Your Professional Toolkit
Contents
Introduction
This 'Toolkit' is a supportive guide that will assist you with various academic literacies during all your studies with us and throughout your professional life. It provides a framework for professional communication through: planning; gaining meanings by reading, thinking, reflecting; writing hints; considering assessment processes and supports; and using a wide variety of resources. This 'Toolkit' builds upon the academic literacies outlined in Cottrell (2003), the UNE Referencing Guide and tUNEup. Each section consists of a discussion of a few key issues and identifies some relevant hints and/or resources. We begin with planning, which is often neglected, but it is the vital first step in learning and communicating.
Some Guiding Principles for Early Childhood Educators
In developing and refining the UNE Early Childhood Education courses, we have considered the following guiding
principles as they relate to young children, their families and their teachers.
Early childhood teachers will:
• recognise and value the uniqueness of each child;
• possess essential abilities and knowledge specific to young children from birth to eight years;
• integrate understandings and abilities from a variety of curriculum content areas and apply them in early childhood settings;
• understand that personally held values and judgements affect choices and decisions made while teaching children and working with their families;
• articulate a set of ethical guiding principles which underpin their work with and their teaching of young children;
• recognise and value the unique roles that parents have in nurturing the development and education of their children;
• support and work with parents in providing optimal opportunities for the growth, development, and education of children;
In summary, we hope that your involvement in our courses is a continuation of your professional development and
stimulates reflective responses and thinking in your work with young children and their families.
Section 1: Planning
Introduction
To begin planning your studies, we encourage you to review your current personal and professional time commitments and outline how you will study. In fact, if you uncover more about your own learning style(s), you will be better placed to plan and document your studies. Based on this personal awareness, you ought to decide on one or more planning approaches that really work for you. Approaches encompass such activities as linear listing, mind mapping, tables and charts, images, etc. Similarly, you have probably heard about Howard Gardner's (1993) multiple intelligences and children's related learning modes. Gardner's theory is touched on by Cottrell (1999, pp. 37–43). Many people find that mind mapping is a very helpful tool, therefore, this approach is explored in this section.
Balancing study time with life responsibilities
Because we realise that you have a busy and complex life, we encourage you to carefully evaluate your personal and professional lifestyle as well as your short and long term goals for studying. We all need to think wisely about meeting our obligations and responsibilities, while still keeping a sense of balance in our personal lives. Therefore, while it is up to you to decide how many units to study, we suggest that you begin with a realistic study load of one unit each semester. (Two units a semester equals a half-time study load, and four units are considered full-time university study.) As a student you may decide to take a different number of units from one semester to another. Setting aside a regular study time can be very helpful. The University considers the average study time per unit to be about 8 to 10 hours a week over a semester. So, be realistic about the time required to study and the time that you can give to studying.
When considering how to balance your study time, it is important to be aware that university students who study externally encounter both advantages and extra strains or challenges. Some of the positives include: your study is more flexible; you set your own time frame; you decide on your place of study. However, pressures that often occur include the following:
- everyday stresses of work and/or one's family, particularly when you have responsibilities for children;
- high personal expectations that you may demand of yourself just like many other mature aged students;
- concern about your abilities to cope with academic work;
- feeling isolated in terms of the amount of study you undertake compared with other students; and
- believing that your friends and family will lack interest in your study or they may query your study time.
Think about how you might overcome such challenges and pressures. Also, talk with a lecturer about coping with particular strains if and when you encounter them as a UNE student. Also, the University Counselling Service offers support for students who are off-campus.
Furthermore, we suggest that you consider being a collaborative learner. Find one or more other early childhood professional who is studying at UNE or another university and create your own peer mentor process. Exchange telephone numbers and email addresses. Here are some ways to share ideas about readings, weekly topic activities and assessment tasks: talk together, meet face-to-face, or email/fax issues and concepts to each other. If you want to know more about mentoring, there are many articles and books available. If you decide to collaborate with another student on a particular assessment task, please contact the relevant lecturer for advice and also note your collaborative work on your assessment task at submission. We encourage this collaborative approach as we acknowledge that it suits many learning styles.
Learning styles
Understanding more about learning and learning styles as well as your own learning preferences will help you cope better with the pressures of being an early childhood professional. As well, this will help you plan your approach to studying at UNE. Learning is a process that is multi-dimensional. It may be described as active and cumulative (where new learning is added to existing experiences or knowledge). We recognise that you come to this course with accumulated education and experiences. Furthermore, learning can be surface or deep. Surface learning is often committed to short term memory, while deeper learning is more likely to be remembered longer. Additionally because the quality of learning differs, we encourage you to engage in deep learning and this expectation is reflected in the unit objectives and marking criteria for courses in the Early Childhood Program.
