Textbooks and Teaching Resources: A Case Study from the Early Childhood Classroom - Australia

In 2008, the Australian Federal and State Governments developed new educational goals to support and guide the development of a new Australian National Curriculum, which is to be implemented in 2013 in all Australian educational settings.As part of this Australian National Curriculum, the early childhood sector is to follow an Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) that reflects a play based, negotiated curriculum that sharpens the focus of intended learning outcomes in a framework of classroom pedagogy and practice. This new national curriculum requires major structural reforms inearly childhood education which will affect the roles of teachers and families and their expectations of teaching and learning in early childhood education settings. The development of the Early Years Learning Framework, as part of the Australian national curriculum, has presented an opportunity for publishers to produce teaching and learning materials to support the new curriculum and the pedagogy underpinning it. This paper will explore a case study centred on how early childhood teachers resource their teaching and learning and plan the use of teaching and learning resources. The paper will use two research methodologies to provide data for this case study. The paper will use the TEXTOR observation tool (Walker & Horsley, 2003) to gather data on the resources used in the observed lessons. The case study will also use the Learning Design Sequence (Selander, 2007) framework to explore the planning and learning design processes that the teacher used in the preparation of the unit of the work and the way that the teacher prepared teaching and learning materials to support the teaching and learning plans. The research focused on methodologies that involved classroom observations and teacher interviews, and provided data on the exploration of the effectiveness of teaching and learning materials used in the early childhood classroom. The results from the study indicated that publisher and teacher consultation is essential to the creation of valuable, relevant, skill based teaching and learning materials that complement the pedagogical approach of the teacher and align with curriculum requirements of the new Australian national curriculum