Helen May
Helen May underwent training as a primary school teacher back in the mid 1960s. Towards the beginning of her career, Helen May particularly taught children aged 5-6 year old. Later, when Helen May had her own children, she started a career in childcare later on becoming the coordinator of the Victoria University creche for five years. In the year 1987, Helen May started working as a teacher in education at Hamilton Teachers’ College. Later on, she became a teacher at the University of Waikato. At some point in the early 1990s Helen May coordinated with Margaret Carr on the improvement of Te Whaariki. This was considered as the first national curriculum strategy for New Zealand. Furthermore, in the year 1995, she was selected as the first New Zealand professorial Chair concerned with the Early Childhood Education at Victoria University Wellington. She also gained the position as a professor of Education later on becoming as the Head of Faculty of Education at the University of Otago. Recently in the year 2007 she was selected as the Dean of the College of Education of the University of Otago. Helen has talked about and already releases several publications in the field of early childhood curriculum as well as about the educational history and policy in the earlier years. This paper seeks to analyze and discuss Helen May’s relevance to the study and development of early childhood taking a look at her works, conditions and other relevant affairs which contributed to the mentioned field.
Helen May and her works
Helen May’s considerate history concerning early childhood studies in New Zealand sums up the fundamental nature of the expansion of early childhood services, and associated educational and political swings, from the year 1947 up until the year 2000. It is a follow-up to The Discovery of Early Childhood wherein Helen May provides an analysis of the concepts concerned with care and education in organizations in both New Zealand and Europe (May, 1997). The photograph on the cover page of Helen May’s Politics in the Playground which was taken way back in 1987 goes in accordance with the theme of her publication. Put adjacent to in the photograph is an infant (Helen May’s) on a swing, seen over by the Prime Minister during that time, Rt. Hon. David Lange, when he visited the childcare centre located in Hamilton, New Zealand. Helen May’s work summarizes and examines the postSecond World War movement in New Zealand for the support of the state to preschool/ early childhood education. Helen May discusses the following in the beginning of her work:
Helen May points out the movement there are the see-saws, swings as well as roundabouts in an apparent playing field of educational, political, as well as social opinion on the finest location for the nurturing as well as education of children, and a century of liberation of women from the limitations of one’s home.
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