Chapter 3 introduces the reader to the Australian Curriculum: Science (Version 9), starting with a brief outline of the history of the Australian Curriculum. The three curriculum strands of Science Understanding, Science as Human Endeavour and Science Inquiry are described, along with how these could be woven together to provide a framework for developing experiential, connected and sequential science learning experiences for children in the early years. The seven general capabilities and three cross-curriculum priorities are presented, along with examples that relate to science in the early years. Case studies provide an insight into how the Australian Curriculum: Science can be implemented.

World culture theory

Central to world culture theory (sometimes called world polity theory, world systems theory or world system analysis) is the claim that the development and emergence of education systems, policies and practices within nation-states is isomorphic and can be explained by wider systemic changes occurring at the international and global level where ‘rationalised myths’ (Silova and Brehm, 2015, p 12) perpetuated by world culture scripts/models come to bear upon and influence national and subnational policy contexts. In this sense, world culture theorists are less concerned with the role of unique path tendencies, organisational logics and value systems to the formation of education systems, nor do they take seriously the context-sensitive, micro-political strategies through which national policy frameworks are adapted in the context of regional and local developments and the contradictions and tensions flowing from these untidy convergences and problematic alignments. Instead, world culture theorists adopt the lens of methodological globalism (or ‘regionalisation’ and ‘Europeanisation’) to locate and explain the development of education systems according to trends considered to be generalisable and evidence of policy borrowing and policy transfer.

However, in order for a country to be amenable to statistical capture within this model of generalisation, it must have ‘already committed itself to the modern nation-state institutional apparatus’ (Rappleye, 2015, p 59) and therefore modelled itself according to a meta-policy or globally circulating discourse shared by other countries, that is, ‘world models [that] are a derivative of the dominant global position of the West’ (Rappleye, 2015, p 66). One implication of this is that world culture theory is often accused of normative commitments to epistemic communities and organisations originating in the Global North, giving rise to postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism of world culture theory (see Takayama, 2015). This might include a narrow technical focus on using metrics, performance indicators and output measurements to calculate teaching quality, school management, inputs and infrastructure, and learner preparation. In turn, the adoption of these policy instruments makes it possible for schools and school systems to be located within relations of equivalence where they are made to appear to be comparable and commensurate with each other.

Chapter 1 starts with examples of typical child-instigated explorations in science, highlighting the importance of EC education as a whole and of developmental and cognitive psychology. This chapter describes children’s wonder and curiosity towards the world as it outlines what science looks like in the early years. As part of the definition of science, the chapter introduces conceptual, procedural and attitudinal science knowledge, and looks at how these relate to young children’s learning of science.

Chapter 11 focuses on EC STEM education. It describes what STEM looks like in EC settings and identifies ways in which STEM elements can be incorporated into children’s learning. The chapter describes how STEM-related play can enhance young children’s appreciation of the world and provides a range of examples that have potential for STEM learning. Digital tools and applications for STEM learning are featured in this chapter.

Community

The concept of community in education may refer to a wide range of formal and informal arrangements or collective movements, from classrooms, parent forums and management groups to professional, discursive and epistemic groupings that embody multiple histories and contexts. These collectives may be grounded in culture, policy making, science, nation-states or economic systems. In addition to communities being thought of as entities spanning scales from the local to the global, they may also be empirically studied as arrangements that are subject to multiple national and transnational influences. Increasingly, researchers have turned their attention to critical questions about which communities are acknowledged and made visible in research and which ones remain invisible or even marginalised. This includes a related focus on which communities influence agenda-setting and policy and how. The critique of human-centrism (anthropocentrism) in education research, for example, demonstrates how nonhuman communities affect and are affected by policy.

One of the most popular definitions of community can be traced to the seminal work of Anderson (1991) and his historical investigations of the emergence of nationalism and nation-states. Anderson (1991) describes the nation as an imagined horizontal comradeship irrespective of inequality and exploitation experienced by its members. Here, Anderson (1991) examines the different historical processes (including education) that create the conditions of possibility for these imagined communities to take shape. The nation as a community can be considered anonymous in the sense that its members will never meet all other members. Yet, according to Anderson (1991), these members imagine the nation as something confined to a finite space known as the sovereign state. This notion of ‘imagined communities’ has emerged within empirical studies beyond any singular interest in nationalism, following Anderson's (1991) claim that communities can be ‘distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (p 7) and that many communities will be defined by imagination because they are temporally and spatially unfixed. Stables (2003), for example, characterises the school as an imagined discursive community, one that is mobilised by students and teachers but also by those who are not directly connected to it, such as politicians.

