Public seminar on “Quality Teaching and Learning in Early Childhood Education”.

The Hong Kong Chapter of the Pacific Early Childhood Education Research Association (PECERA) organized a seminar on “Quality Teaching and Learning in Early Childhood Education” on Dec 15, 2011. We were honored to have Dr Bonnie Yim and Dr Louise Paatsch shared with us their research studies and insightful findings in this area.

Dr Bonnie Yim is a Senior Lecturer and Course Coordinator at Deakin University, Australia, and is an active consultant on early childhood curriculum in the Asia-Pacific region. She talked to us about a very topical issue: the importance of children’s engagement as an indicator of curriculum effectiveness, and how it can be measured using observation scales in both the East and the West. Dr Louise Paatsch is a Senior Lecturer in the area of English language and literacy at Deakin University. She is a teacher of the deaf with over 20 years of experience, and is currently involved in research on multimodal literacies and teaching literacy pedagogy. She shared with us her analysis of adult-child storybook reading sessions in pre-school programmes, looking at how teachers might support children’s oral language development.