multilingual texts with participating children that represented their lives, experiences, and aspirations—noting Fiji’s three official languages are Bauan (associated with Fiji’s iTaukei people), standard Hindi (connected with Indo-Fijians) and English (Fiji’s language of government, schooling, and media). We begin this chapter by sharing details about our project and project participants. Next, we use the dialogic structure of talanoa to explore OfL that were generated in the three project communities. We close the chapter by considering insights about OfL in community settings.
Among myriad complex challenges facing educational institutions in this era of a rapidly evolving... more Among myriad complex challenges facing educational institutions in this era of a rapidly evolving job marketplace is the development of career self-efficacy among students. Self-efficacy has traditionally been understood to be developed through the direct experience of competence, the vicarious experience of competence, social persuasion, and physiological cues. These four factors, and particularly the first two, are difficult to build into education and training programs in a context where changing skills make the specific meaning of graduate competence largely unknown and, notwithstanding the other contributions in this collection, largely unknowable. In response, in this paper we argue for a working metacognitive model of career self-efficacy that will prepare students with the skills needed to evaluate their skills, attitudes and values and then adapt and develop them as their career context evolves around them. The model we will present is one of evolving complex sub-systems wi...
This book captures something of the essence of how communities that better support healthy child ... more This book captures something of the essence of how communities that better support healthy child development can be built. It includes a look at elements of the Australian Communities for Children initiative, using a collaborative approach that takes into account community, government and family. How can the voices of children be heard in decision-making processes that impact their futures? How can digital media be used to support, educate and protect children living in an online world? What does it mean to use a whole of community approach to supporting families? How can government departments and non-government agencies work together with communities to provide the kind of support that effectively engages families, so that the quality of parenting improves? What strategies can be developed in early childhood and school settings to improve family functioning? How can fragmented services become more integrated? While these are undoubtedly diverse questions, this kind of holistic vie...
The relationship between effective teaching and learning and student wellbeing has gained increas... more The relationship between effective teaching and learning and student wellbeing has gained increasing recognition, with various programs being developed that aim to identify and assist individual students ‘at risk’. In contrast to individualised approaches, this presentation reports on a school-wide ‘classroom as community’ approach to wellbeing through complementary pedagogies that address the issues for children with trauma experiences. Strategies include education in emotions [1], pro-social games [2], students as wellbeing agents and parent involvement [3]. The approach uses Vygotsky’s [4] notion of the socially formed mind wherein children’s minds are formed in interaction with those around them [5]. Working with the whole school, the approach creates a culture enabling students to succeed in group activities [6]. Now adopted in over 50 primary classrooms in South Australia the approach is being evaluated in one school over a three year period of implementation. Measures include...
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explicate the links between public pedagogy, ethics of car... more PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explicate the links between public pedagogy, ethics of care and storying as a methodology and method in Oceania.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explores the role of extended families as First Teachers in iTaukei and Indo-Fijian Early Childhood contexts in Fiji. Using storying as methodology, the authors, three Australian and four Fijian academics, present three portraits to make visible the pedagogical entanglements of public pedagogy research in diverse community contexts. These portraits reveal the intersection and integration of extended family with the authors' community–family–child–informed pedagogical approaches, and the advantages of culturally located standpoints when working with iTaukei and Indo-Fijian communities. This article's unique contribution lies in its demonstration of the importance of an ethics of care approach in site-specific and contextually emerging pedagogical encohttps://libkey.io/libraries/1964/articles/586755572/full-text-fileunters.FindingsThe findings demonstrate ...
This research examined the conditions under which codesigned approaches to educator professional ... more This research examined the conditions under which codesigned approaches to educator professional learning in multilingual, birth to five settings were accessible and supportive of children's social and emotional development across diverse types of Australian early childhood services. The research sites, in the suburbs of a capital city, comprised a long day childcare center, two short term informal community creches for birth to 5-year-old children of migrants and refugees attending English classes, and a family hub short term informal community creche for children of Afghan refugees. Professional learning mentors visited the participating sites eight times for 2 h every 2 weeks for 16 Weeks in 2021, demonstrating resources and strategies to assist young children to identify their own and others' emotions and engage with social settings. Over 20 weeks, 97 participants provided data, commencing before and extending after the professional learning program. Participants included professional learning mentors, staff and volunteers, parents, and children via observation. Using Reggio Emilia principles, the research identified that professional learning, flexibly delivered over time, enabled educators and volunteers to build their social and emotional development knowledge, and to try resources and strategies with children in their care. Recruiting educators who shared children's home or community languages, in addition to professional learning, supported multilingual children to engage with emotional literacy resources, while still developing spoken English. The research affirmed that educators, volunteers, parents, and children benefitted from a sustained focus on children's social and emotional development in the early childhood education and care settings.
