Learning to Teach in a New Era is a foundational text with scope for use throughout an entire initial teacher education (ITE) degree program. The book equips preservice teachers with introductory understanding and skills in the areas of professional knowledge, professional practice and professional engagement. Aligned with the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) and the Australian Curriculum, it contributes to the preparation of those in early childhood, primary and secondary preservice education to meet the Graduate Standards.

This chapter focuses on dance and learning in the early years, presenting a theoretical framework that reflects the changing Australian cultural context for dance. Building upon an earlier model for dance education, culturally responsive pedagogy is an inclusive approach to dance learning from birth to age eight. Key influences are introduced with attention given to aesthetic experiences, early dance relationships, ‘dance-play’, young children’s engagement with technology and the explosion of dance on screen. Consideration is given to established truths about dance and the emerging presence of Indigenous dance within dance education. Examples of dance artists in education settings, along with visual and transcribed examples, are provided, demonstrating how early years educators may support young children’s agency as critically responsive co-creative participants in dance.

The importance of effective communication between the adults in the lives of children and young people has gained prominence in theory, policy and practice, and throughout the different contexts in which students participate. In educational contexts throughout the world, it has been well established that the best outcomes occur for children and youth when the adults in their lives come together to support them. Communication is at the core of interaction and provides the building blocks for positive relationships to emerge and develop. Such relationships enhance learning and support students, their families and teachers to recognise and reach their full potential. The field of communication offers some sound insight into effective communication between adults, including different models that aid in developing a better understanding about the complex nature of communication in education-based settings.

Teachers work across a diverse range of learning environments in an array of different contexts, sectors and settings. Therefore, teachers need to organise and manage particular learning environments according to a number of factors, including the age range, learning needs and number of students they are teaching, the nature of the learning context, and the aims and purpose of the teaching and learning being undertaken. The first section of this chapter explores this theme, and provides insight into how classroom management practices are historically, socially and culturally contextualised. In the second section, we introduce some of the theoretical principles and practical issues associated with establishing and maintaining positive, supportive, safe and inclusive learning environments that encourage all students to participate fully in educational opportunities. Theories are of little use in classroom management if they exist only at the level of abstract thought, so we explore ways in which theory can be enacted in practice across learning contexts.

The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST), as introduced in Chapter 1, require that teachers not only know the content and how to teach it, but also know their students and how they learn. This chapter introduces the concept of pedagogy and examines the centrality of relationships between teacher, student and content, as a defining feature of pedagogy. Pedagogy is the most outward expression of how a teacher considers that teaching and learning best take place. Teachers should always base their decisions on ‘how’ to teach on their understanding of how the students in their class learn best. This involves a number of considerations, such as their stage of development (physical, cognitive and social), individual interests and preferred ways of learning. A number of different pedagogical frameworks are explored in the chapter, which concludes with a discussion of some of the key elements of exemplary teaching and how these elements are embedded in pedagogy.

Planning for learning is essential for creating environments conducive to deep learning and to developing student understandings. Standard 3 of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) specifies the need for all graduate teachers to be able to ‘plan for and implement effective teaching and learning’. Quality planning involves the systematic use of feedback data to design activities that encourage the assimilation and synthesis of information, leading to the creation of new understandings. Student learning should always be the goal.

The objective of this chapter is to define socio-dramatic play from a cultural-historical perspective and to describe how teachers can become co-players with children in their play. To do this we present case studies from research and a pedagogical toolbox to support children’s participation, learning and development. The chapter begins by outlining children’s socio-dramatic play using a cultural-historical perspective to focus on interactions in shared play. In socio-dramatic play, imagination and creativity are central as children create narratives together. Play creates conditions for children to express and construct meaning with others and to become co-players in a shared imagined world. Adults in early childhood settings traditionally support children’s play by planning, resourcing and observing, although their role as co-player is less understood.

Education changes lives. It opens doors and provides us with the skills and dispositions to achieve what we believe in. But not all students flourish in their educational settings. The ways students experience their education are shaped by the differences among them. Despite many years of equity-based reform in schools, the children most at risk of educational alienation, failure or withdrawal in the third decade of the twenty-first century are, for the most part, the same children who were most at risk 50 and 100 years ago. Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, rural and isolated areas, non-dominant cultural, language, or religious groups, students with disabilities, and many who don’t fit the stereotypes associated with a particular subject area, gender or culture have been shown to experience schools as places of alienation, not as places of growth, opportunity and learning. Issues of sexual and gender identity, mental health, and instability of citizenship, housing, and employment combine to make the situation even more complex.

This chapter explores young children’s semiosis (meaning-making) and transformations when immersed with artworks that were made by professional artists. Paintings and sculptures (static, moving and sound-making) ‘resided’ (were installed) in their classroom for two school terms. The first part of the chapter provides a brief context for how artworks as mediating tools elicited children’s meaning-making through individual and social activity and describes how the children’s communication and representation of meaning was multimodal. The second part of the chapter delves into Illustration of Practice 7.1 based on recent research, where semiosis was studied through two key processes: (1) noticing, or becoming aware of signs within artworks, based on an individual’s perceptions, knowledge and emotions; and (2) immersion into the artworks. Immersion involved mediating signs through perezhivanie (a cognitive-embodied-emotive encounter that requires working-through) and transmediating (translating meaning from one mode of expression to another). Illustration of Practice 7.1 highlights how young children’s representation and communication of meaning are socially mediated, cognitive, affective and embodied.

This chapter provides theoretical and practical examples of how children’s meaning-making is enriched through teachers’ mediation. It shifts attention away from a traditional literacy perspective to a semiotic orientation that honours young children’s symbolic communication through art, music, play and dance. Exemplars are given of how children’s sign-making practices in the arts are of equal significance, and are the precursors, to sign-making in language and literacy. Indeed, the arts are children’s ‘first literacies’ because they help children find their way into the sign systems of reading and writing. Illustration of Practice 8.1 demonstrates the notable link between playing and drawing, and how children cross between graphic, narrative and embodied modes to communicate meaning. Illustration of Practice 8.2 foregrounds art making in a Reggio-inspired preschool classroom. Concluding sections focus on the building blocks of meaning-making, with an emphasis on its co-creation and the importance of documenting and interpreting children’s creative processes and learning.

As a novice teacher, it is important for students to be aware that they are entering a profession with a set of guiding policy frameworks to inform their knowledge, practice and engagement. Chapter 1 introduced a range of data snapshots that provide insight into current Australian and global education systems in the twenty-first century. Data are increasingly used to inform policy, but policy is also shaped by many other complex and multifaceted factors operating across both local and global contexts. This chapter further examines the education landscape and looks at how policy is shaped by, and in turn shapes, our educational thinking, work, teaching practices and future research.

This chapter describes how conceptual learning is mediated by interactions, the environment and a range of semiotic modes. Using a case study approach, Illustration of Practice 3.1 presents four-year-old children’s dance-play and drawing-telling as exemplars of powerful forms of meaning-making and communication. The nexus between theory and practice is illustrated through an innovative model that supports children’s creative dance improvisation and experimentation, and links to graphic and narrative modes. Children’s sophisticated levels of thinking, feeling and relating are addressed, and the role of the teacher is foregrounded with regards to supporting transformative learning outcomes for young children.