Grammar has historically been an important component of language and literacy education. It has been understood and defined in various ways, depending on the different linguistic perspectives throughout history. This chapter discusses two main historical perspectives on grammar: traditional grammar and functional grammar. Both implicitly and explicitly underpin the Australian Curriculum: English. The metalanguage and concepts used in the Curriculum and the National Literacy Learning Progression are a combination of traditional and functional grammar terms. Many traditional grammar terms (e.g. nouns, verbs, subject-verb-object) are used alongside functional grammar terms (e.g. participants, processes, circumstances, noun groups, verb groups) to describe sentence-level components, but functional grammar terms are mostly used to describe text-level components. Therefore, it is crucial for pre-service and in-service teachers to be equipped with explicit knowledge of these two grammar traditions to be able to teach in contemporary English classrooms.

Children are alike and different; the value of multiple perspectives; the complexity of child development; the future of the village; last words.

Human emotional responses are a complex mixture of physiological, cognitive, social and communicative activity. Emotional activity occurs in response to inner and outer worlds and is deeply shaped by the social and cultural environments in which it is embedded. Very young children experience (and learn about) emotions by feeling, understanding and showing them. These sophisticated emotional capabilities lay the groundwork for co-creating social affective relationships with important people in their lives. As the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) states, when educators tune into and try to understand children’s emotions and feelings within respectful and reciprocal relationships, they support their learning, development and wellbeing. Emotional wellbeing can be seen as the glue that holds children’s learning and development together. Similarly, an educator’s emotional wellbeing can bind their professional learning, development and satisfaction together. Without emotional wellbeing, learning and development for both children and educators can be negatively impacted.

In this chapter, we consider vector spaces over a field that is either the real or complex numbers. We shall start from the most general situation of scalar products. We then consider the situations when scalar products are nondegenerate and positive definite, respectively.

The aftermath of civil wars is a fraught experience that does not end once a peaceful resolution is established. The study of civil war termination is vital to shaping our understanding of what factors dictate prospects for long-term peace once armed conflicts conclude. In particular, the types of conflict termination – from peace agreements to ceasefires and outright victories – have a strong bearing upon whether sustainable peace will be established, or violence will recur. Chapter 9 explores the relationship between the nature of civil war termination and the prospects for durable peace. It considers the factors and data provided by, for example, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program on which termination processes succeed and why long-term peace might be evasive for some conflicts. These approaches offer a ripe area of contemporary research and debate when seeking to resolve ongoing conflicts.

Chapter 2 explores economic views of sustainability, defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987). This implies the current population’s needs are met, and future generations have access to at least the same economic opportunities and well-being as today. The systems approach to sustainability optimizes goals across environmental, economic, and social systems. The economists’ capital approach treats nature as capital. Natural, physical, and human capital form a portfolio of assets representing an economy’s wealth, which determines economic opportunities and human welfare. “Weak” sustainability assumes that maintaining and enhancing the overall stock of all capital is sufficient to achieve sustainable development. “Strong” sustainability asserts that preserving essential, irreplaceable, and non-substitutable natural capital is also necessary. The “resource curse” hypothesis and the environmental “Kuznet’s curve” hypothesis (EKC) are explained. Achieving sustainable development requires addressing extreme poverty, inequality, and unsustainable resource use.

Understand how children direct their own learning and learn from others; describe the importance of imitation, play, and instruction; explain how children transfer what they know across different contexts.

The environments we create for the infants and toddlers in early childhood education (ECE) settings are critically important because they shape the daily lived experience of children and educators, and create the conditions for children’s interactions, wellbeing, engagement, learning and development. ECE environments are not neutral, nor are they natural. They are constructed in specific ways for specific purposes and are a representation of our philosophy that ‘speaks’ to children, educators and families about our image of the child, about the value we place on family, culture and community, and about our beliefs regarding teaching and learning. ECE environments are political because they influence the possibilities for interactions, relationships, empowerment and agency.

Chapter 14 evaluates the challenges of SDG 13: Climate Action, which emphasizes the urgent need to combat climate change and its impacts. Two global pollution problems are compared: chemical emissions deplete the ozone layer, which shields us from harmful ultraviolet radiation, and greenhouse gases trap heat, contributing to global climate change. International cooperation and action effectively addressed the emission of ozone-depleting substances. In contrast, current policies to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions are inadequate for limiting global warming to below 2°C, threatening a significant reduction in economic welfare and well-being, especially in developing regions. The social cost of carbon measures future damages associated with a ton of greenhouse gas emissions, discounted to present value, which can inform how much we should “pay” to reduce emissions today. The various policy options for combating climate change, including removing existing policy distortions and addressing prevailing market failures, are explained, and the costs and benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through technology- and nature-based solutions are discussed.

Understand why the cross-cultural perspective is important to understanding children’s development; consolidate what you learned in Chapters 1–5; revisit the ideas you came across in Chapters 1–5 in a cross-cultural context.

Chapter 1 explains how economics plays a crucial role in sustainable development, affecting the well-being of current and future generations. Economics explores how scarce resources are allocated and distributed and analyzes the trade-offs in decision-making. The stock of capital assets, or economic wealth, in an economy determines economic opportunities and individuals’ standard of living and prosperity. Economics recognizes that the economy is embedded in nature and that natural capital contributes to economic welfare in three ways: natural resources provide inputs to production, the environment assimilates waste and pollution, and ecosystems provide essential goods and services. A pessimistic view is that environmental scarcity will limit economic growth, leading to economic collapse. An optimistic perspective is that human creativity, innovation, and technological advancements can avert environmental scarcity, allowing economies to prosper. Economics can help guide society toward a more optimistic development path by creating incentives and safeguards for sustainable use of the environment.