The critical participatory action research project discussed in this chapter was situated in thre... more The critical participatory action research project discussed in this chapter was situated in three communities in Fiji. Across three years, children, families, community leaders and mentors, research partners, and university researchers collaborated to build community capacity for fostering preschool children’s multilingual literacies in their home languages and English. An agreed goal was to co-create multilingual texts with participating children that represented their lives, experiences, and aspirations—noting Fiji’s three official languages are Bauan (associated with Fiji’s iTaukei people), standard Hindi (connected with Indo-Fijians) and English (Fiji’s language of government, schooling, and media). We begin this chapter by sharing details about our project and project participants. Next, we use the dialogic structure of talanoa to explore OfL that were generated in the three project communities. We close the chapter by considering insights about OfL in community settings.
Among myriad complex challenges facing educational institutions in this era of a rapidly evolving... more Among myriad complex challenges facing educational institutions in this era of a rapidly evolving job marketplace is the development of career self-efficacy among students. Self-efficacy has traditionally been understood to be developed through the direct experience of competence, the vicarious experience of competence, social persuasion, and physiological cues. These four factors, and particularly the first two, are difficult to build into education and training programs in a context where changing skills make the specific meaning of graduate competence largely unknown and, notwithstanding the other contributions in this collection, largely unknowable. In response, in this paper we argue for a working metacognitive model of career self-efficacy that will prepare students with the skills needed to evaluate their skills, attitudes and values and then adapt and develop them as their career context evolves around them. The model we will present is one of evolving complex sub-systems wi...
This book captures something of the essence of how communities that better support healthy child ... more This book captures something of the essence of how communities that better support healthy child development can be built. It includes a look at elements of the Australian Communities for Children initiative, using a collaborative approach that takes into account community, government and family. How can the voices of children be heard in decision-making processes that impact their futures? How can digital media be used to support, educate and protect children living in an online world? What does it mean to use a whole of community approach to supporting families? How can government departments and non-government agencies work together with communities to provide the kind of support that effectively engages families, so that the quality of parenting improves? What strategies can be developed in early childhood and school settings to improve family functioning? How can fragmented services become more integrated? While these are undoubtedly diverse questions, this kind of holistic vie...
The relationship between effective teaching and learning and student wellbeing has gained increas... more The relationship between effective teaching and learning and student wellbeing has gained increasing recognition, with various programs being developed that aim to identify and assist individual students ‘at risk’. In contrast to individualised approaches, this presentation reports on a school-wide ‘classroom as community’ approach to wellbeing through complementary pedagogies that address the issues for children with trauma experiences. Strategies include education in emotions [1], pro-social games [2], students as wellbeing agents and parent involvement [3]. The approach uses Vygotsky’s [4] notion of the socially formed mind wherein children’s minds are formed in interaction with those around them [5]. Working with the whole school, the approach creates a culture enabling students to succeed in group activities [6]. Now adopted in over 50 primary classrooms in South Australia the approach is being evaluated in one school over a three year period of implementation. Measures include...
Building Stronger Communities with Children and Families (2nd Edition), 2020
This book highlights key principles emerging from the process of implementing a whole of communit... more This book highlights key principles emerging from the process of implementing a whole of community and government approach to supporting families at risk of vulnerability. Drawing on the expertise of a collaboration of practitioners and researchers, it also examines the efficacy of some of the early intervention and prevention strategies developed through the Australian Communities for Children initiative. It will be of particular interest to community services, education and child welfare practitioners and policy makers involved with or contemplating involvement in implementing a placebased collective impact approach to child development, wellbeing and protection. How can we better engage with families at risk in a digital world? How can we deliver holistic, integrated support? How can we redesign our family support systems? What kind of leadership and governance will it take to implement the kind of systems change that delivers improved outcomes? These are critical questions we need to engage with if we are to collaboratively redesign inadequate siloed approaches and build family friendly communities that improve the lives of children and families.
Harris, P, Brock, C, Diamond, A, McInnes, E, Neill, B, Camaitoga, U & Krishna, M 2018, '
early ... more Harris, P, Brock, C, Diamond, A, McInnes, E, Neill, B, Camaitoga, U & Krishna, M 2018, '
early childhood; cross-cultural; research methods; Fiji
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Papers by Bec Neill
early childhood; cross-cultural; research methods; Fiji