Organizing your thoughts using mind maps
There are many ways to organize your thinking on a topic and to use this organization as a plan for writing assignments or any other professional writing. Such organization is achieved by firstly, brainstorming your ideas and clustering them (Rico 1983). Clustering helps to get rid of any clutter and so you can freely identify associations between ideas and let patterns emerge. This helps avoid repetition and there is no grammar involved.
According to your learning style you may then use a linear (i.e. listing) form of planning where you write headings, subheadings, and paragraph points one under the other. Another way that most people find very useful is to use mind maps. This is a non-linear form of planning that involves radiating circles. The central circle would incorporate the subject of the paper, which would become the title. Radiating out would be the major issues of the paper. These would become major headings. Coming out from each of these would be the next level of points that would form subheadings that lie under each major heading. Out from these subheadings come another ring of circles that are more specific points that may be the topic of each paragraph. Mind maps would vary in how many layers of circles there are.
The following example shows a mind map for a paper on the value of mind maps. In order to demonstrate how the mind map is a plan for your essay, we have used terms that you should replace with meaningful concepts. Note: pp stands for paragraph point.
Acting ethically and developing professional documentation
It goes without saying that moral obligations and ethical responsibilities bind educators, however, some professionals do not always act morally and ethically. We believe these moral and ethical challenges are often greater for early childhood educators than for other teachers because of young children's ages and vulnerabilities. The AECA's Code of Ethics (AECA 1990, Readings booklet) provides guidance for early childhood educators and students.
In a number of units within the BTeach (ECE) and the BEd (EC), specific reference is made to codes of ethics and their applications. A relevant case would be if you were planning a child study or a family study. Then, ethical dilemmas and processes must be considered and taken into account. For example, it is vital that any assessment tasks you undertake with young children and their families are planned and implemented in ethically responsible ways. A few specific actions are:
• seeking approvals
• maintaining confidentiality
• protecting personal information
• using information in morally defensible ways, etc.
In Section 1, we have encouraged you to adopt an informed approach to your planning so that you are better placed to successfully negotiate your journey as a student. The following section suggests ways of optimising your learning.
Section 2: Gaining meanings by reading, thinking, reflecting
Meanings
As you interact with the topics in the Topic Notes booklet, we will refer you to Cottrell (2003) to explore skills for gaining meanings; then, we will ask you to apply these skills to each topic. Part of gaining meaning is to recognise that writers come from different discourses or ideological identities. Thus, people have varying motivations as well as theoretical frameworks from which their words emerge. This means that as you read, you will need to think critically about who the author is, what she/he is saying, and why she/he is making that particular point. By reading different writers' words on the same issue, you will probably gain multiple and often contradictory perspectives. Then, by thinking and reflecting on all these ideas, you should be able to formulate your own position on the issue. What you will have engaged in, is critical reading. Comfieym and Crawford (1999, np) state that 'critical reading involves:
• assessing the writer's expertise
• recognising the writer's purpose …
• inferring meaning
• recognising the writer's assumptions, underlying values …
• assessing quality of argument
• recognising implications of the text
• linking ideas of the text to other ideas and other texts
• understanding the text in its wider (e.g. social & political) context
• recognising how language choices reflect values and indicate power relations
• recognising how the text positions the reader'.
Furthermore, writers adopt particular genres or writing styles to suit their purpose in communicating with their audience. For example, personal stories written in a journal (see below) look very different from a research report for an academic audience. When you are reading, look at the genre used and consider its appropriateness to the expectations of the reader. Within this course you are expected to read widely from a variety of genres in such documents as research reports and articles, government publications, professional literature, teachers' stories, policy documents, etc.
Research
Research is a particular and significant source of information that is sometimes accepted without question. Even though most research is carried out ethically and properly, the findings and implications are still a reflection of the researcher's perspective and as such are socially constructed. Consequently, you are expected to read, think and reflect deeply and critically about the content of all you encounter in our units, including the lecturers' topic notes. Research also varies in terms of researchers' theoretical and philosophical leanings, which inform paradigms along a continuum of quantitative to qualitative (refer to Topic 7).
