“We lived in a very busy city, with lots of traffic and narrow roads. When I turned up at home, I had crossed many streets that normally I would never have been allowed to cross.
“I managed to win myself a few days of grace and didn’t go back to school the next day. When I did return, they put me in a different class.”
Carmen now specialises in teacher professionalism in the early years and in studying the experiences of infants and toddlers in early childhood centres.
One of the first professors of Early Childhood Studies in the School of Education at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, Carmen has developed courses and undertaken research that have benefited hundreds of teachers. Deeply involved throughout her career in advocacy for a high-quality early childhood sector, she chaired the ministerial advisory group that developed the 10-year Early Learning Strategic Plan launched in December 2019.
The catalyst for her work was Carmen’s own limitations with very young children more than 30 years ago.
“I was a very academic student and loved teaching at secondary school level and the high end of primary school. Then I was given a new entrants’ class in a primary school in Malta. And I was out of my depth.
“It took me quite a while to switch from teaching subjects to understanding that, with young children, you are really opening up the world to them. You need playful approaches and being present to them as people, rather than being there because you understand the subject.
“That was a real insight. To discover my lack of proficiency really challenged me. It started me on the track of thinking, ‘What does it take to make a really good early childhood teacher?’”
“It took me quite a while to switch from teaching subjects to understanding that, with young children, you are really opening up the world to them.”
Carmen and colleagues Dr Anna Strycharz-Banaś (School of Education postdoctoral fellow) and Professor Miriam Meyerhoff (School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) recently won a British Educational Research Association award for a paper on their work.
The paper on negotiating conflict and identity in an early childhood learning centre follows the experiences of three-year-old Kareem (not his real name) during his first six months at an unnamed centre with four teachers in a major New Zealand city.
Using video to analyse activities and dialogue, the researchers identified that Kareem’s sense of belonging came not from a single event or interaction, but through negotiating rules and norms to establish his place and identity.
“Kareem wanted to belong and find a way of being part of the centre. He didn’t have much English when he started but he was drawn to helping the teachers,” says Carmen.
“He really enjoyed getting the positive feedback on that and earned himself an identity as being a helper. From learning to participate, he realised, ‘This is my place too’.”
Carmen and Anna are progressing their Sowing Seeds of Peace project, in which they argue that if children realise their teacher understands their emotions, conflict is defused and the child feels the teacher has entered their world.
“We still have lots of data to write up, and a book we would like to write about trajectories of belonging, but are weaving into that what it might imply for teacher practices,” says Carmen.