Identifying and evaluating teachers’ knowledge in relation to child abuse and neglect: A qualitative study with Australian early childhood teachers

Effectiveness of child protection training for pre-service early childhood educators

“…Reflecting a child's rights based approach to protection, the programme is set within a legal and policy framework and addresses the context and impact of child maltreatment, and the educators' role in recognition, response and reporting. Programme features, also evident in a range of theoretical and legal frameworks (see for example CPSSS and DE, 2007;DENI, 1999;GTCNI, 2007;Lazenbatt, 2010;QAA, 2007;Walsh & Farrell, 2008) Prior to completing the CPQE, and in order to eliminate learning not related to the programme, participants were asked to indicate if they had attended other child protection training during the course of the study. The CPQE was piloted with a cohort of final year ECS students; only minor amendments, in terms of terminology within MCQs, were made.…”

“…While their primary purpose is to contribute to children's learning, development and wellbeing, this places early childhood educators in the unique position to contribute also to early identification and response when developmental needs are compromised through maltreatment and/or trauma (McKee & Accordingly, it is most likely that early childhood educators are the first professionals to detect child protection concerns and are able to alert other professionals, such as social workers or the police (Walsh & Farrell, 2008).…”

Heads You Win, Tails I Lose: The Dilemma Mandatory Reporting Poses for Teachers

“…Available evidence suggests that pre-service child protection preparation of teachers is infrequent, disparate and largely insufficient (Arnold, Maio-Taddeo, & Brennan, 2007;Walsh & Farrell, 2008;Walsh et al, 2011). Arnold, Maio-Taddeo and Brennan (2007) gathered information about child protection training in teacher education courses from 33 Australian universities.…”

Locating child protection in preservice teacher education

“…Elsewhere, some of us have written on the need for discipline-specific knowledge in the teaching of child protection in preservice teacher education (Walsh & Farrell, 2008). Grossman (1995) defined this type of discipline-specific knowledge as content knowledge which essentially includes in-depth knowledge of the subject matter and applied knowledge about how to teach it.…”

“…The analysis does not 'measure' the effectiveness of the approaches used, which would be very difficult to achieve within the context of teacher education programs. Future research could address this, however, by investigating the efficacy of different models or exploring how different emphases produce changes to knowledge, skills and attitudes, and considering how knowledge from different sources is translated into practice (Walsh & Farrell, 2008). Despite these limitations, the case studies provide impetus for further investigation of effective pedagogies in teacher education.…”