Collaborative or participatory action research (MacNaughton 1996, Readings booklet) is about continuous improvement rather than going into a situation, changing it and then leaving. It is a cyclical process involving reflection on a real world situation from which comes an issue needing change. The key is working together at every step of the research, as action research is not done to people but with them. This form of action research also means that you are not solely responsible for any part of the cycle. This is so even though in most units the second assessment task involves you as instigator of practice projects in early childhood settings (Jensen & Hannibal 2000, pp. 8–11, Readings booklet). Consider visiting the following website about action research: http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/valwb.html
Action planning
You will be asked to create plans of action in many of your assessment tasks, in your work, and in various aspects of your life. This section provides one framework for such planning. Always remember that the key to planning for change is collaboration with those who will be affected by the change. Valuing and respecting others is essential in all action plan phases, not just when implementing plans. There are several basic steps that may help with group planning. They are the following:
- Situational analysis. This means that your group honestly looks at where you are right now and where you might want to go. The key is in making sure that you don't just see what you want, but actually understand your situation from the various perspectives of key constituents, for example, children, parents, management, staff, community members, government officials, local businesses, etc. You may also need to collect data, for example, bank and budget statements, maintenance reports, average attendance records, job descriptions, etc.
- Goals. From an understanding of where you are, you need to look at the longer term view of where you want to be. This is a rather big picture and is not meant to be achievable in the near future but rather to give you direction.
- Desired Outcomes. These should stem from your goal(s) and express reasonable and specific outcomes that you expect to achieve within a particular period (e.g. three months). Writing desired outcomes is the key to planning. It is important that we lift our thinking from activities or 'what' you do, to desired outcomes, which encapsulate 'why' you are creating plans. The desired outcomes look at this 'why'. It states what you hope to achieve by carrying out your activity or strategy. If we don't think about this then we get stuck focussing on the activity regardless of whether it achieves any desired outcomes. So as a check, look at your desired outcomes. Are they really strategies? Things like to run a parent evening, or parents and staff to review policies, are not desired outcomes. To arrive at the desired outcome you need to ask yourself 'why' you are doing this. What do you hope to achieve by these strategies. You may run a parent meeting (strategy) in the hope that parents and staff have a shared understanding of the policies, or for parents to feel more valued and empowered (desired outcome).
- Unless you are clear about 'why' you are doing things you will not be able to design an evaluation plan that looks at this higher level achievement. Instead you will be evaluating whether or not the review or evening took place rather than thinking about whether these strategies really did empower and value parents or whether there was a genuine shared understanding. You should be able to devise a way of measuring the achievement of desired outcomes and thus develop an evaluation plan for each desired outcome
- Evaluation plan. This is an essential part of planning and not something you just do at the end of implementation. Evaluation should be ongoing, and should focus on the achievement of desired outcomes rather than the strategies. Imagine if your desired outcome is for a group of children to express pride in their culture through an art form. One strategy may be to invite a visiting ethnic dance troupe and encourage children to dance with them. If you evaluate the strategy then you may easily have achieved a participation level. However, if your evaluation plan focuses on the desired outcome it may involve asking parents for their children's comments on their participation. You may find that they complained of embarrassment and vowed never to participate in their ethnic dance again. The strategy was achieved but the desired outcome (which is what really matters) was not. This leads us to the next planning phase.
- Strategies. These are the actions that will be taken to achieve desired outcomes. Strategies have a much greater chance of success if you detail each action and allocate the person responsible, the time frame and resources needed.
- After implementing your plan, the group engages in a phase of reflection and re-planning based on the achievement of the desired outcomes, and the cycle repeats. The following format may help you with action planning, so feel free to photocopy it.
Reflection
A major intent of this unit and the BTeach (EC) course is for you to strengthen your abilities for reflective practice. Reflective practitioners critically appraise themselves and their work with others and the materials they read. Zeichner and Liston (1987, pp. 24–25) outline Van Manen's (1977, cited in Zeichner & Liston 1987) different forms of reflection as technical rationality, practical action and critical reflection. These concepts are pivotal to moving from a basic level of reading for meaning, thinking and writing through to complex, more advanced metacognitive processes that are expected of education graduates of universities. Technical rationality involves the unquestioning use of knowledge to attain defined ends. The next level, practical action, involves analysing assumptions about daily actions and deciding to act based on their practicality. We encourage you to move to critical reflection which is based on asking moral and ethical questions that lead to just and equitable social outcomes. Remember that how you reflect and think will form the basis for how you write; and your writing will influence how lecturers respond to your assessment tasks (Woodrow & Fasoli 1998, Readings booklet). To assist you, we have provided a few definitions and a number of processes for you to consider in terms of reflecting on your daily work. Furthermore, to gain the most from your practicums you will need to engage in critical reflection.
