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Understanding the ways in which educational and social contexts influence children鈥檚 involvement and development as learners is critical to the pedagogy and practice of early educators. A critical role of early childhood educators involves research, observation and documentation in order to support children鈥檚 learning and to inform curricular and pedagogic planning. Early childhood educators typically draw upon a range of pedagogical documentation and data to gain insight on how a child thinks, what a child鈥檚 interests are, what their abilities are, and how they connect reciprocally with others and their environment. Observational, analytical and reporting skills, together with the interpretation of data, are foundational to quality educational practice, enabling educators to identify potential barriers and challenges to children鈥檚 learning and involvement, to plan appropriately challenging learning opportunities, and to report effectively on children鈥檚 learning progress.

This course draws on sociocultural theories, social justice frameworks and anti-bias approaches that consider children's development as learners as being shaped by a range of historical, cultural and social contexts within and beyond early education and care settings. The course gives particular emphasis to factors within educational contexts - outdoor and indoor learning environments, playgrounds, peer and pedagogic relationships - and how these contribute to children's access, involvement, engagement and development as learners. Social, relational and contextual factors that support children's full involvement and learning will be considered. Focus will be given to the role of educators in accurately identifying and managing any possible challenges, in order to ensure that all facets of children's educational experiences contribute to positive learning and development. Pre-service educators will learn how to interpret data, as well as learning skills of observation, analysis and reporting as the basis for communicating with parents pertaining to their child's educational experience. They will be introduced to a cycle of professional inquiry and develop knowledge and a rationale for gathering accurate information on and with children, which is the foundation for planning and organising appropriate learning opportunities for learners and for teachers' own professional learning needs.

The course objectives define the student learning outcomes for a course in accordance with the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership鈥檚 (AITSL) Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST). On successful completion of this course pre-service educators should be able to:

1. develop an informed philosophy to development, involvement and learning by re-examining development domains through sociocultural-historical theory, a contextual lens, a social justice framework and anti-bias approach (APST 1.1);
2. examine a range of assessment approaches and strategies for their inclusion of the contextual factors which may influence the development, involvement and learning of children, and understand the purpose of keeping accurate and reliable records (APST 1.2, 5.1, 5.5);
3. implement a range of observational techniques to document children鈥檚 development, involvement and learning and plan for moderation practices which support consistent and comparable judgements (APST 5.1, 5.3);
4. analyse and interpret observational records of children鈥檚 development, involvement and learning with reference to current theory and research and demonstrate understanding of the purpose of providing timely and appropriate feedback to learners and strategies for reporting to parents/carers (APST 5.2, 5.4, 5.5);
5. plan learning experiences and select suitable resources, including ICTS, that provide achievable learning goals for children based on analysis of observational and assessment records for the purposes of informal and informal data gathering and assessing development and learning (APST 3.1, 3.4, 5.4).