Kindergarten Teachers to Return to State Sector

Research looking into the difficulty early childhood education practitioners have in establishing a genuine partnership with parents. It details tensions in shared decision-making and highlights what enables and hinders partnership in decision-making.

FULL REFERENCE: Zhang, Q. (2016). Whose decision is it? Unpacking shared decision-making as a component of partnership in New Zealand early childhood education centres. NZ Research in Early Childhood Education Journal, Special Issue: Equality and Diversity, 19, 78 – 89.

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ABSTRACT: Despite the partnership rhetoric, early childhood education practitioners have found it difficult to establish a genuine partnership with parents, and this is in part due to the tensions in shared decision-making – one component of partnership. The aim of this study is to investigate approaches to mediating such tensions by teachers and parents. The study is a two-stage design. The pilot stage involved semi-structured interviews with teachers and parents from one kindergarten on their experiences with shared decision-making, which captured typical dilemmatic situations of shared decision-making. The main stage explored a sum total of the approaches to resolving the three dilemmatic situations captured in the pilot stage based on interviews with teachers and parents from two kindergartens and eight childcare centres. Data analysis generated three themes each of which form a continuum of mediatory dimension, and the three interrelated continua form a conceptual model that helps the practitioners to intentionalise and theorise their practice of shared decision-making in local contexts.

Key words: Shared decision-making; partnership; relationships; early childhood.

Introduction 

Researchers have highlighted the importance of teacher-parent partnership (e.g., Epstein, 2001; Stonehouse & Gonzalez-Mena, 2004) which has been considered to be good practice (Blue-Banning, Summers, Frankland, Nelson, & Beegle, 2004). The importance of partnership is also evident in educational policies and legislations (Osher & Osher, 2002; Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR], 2009). However, a genuine partnership is difficult to establish (Murray, Curran, & Zellers, 2008). As a crucial component of partnership (Stonehouse & Gonzalez-Mena, 2004; McGrath, 2007; DEEWR, 2009), shared decision-making has been under-researched, especially in early childhood education (ECE) contexts.