Section 3: Writing hints
Introduction
Critical thinking, reading and reflecting result in writing that displays more than just the 'what' of an issue, topic or event which is sometimes represented by lists or dot points. Critical writing usually incorporates surface plus deep learning. Thus you might look at the 'who', 'where' and 'when' which asks you to contextualise the issue. The 'why' of an issue leads you to give reasons and justify your position. By writing about the 'how' you are considering the processes involved in bringing a notion to reality. Thus you have moved to a much richer metacognitive strategy that starts to satisfy the need for interpretive and analytical thinking and then writing as reflected in the unit grading system.
Keeping a reflective learning journal
As you proceed with your study, you will find it useful to keep a Reflective Learning Journal. We ask you to write weekly during your studies for PDEC 310. Your journal is a place where you record your thinking about the complex issues that arise and where you can answer some of the questions that are posed in the topics. Your journal can be an old exercise book, a writing pad or simply a space in your study notes. You may well find it interesting to revisit earlier entries to see how your thinking has changed as you progress through your university studies. As you complete the various support activities linked with each of the ten topics in this Topic Notes booklet, we encourage you to comment and reflect on these in this Reflective Learning Journal. Keeping a journal throughout your studies ought to result in a valuable professional documentation of your journey.
When constructing your Reflective Learning Journal, consider the following hints about structure and content. Two dimensions worth exploring are your own learning needs (as a professional) and the early childhood field. Thus, journal writing represents communicating with yourself about who you are and what you do in your educational setting. Writing may generate ideas and emotions about changing yourself and the organisation you work in. Writing itself is a mode of active learning for deeper understanding. In structuring your journal you might like to incorporate (Fulwiler 1987):
• informal, even colloquial diction
• the first person pronoun 'I'
• informal punctuation
• the rhythms of everyday speech
• experimentation.
Constructing a professional glossary
Often, it is useful to have a specific place in which to record the meanings of terms that you are unfamiliar with. The example below is one idea demonstrating how you might organise such a glossary. Note that the glossaries are used to bring together the ideas of several authors and then for you to make a statement about your position on the concept that is based on your critical appraisal of the ideas of others. Note that this glossary is focussed on early childhood education and so the use and value of general dictionaries is minimal.
Designing an effective poster
When you are planning a poster for use with adults or children, there are key design principles (taken from the marketing and/or advertising world) that will help you communicate messages more effectively. These include such hints as the following:
• Being clear about your purpose.
• Including plenty of empty space.
• Incorporating clear rather than messy layouts.
• Using print that is very large and easily read.
• Limiting the number of fonts.
• Breaking up written text with illustrations or photographs.
• Ensuring permission is gained for all photographs.
• Presenting children in natural and non objectified positions.
A checklist of writing hints
Students often make similar mistakes in their assignments and the lecturers find that when they are marking them, they are often writing the same comments over and over. Furthermore, comments may be so brief that they don't always fully explain the point.
In order to overcome this, the early childhood team has adopted a feedback format that will be used for marking your PDEC 310 portfolio-extracts. It may be used in other units during your studies at UNE.
This is how it works. In the following paragraphs we have written on certain common errors found in assignments and have suitably labeled them (e.g. R-Referencing, H-Headings). When you receive your marked assessment task back from the lecturer and find a circled letter in the text, for example an R, then you know to go to the Referencing paragraph to interpret the lecturer's feedback.
We encourage you to read the checklist before you attempt your assessment tasks as it may assist you with your writing. We hope you find this guide helpful.
H-Headings
The use of headings and sub headings assists you as author to identify key issues and locate your comments on those issues in a consistent argument. This helps avoid repetition and spasmodic and disjointed consideration of a single point. The result is a much more compelling argument. Headings also greatly assist the reader to follow the direction of your paper. You will notice that every article in your Readings booklet follows this tradition. This is so for nearly all education journals and books. Your textbook (Cottrell 2003) indicates that headings are not used in essays. However, within our Early Childhood Education Program, we expect headings to be used in all assessment tasks regardless of whether or not they are called essays. It is also important to give all your work a title. Note that published articles always have a meaningful title. Note also that the style (eg size. font, bold) of each level of heading should vary so that the reader can distinguish titles, major headings and sub-headings from each other.