Chapter 9 highlights the importance of play in young children’s science learning. During playful events, children can explore, discover, investigate and experiment, thus promoting critical thinking and scientific inquiry. Play pedagogies that promote children’s learning through playful activities are discussed. Four case studies are presented to highlight how EC professionals can encourage children’s scientific exploration and thinking through play.

Leadership

Educational leadership is a field that draws on differing disciplinary backgrounds with distinctive epistemologies that produce knowledge claims that are arguably mutually incompatible. Leadership knowledge intersects with policy in diverse ways that reflect its underpinning epistemology. Here, specifically, the field may be broadly understood as composed of functionalist and critical parts (see Gunter [2016] for a more detailed mapping). Functionalist scholars tend to locate their work in the school improvement and/or effectiveness tradition (see, for example, Leithwood and Jantzi, 2005). This draws on a positivist epistemology that is often explicitly atheoretical or even anti-theoretical (Courtney et al, 2018); the legitimacy of such research lies in its unmediated responsiveness to questions regarding ‘what works’ in education. Courtney et al (2021a) describe how functionalist researchers largely render professional practice through leadership models denoted by adjectives such as ‘transformational’, ‘distributed’ and ‘system’, which they deploy in an often unproblematised and normative manner. Functionalist assumptions include that leadership is an ontologically valid concept and is necessary to improve education, whose goal is to improve students’ outcomes in standardised tests. Here, the leadership style/model is operationalised through the leader's vision, which inspires and motivates followers in ways that take little account of context. This decontextualisation is purposive: it enables an illusory universalism that underpins a leadership industry (Gunter, 2012). Privileged models change over time in a way that responds to state political agendas. For example, transformational leadership was imported from business into the field of education where it comprised a key mechanism for education reforms internationally. Charisma is integral to, but implicit within, this broader transformational model, with its focus on the single ‘heroic’ leader (see Courtney, 2021a). As heroism failed, the focus moved to distributed and then system models, all of which focus instrumentally on delivery and performance. Functionalist research into educational leadership is designed to be amenable to policy making through its claimed capacity to produce solutions to complex problems, for example.

The functionalist part of the field can be contrasted with the critical (Gunter, 2016; Courtney et al, 2021a; Courtney and McGinity, 2022). Drawing on social constructionism, critical scholars may problematise the very existence of leadership, noting that conceptual distinctiveness arrives only with the addition of the sort of adjectives mentioned earlier (Gronn, 2003).

Chapter 8 provides insight into science learning that incorporates Indigenous Australian science knowledge and the roles of both culture and Indigenous Australian Ways of Doing. Social protocols, which underpin Indigenous Australian Knowledge, particularly in science, are discussed to provide background to non-Indigenous EC professionals. This chapter describes principles and strategies for EC professionals to embed Indigenous science into their settings. Cases of how practitioners have done this in various settings are presented.

Queer policy analysis

Queer policy analysis comes from queer theory, which itself draws on diverse intellectual and activist strands, not all of which are internally coherent. This might not matter; queer theory's principal definitional criterion is that normative definitions are to be resisted and problematised, including its own, and so ambiguity is a central feature. The field's semantic adoption of ‘queering’ to complement ‘queer theory’ reflects and results from the conceptual instability of the noun form. Using ‘queer’ as a verb foregrounds a particular disposition that produces oppositional, subversive and/or liberatory actions. In this entry, attention is drawn to some of the major ways in which queering has been operationalised in thinking about and practising education research and policy. These strands are considered alongside their conceptual antecedents and contributors, as well as the consequent implications for policy.

