essential to the quality of the curriculum and to children’s learning. The quality of
the curriculum is an ongoing concern for policy, theory, and practice—as is clearly
evident in recent media coverage. See for example the series of articles on the
quality of ECE in Aotearoa New Zealand, beginning with the article Early
Childhood Services Red-Flagged(Johnston 2015 ). This series of articles raised
significant concerns about teacher knowledge of the curriculum, of child devel-
opment, and of culturally responsive practices. Such concerns raise points that are
often associated with the benefits of teacher education for quality ECE experiences
for all learners.
The research conducted by organisations such as the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development [OECD] suggests that early childhood teaching
teams regularly change as a result of high levels of workforce attrition. There is
little research into these changing knowledge environments. Clearly, however, it is
of significant value to provide evidence of how teachers can be attuned to and
promote strong collaborative knowledge environments, and then draw on this
evidence within teacher education. It is not only changing staff roles that impact on
the knowledge environment, we are also concerned with how stable teaching teams
construct and share knowledge in times of constant change. How is the ongoing
professional learning of teachers integrated into the collective knowledge of a
teaching team, and what is the relationship with teacher education?
In teaching, strong teams respond to fastflows of information from multiple
sources (academic journals, government publications, professional development
providers, and more) designed to inform teacher knowledge. Significantly though,
little is known about how teachers negotiate thatflow, how they incorporate it into
their team, and how the flow of knowledge impacts on the team dynamics.
Following discourses of educational futures (see, for instance, Bolstad et al. 2012 )
and the strategic direction for twenty-first century learning (New Zealand
Parliament 2012 ), an essential dynamic of future teaching teams will be their
professional capacity to make sense of theseflows and respond to the values and
aspirations of the teaching community.
We are intrigued with the ways knowledge is shared, shifted and constructed
during the daily work of early childhood teachers—specifically with how teacher
education impacts upon the experience of theseflows of knowledge, how both
beginning and experienced teachers reflect upon and discuss construction and
sharing of knowledge, how knowledge relationships and environments are formed
and altered, and how these relationships and environments impact on the curricu-
lum. Such knowledge might include knowledge of child development, subject
knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and knowledge of the children and
families. Teacher education is a critical space for engaging collaboratively in
exploring whatflows of knowledge generate, and what knowledge relationships,
and knowledge environments,doto the curriculum (Bolstad et al. 2012 ). These are
the concerns that, we argue, would benefit from further research.
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