SS-Sentence structure
Students commonly struggle with sentence structures and in particular with sentence fragments and run-on sentences. The Academic Skills Office site has very useful handouts on these problems. It is located at http://www.une.edu.au/aso I strongly recommend that you check these out. I would estimate that about 50% of students have problems in this area so maybe you could assume that you are one of them and get in early.
R-Referencing
It is imperative that referencing be consistent and accurate. As members of the early childhood profession we must take care to ensure that our writing is not undermined by poor referencing standards. If we are to share our learnings and promote our profession, we must ensure that others have an accurate trail to the original proponent of the research or ideas that we present. Thus, readers can trace the source of ideas from the body of your paper, through to the reference list, and then if readers want to follow up on that idea they can go to a library with sufficient information to access the original document. You will note that referencing in the articles in the Readings booklet is meticulous.
The UNE Referencing Guide provides detailed information on the author-date referencing system, which is recommended for use in education. This Guide should become a well-worn document.
Referencing can be tedious until it becomes automatic for you, but accurate referencing reflects your professional approach to communicating with others in the field of early childhood. The following are a few extra pointers.
- You are asked to provide References at the conclusion of the body of your paper and not a bibliography – see the UNE Referencing Guide for this important difference. The appropriate heading for this section of your paper is: References, not List of References.
- When quoting from a particular page of an author's work then page numbers are given in the reference within the text (body of your paper). If paraphrasing or summarising an author's position or ideas then page numbers are not given.
- Page numbers are given in the References only when the author is not responsible for the entire publication. For example, a chapter in an edited book, an article in a journal etc. Give all pages of the author's work, not just the ones you refer to. This is because the list of References is meant to help the reader find the original source rather than the specific page that you may have referred to within the source. Note that we provide pages in the Readings booklet as we are communicating the part of the authors' works that we are providing. This is a contents list and not a Reference lists.
- A sentence should make sense without having to read any of the information placed within parentheses. This means that all reference information (author's name, year of publication, page number) that is not to be read as part of the sentence should be inside parentheses. If you wish to have the author's name read in the sentence then it remains outside the parentheses while the year and page number lie inside the parentheses, for example:
- Smith (1999, pp. 12–13) argued that …
- If the reference detail is at the end of a sentence then the full stop goes after the closing of the parentheses. Thus it is clear to which sentence the reference belongs.
- Please note that when referring to ideas in an edited book you must acknowledge the actual author of that chapter, as the ideas are his/hers and not those of the person who compiled and edited the book. For example, if you were referring a chapter written by Glover in a book edited by Dau, you should simply reference in your text as (Glover 2001). Glover is the source of the ideas and not the editor (Dau) and thus Glover deserves the credit for her words. Furthermore, Dau may not totally agree with the words of Glover and thus would not like these words falsely attributed to her. All references in the paper should be traceable through the Reference list at the end of your paper, and hence the Reference List entry should recognise Glover. So this entry in your Reference list would be;
- Glover, A. 2001, 'Children and Bias' in The Anti-Bias Approach in Early Childhood, 2nd edn, ed. E. Dau, Pearson Education, Sydney, pp. 1–13.
- Note also that page numbers are given for chapters in an edited book so that the authors work is easy to locate and it is clear that he/she did not write the whole book. Articles in Journals have page numbers for the same reasons.
- Most articles you read will reference their supports. Commonly these are in brackets in their article and are their general supports but the ideas still belong to the writer of the article. You should not mention their supports unless they have specifically attributed a study, idea or quote to them. In such a situation then you need to acknowledge the original ideas coming from the author whose original work you have not read. In such cases you would acknowledge the originated as cited in the authors article that you read. For example: Smith (1987 cited in Ogilvie, 2001:16). In this case you only read about Smith in Ogilvie's article and so you would only put the Ogilvie article in your list of references. Remember that Smith would only rate a mention in your text if Ogilvie referred very specifically to his ideas. By far the majority (if not all) of Ogilvie's support references would not be mentioned by you and all references you make will be directly to Ogilvie.
SA-Supported arguments
Your opinion and your position on an issue are very important. They need to be clearly and crisply presented. They require support from a collection of research and literature, such as journals and books, government publications, professional documents, research reports or newspaper articles. The best way to support your argument is to include the ideas of others in your flowing text and then acknowledge the sources of those ideas at the end of the sentence or paragraph to which the reference applies. Remember to always acknowledge a source of ideas as to not do so is to claim them as your own. This is called Plagiarism (see the section on Plagiarism in the Assessment booklet).