In an interview, Connell (Rasmussen et al, 2014) provides a ‘capsule definition’ (p 340) of queer theory that may usefully be unpacked and developed:

First, therefore, queer theory problematises binaries. Here, it reveals its activist foundations in the lesbian and gay movement which contained the first such binaries to be disrupted. Foucault (1976) argued that turning ‘homosexual’ from an act into an identity was purposively undertaken in order to construct and constrict those so named as objects of power in abjection of the normatively positioned yet fragile heterosexual. Drawing on Foucault's (1976) deconstructionist arguments as well as on Derrida's (Derrida and Houdebine, 1973) insights concerning binary oppositions, queer theory aimed to destabilise the ontological labels of gay, lesbian or straight, as well as to problematise their compulsory association with particular ideas about masculine and feminine (the heteronormative matrix). This strand concerns most obviously identities, particularly relating to sex and sexuality (see, for example, Courtney, 2014), especially in relation to individual experiences and lives.

Elite

Identifying putative elites is a key but problematic task because observing that a sub-set of a population functions as an elite insofar as policy formulation is concerned is easier than identifying who the members of that sub-set are. It seems that elite identification is a product of the intellectual and conceptual framework that is deployed to do so. Kakabadse et al (2011), for instance, typologise elite identity according to four theories. In classical theory, elites are composed of ‘people who have the highest indices in their branch of activity (“the strongest, the most energetic and the most capable”) within society’ (Kakabadse et al, 2011, p 3), which means that the constitution of elite groups is liable to change. In critical theory, elites are a product of ‘access to wealth and power’ (Kakabadse et al, 2011, p 3), which makes them hard to displace. In democratic theory, elites are those whose acquired skills are deployed or deployable for the common good. Elites can consequently be removed through democratic processes. In network theory, elites are constituted through ‘strong social, political or professional ties’, and so membership is ‘evolving [and] dynamic’ (Kakabadse et al, 2011, p 3). There is considerable literature that identifies a shift from economic through corporate to education elites, whereby actors made powerful through and within a capitalist landscape move their attention to the framing of public policy in ways that suit their interests. This means that elite actors are not obliged to directly participate in policy making but they may influence it through supranational institutions like the World Trade Organization (Gaus and Hall, 2017). This phenomenon, like its underlying neoliberal ideology, is global yet enacted locally by those acting in ways that reproduce a neoliberal orthodoxy (Courtney, 2017b; McGinity, 2017). In practice, it is not possible to disentangle the reproduction of neoliberalism from neoconservatism, whose definition foregrounds the reproduction of advantage and so is central to any discussion of elites.

Chapter 7 presents an introduction and overview of inclusive teaching within the context of science in the early years. Inclusive teaching is about proactive, intentional and purposeful decisions being made by the EC professional to allow all students to reach their full potential. Inclusive practices, such as differentiation and the Universal Design for Learning framework, are described. Case studies are presented that provide opportunities to identify inclusive practices in science teaching and learning.

Visual methods

Visual methods and visual analysis refer to tools and technologies used for generating and analysing data about the social world. Typically, visual methods make use of non-verbal modes of representation and/communication in order to supplement or compensate for traditional verbal or text-based approaches to data generation and sense making. Visual methods make use of a wide range of digital and non-digital artefacts to generate data about the social world, including maps, diagrams, photographs, video footage, collage and drawings (Radley and Taylor, 2003; Copeland and Agosto, 2012; Wilkins, 2012). Visual methods such as photo elicitation, auto-photography and participatory mapping are therefore particularly useful in creative and arts-based research and learning but also when working with research participants who, for whatever reason, cannot engage in conventional forms of data generation which rely on speech or written forms of communication. Through enabling people to communicate their perspectives and experiences through visual forms of representation, visual methods help to generate new knowledge and forms of meaning making, especially among ‘hard to reach’ groups (Delgado, 2015). In some instances, visual methods have been used to great effect as a supplement to interviews as a way to prompt memory and reduce misunderstandings between interviewer and interviewee (Harper, 2002). Central to visual methods, however, is an appreciation for the context in which visual artefacts of any description (maps, photographs, drawings) are produced, with the implication that visual artefacts cannot be read as neutral or unmediated reflections of ‘objective truth’ but rather emerge through an interpretive framework made possible by the producer and viewer.