You may have heard terms like 'engage with the literature' or 'dialogue with the literature'. Maybe the following image will help you understand this feature of writing. Imagine that you are discussing your assessment topic while sitting at a table with a number of writers or researchers (say Stonehouse, Wangmann, Rodd and Katz). The only difference is that they are not there in person but rather their books or articles are at their table place. You may begin by commenting on an issue based on your experience and then Stonehouse may present her opinion (through her writing). Wangmann may then disagree and present an alternative view. Rodd may agree with Wangmann and then Katz may extend that thought. You may think critically about their discussion and then comment again giving your position on the issue. When writing your paper you roughly reflect this conversation. Clearly, your opinion is valid but by presenting the rest of the argument you are developing the point and taking your own opinion to a higher level. This then becomes a supported argument and clearly would be far more convincing than just presenting your own experience.
As a professional you will have many occasions when you need to argue a case. One example is if you are a director of a service and you go to your licensee or management committee seeking funds to replace some stereotypical posters and puzzles. Rather than merely presenting your opinion based on your beliefs, you can prepare by reading research and literature on the issue and then presenting an argument that incorporates all your support. By presenting a supported argument you will be much more convincing and therefore optimise your chances of gaining the necessary funds. Writing assignments presents you with opportunities to develop these necessary professional skills.
PR-Professional reflections
Trust your feelings and experiences. As a mid-career professional your knowledge and experience can be an invaluable aid rather than an obstacle to your academic success. However, even when discussing your own values and beliefs or when asked for reflections, you should engage with the literature. This is so regardless of whether or not the lecturer has asked for a specific literature review in that section of the assignment. Your experiences are your first source of information but they ought to be considered in the light of other sources, namely, various literature, documented research and sometimes findings from your own research. By synthesising all sources you will be better placed to develop your professional opinion. Hence, your understanding and the academic paper you write after studying an issue should be very different from the one you may have written prior to beginning that study when your position may have been based on experience alone.
Many students are confused by the use of the first person or third person. Third person is commonly used in academic writing but in this course you may use first person. However, if you do use 'I' then you need to use dispassionate language. Thus statements like 'I hate seeing the nasty parents' would be better written: 'As a professional, I may be distressed when parents appear uncaring'. Of course, such comments would also need to be supported by literature on staff stress.
DQ-Direct quotes
Simply repeating unquestioned information is not sufficient to prove that you have understood and integrated ideas into your own thinking. You must mount evidence to show your thinking processes and understanding. This requires you to critically reflect on the writing of others and construct your argument by paraphrasing or summarising their words into your own. Remember to acknowledge the original source of the ideas at the point of use.
Direct quotes are generally used sparingly. If used too freely they tend to disrupt the argument rather than enhance it. However, direct quotes are used when the author's words are so profound that you cannot paraphrase the idea or incorporate the author's position into your own text. If you use direct quotes, you should appraise them and not write them as if they represent your opinion. Many well-supported papers do not use any direct quotes, in fact, many (if not most) high distinction assessment tasks do not use direct quotes. You will note that the articles in the Readings booklet only occasionally use direct quotes, but they have many supported and referenced ideas.
Remember that if you do use direct quotes then you must enclose them in single quotation marks if they are of 30 words or less. If the quotations are longer, they should be set off from the text as block quotations. Quotation marks are not used. Furthermore, whether quoting, paraphrasing or summarising you must acknowledge the source by placing the relevant referencing details directly after use. Thus you acknowledge the intellectual property of the original source and also demonstrate that you have support for your argument. Please note that failure to do this may be considered plagiarism.
P-Paragraphs
In order to create an argument you need to organise your ideas. Mind mapping will help determine headings and sub headings as well as paragraphing. Each paragraph should contain a point that is introduced in a topic sentence and then developed in the next two to three sentences as a minimum. These sentences are followed by a concluding sentence that links to the point of the next paragraph. You should avoid multiple points in the one paragraph. If a point is worth being made then it deserves its own paragraph. Remember that a single sentence is never a paragraph. Be very careful when using direct quotes because they often contain a number of points beside the topic of your paragraph. The use of connectives like 'however', 'therefore' and 'consequently' may help give your argument necessary flow. When you read articles in the Readings booklet, take note of those who construct a flowing, compelling argument. You may like to use the techniques that these authors adopt to assist you in organising your case into a collection of paragraphs.