In the 20th century, visual anthropologists primarily used documentary photography and film as supplementary artefacts for supporting empirical claims about the nature of the social world (Edwards, 1992), in what can be described as ‘realist ethnography’. In the 1970s and 1980s, these documentary and realist traditions of early visual methods came to be displaced by postmodernist, critical theory and cultural studies perspectives and concerns about the discursive composition and effects of the visual image, specifically its social and political function as a vehicle for affirming, contesting and concealing claims to power and ideology.

Fast policy

Since the 1980s, political and social scientists have been documenting the technological, economic and cultural effects of globalisation. Globalisation has given rise to a multitude of ontological and economic possibilities, from instantaneous communication to cross-border trade of physical commodities. Globalisation has therefore been studied at various scales and levels, from microqualitative studies observing the impact of resettlement on refugees and the emergence of hybridised local cultural identities, to macro-quantitative studies examining the impact of transnational capital mobility, trade liberalisation and international outsourcing on national industries.

Another significant impact of globalisation has been the intensification and compression of policy movement around the globe, held together by the involvement of ‘intermediary’ actors in the brokering, mediation and translation of relationships and exchanges between governments and agencies. This enables a range of intergovernmental and interagency pragmatic policy borrowing and fast-tracking policy decision-making to occur. The result is the translocal and cross-scalar flow and insertion of new global policy networks at the subnational and national level made possible by the expansion of multilateral organisations and international political and economic unions, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the European Union.

On the one hand, the increased mobility of policy ideas across the globe is, according to Peck and Theodore (2015), evidence of ‘fast-policy regimes’ (p 3) or ‘compressed policymaking moments’ (p xvi). These are mobile, fluid, transnational policy spaces in which intermediary actors and agencies spanning transnational corporations, philanthropic organisations, professional bodies and business communities work through long-distance interconnections to broker new kinds of cross-national political and institutional connections. Their aim is to influence and profit financially from the packaging and selling of ‘what works’ or ‘best practice’ solutions to different countries (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2016). While fast policy can give the impression of policy ideas moving seamlessly across national borders and subnational spaces more or less intact, Peck and Theodore (2015) warn against ‘reading off’ these processes as evidence that policy ideas are recontextualised and implemented according to interests or motivations that can be traced to some principle design, singular logic or predefined sequencing.

Ontology

Ontology is the naming and categorisation of reality, or that which is. Pluralising it to ontologies aligns with post-positivist insights into the multiple and contingent conditions of reality. Ontological statements, including classifications, about what is draw on how we think we know (see entry on ‘Epistemology’). Each of these two concepts requires and shapes the other. For example, an epistemological approach that draws on material semiotics ‘argues that the practice of relations shapes and forms the actors caught up in them’, that ontological realities ‘are done in practices’ (Law and Singleton, 2014, p 384, original emphasis) or enactment. Since different actors engage in different practices, this means that in material semiotics, what might have been thought of as an ontologically singular entity or phenomenon from a positivist perspective, is instead necessarily plural. This is compounded by the insight that even over little time, the context within which practice takes place also changes, which in turn produces new realities. That which is, or the ontological object, can never be singular in material semiotics and similar epistemologies. This multiplicity goes beyond the interpretive, where it is understood that a single event will be experienced and interpreted in many ways that themselves acquire an ontological status; it suggests that what is being interpreted is already ontologically multiple.

Asking what education policy is may consequently be seen as a more ontologically challenging and politically charged question than it at first appears, bringing to the fore issues including reality versus representation. That is to say, policy-as-relational-practice (social reality) and policy-as-text (representation) are ontologically more imbricated than they are identical, and it is evidence of power functioning effectively and teleologically to have them understood as reducible to one another, and/or as the text having privileged status over embodied practices.

The power to impose ontological understandings of what policy is constitutes a power over reality, including how subjects make sense of themselves, and so ontological framings are simultaneously largely implicit in policy and policy studies and also fundamental to the creation and reproduction of epistemic paradigms, their communities and claims.

Chapter 10 explores how young children’s science identity can be enhanced when thoughtful pedagogy is provided by the EC professional. The first part of this chapter presents the definitions of science identity and pedagogy, followed by an exploration of the relationship between EC professional beliefs and what they teach. The second half of the chapter presents two case studies to illustrate pedagogical practices associated with the learning and teaching of science with young children, using play as a medium, in order to enhance their science identity.