G-Generalisations
Take care not to be dogmatic or absolute. It is probably better to err on the side of moderation than try to make universal statements of absolute truths, which probably do not exist. Maybe you could adopt a genre that is more consistent with post structuralist thinking which sees a world of multiple meanings, full of uncertainties and inconsistencies. We suggest adopting terms like 'could' instead of 'should', or 'may' instead of 'will'. Qualifiers such as 'at this point in time' make your arguments more plausible. Now, consider a qualifier that you could use in place of the word 'need' in a phrase like 'children need to play'.
The opposite of being too dogmatic is being too long and convoluted in your presentation of ideas. In this case, take a position by getting to the point with less qualification. This writing hint is about balance – not too dogmatic or absolute and not too 'long winded' and 'waffley'.
E-Edit
It is the responsibility of students, not lecturers, to edit submitted papers. Poor written communication can seriously undermine a worthwhile argument that you may be presenting. Thus, effective writing does take time; it is believed that even Ernest Hemingway rewrote the last page of Farewell to Arms 39 times! Here is a collection of helpful hints for proofreading your assessment tasks before submitting them.
Proof a hard copy of your work, not online. It is easier to proofread a printout of your work rather than on the computer screen.
Use the spell check and grammar check. However, even though computer checks catch many typos, they do not pick up a word when it is used incorrectly (e.g. their, there; your, you're).
Proofread in stages. It is more efficient and easier to concentrate on one task at a time.
- Read the assignment for sense.
- Check headers and footers (if used) and pagination.
- Check table of contents (if you have one).
- Check headings.
- Check numbered lists and bullet lists.
- Check captions/headings for images, figures and tables in your flowing text and in any appendices.
Now do these final tasks.
- Input on your computer all the corrections you noted on your paper.
- Put the computer spell check through again.
- Print out the corrected copy and check it against the previous marked up copy. Check carefully that the changes were made correctly and no new errors introduced. Check the area around where the correction was made. Is any text omitted?
- Go through the assignment page by page. At this stage, you will be looking at how the text falls on the page. For example, is there any text that has become separated from the rest of the paragraph by a page or column break? Is there isolated text (single word, one line of a paragraph) at the bottom or top of a page?
- We suggest that you read the assignment through without stopping to check for anything. Pretend you are the audience. Have someone else look over the paper after you have proofed it. A fresh perspective helps.
Section 4: Assessment processes and supports
This section contains information about several forms of assessment that are part of our units of study; the ECE generic objective; Attributes of a UNE Graduate and beyond.
Understanding various kinds of assessment
There are many types of assessment tasks and numerous ways of approaching both planning and completing assignments. Within the Early Childhood Education Program, all units of study include two assessment tasks. Additionally, the units with practicums have a field experience assessment. The general format for assessment tasks is one narrative paper, position paper or essay and some form of practice investigation project or documentation of your professional activities.
The approaches to assessment that are used within our units encompass:
- situational analysis
- critical reflection (Comfiey & Crawford 1999)
- interview and transcription
- critical analysis
- critiquing a scenario
- designing a case study
- observing and documenting an investigation
- creating or discussing your philosophy
- preparing an annotated bibliography or glossary
- documenting a child or family study
- mapping concepts or issues
- sketching a framework or image/metaphor.
When you are asked to research and write a position paper, an essay or a project report, we expect you to approach your reading and thinking, drafting and final writing by doing one or more of the following cognitive 'thinking' activities: analyse, compare, contrast, define, describe, discuss, evaluate, illustrate, outline, review or summarise. Brief definitions of these concepts appear in the Cottrell (2003) text (check the text's index at the back) and tUNEup (Academic Writing Module, pp. 42–43). Additionally, attention to how you write is essential (refer to 'A Checklist of Writing Hints' in Section 3 above, for guidance while writing and when reviewing lecturers' feedback). This aspect of writing effectively links directly with the Attributes of a UNE Graduate and the ECE generic objective.
Meeting the ECE generic objective
All units in the BTeach (EC) and the BEd (EC) include a selection of objectives for you to work towards. These objectives inform and link to the specific content being studied. A generic objective has been created which appears in every unit of study:
Upon completion of this unit, you (as a student) will be able to:
- demonstrate acceptable standards of communication and professional responsibility, by having presented all unit requirements in an appropriate format and on time.
This generic objective links with being professionally competent and includes using a variety of academic literacies which this unit has been specifically designed to address within an early childhood profession and field context. The value or weighting of this objective varies across the units in the BTeach (EC) and the BEd (EC). For example, in this initial and prerequisite unit, the weighting of this objective in terms of professionalism and literacies is greater than it may be in subsequent units. This is because a major focus of PDEC 310 is to initially guide and support your entry into a university level of academic thinking and writing.
Attributes of a UNE Graduate
For this introductory unit, one objective links directly with the Attributes of a UNE Graduate. Like other universities, UNE has embraced a set of attributes that graduates are expected to develop or extend while undertaking university study. The University expects that various attributes will be explicitly taught, explicitly assessed, and/or practiced by students through activities in each unit of study across a whole course. As lecturers, we are working to explicitly incorporate the attributes into our units. See http://www.une.edu.au/gamanual/. Click on 'for students' at the top and you will get the detail of the attributes.
Generic life abilities
One aspect of our approach to teaching and learning relates to acknowledging and encouraging various generic life abilities. Being proficient with a computer is a valuable, even vital, ability for both university study and worksite responsibilities. In fact, the NSW Ministerial Advisory Council on the Quality of Teaching (October 1997) decided on minimum proficiency for beginning teachers. These computer competencies include using basic computer operations, evaluating software, considering pedagogical issues, understanding ethical dilemmas and meeting social justice objectives.
Moving beyond generic attributes – Teaching abilities and the art of teaching
In addition to the above abilities for livelihood and lifestyle, various associations and organisations have attempted to outline what the work of teachers is or ought to be. For example, the Australian Teaching Council played a role in developing Australia's first National Competency Framework for Beginning Teaching (NPQTL 1996). The booklet states that the Project was based on the premise of improving the quality of education in part by describing what beginning teachers ought to know and be able to do. There are five areas of competence:
- using and developing professional knowledge and values;
- communicating, interacting and working with students (children) and others;
- planning and managing the teaching and learning process;
- monitoring and assessing student progress and objectives; and
- reflecting, evaluating and planning for continuous improvement.
This may appear to be a simple, even helpful document. However, the Framework can conversely be viewed as a contested, political, government policy initiative about legitimacy and power (Hattam & Smyth 1995). This means that the National Competency Framework for Beginning Teaching, like all other publications, was socially constructed. In part Hattam and Symth's (1995:1) case study revealed the 'art' of teaching and the location or context of teachers and their teaching, as opposed to teachers and teaching being presented as a generalised bureaucratic and decontextualised list of competencies.
The 'art' of teachers and their teaching has to do with humanness via interactions and with artistry qualities like creativity. Teaching is about joys and wonderment, dilemmas and challenges. Everyday is unique, everyday is full of human encounters; and so, teachers and their work are more cooperative and creative than individual and linear. Wonderful teaching is holistic with a pulsating heart (Ehrich & McCrea 1999; McCrea & Ehrich 1999:433) and it incorporates active use of one's head, heart and hands (Sergiovanni 1992).
Section 5: Some relevant resources
Journals
Australian Journal of Early Childhood
Australian Research in Early Childhood
Australian Journal of Indigenous Education
Australian Journal of Language and Literacy
Childhood Education (Association for Childhood Education International, USA)
Classroom
Early Childhood Research Quarterly
Early Education and Development
Electronic Learning
Every Child (Australian Early Childhood Association)
International Journal of Early Years Education
Qualitative Research in Early Childhood Settings
Young Children (National Association for the Education of Young Children, USA)
Websites
Australian Early Childhood Association (AECA)
http://www.aeca.org.au/
The Future of Children (see lists of free publications: Long Term Outcomes of Early Childhood Programs)
http://www.futureofchildren.org
Early Childhood Care and Development (International Resources for Early Childhood Development, available in five languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese)
http://www.ecdgroup.com/
Early Childhood.Com (Articles, Resources, Sharing Ideas, Links)
http://www.earlychildhood.com/
Early Childhood Education
http://www.theideabox.com
Early Childhood Educators' and Family Web Corner
http://users.sgi.net/~cokids/
Early Childhood News
http://www.earlychildhood.com/
Early Childhood Today
http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/ect.htm
OzEdweb
http://www.ozedweb.com
Families and Work Institute (see publications lists, e.g. Rethinking the Brain, New Insights into Early Development)
http://www.familiesandwork.org
International Reading Association
http://www.reading.org
National Association for the Education of Young Children
http://www.naeyc.org