At the kindergarten stage, storytelling activities are a proven intervention that promotes children’s vocabulary, reading, oral expression and writing development. The purpose of this study was to examine children’s emotional engagement and cooperation during storytelling by early childhood teachers. This study adopted a qualitative research method with a sample of children (aged 5-6 years) in an inclusive K3 kindergarten in China. Data were collected through video recordings of storytelling activities. Conversation Analysis (CA) and Multimodal Interaction Analysis (MIA) were used as analytical tools for teacher-child emotional engagement and collaboration in storytelling activities. The study focuses on the entertaining nature of teachers’ storytelling organisation, storytelling teaching styles and children’s participation (verbal and non-verbal). The study found that teachers used body language, props and vocal tones to stimulate children’s emotional engagement and cooperation. Children demonstrated their understanding of the story by actively answering questions, catering to body movements, choral singing and creating story segments to achieve co-participation. The data from this study form initial insights into the deepening of children’s aesthetic literacy and socialisation through storytelling activities. This research can further prompt teachers to focus on diversity in the organisation of storytelling activities, as well as help children to immerse themselves in early literacy through their emotional appraisal of story events or characters.

Generative Artificial intelligence (AI) art is increasingly integrated into higher education (HE). While its creative potential has been discussed, its actual pedagogical impact and implications for educational equity remain underexplored. This study conducts a systematic review to evaluate how AI art has been applied in HE settings, what teaching and learning outcomes it supports, and what structural barriers exist in its integration. Using the PRISMA framework, 65 peer-reviewed articles published Scopus and Web of Science. The included studies were synthesized thematically and find that generative AI tools are being used to support ideation, multimodal expression, and interdisciplinary projects. However, barriers such as limited faculty training and unclear evaluation standards may hinder equitable access and long-term integration. This review contributes a conceptual framework for understanding the integration of generative AI art, highlighting opportunities and structural limitations. It offers insights for curriculum designers, educators aiming to support responsible, creative, and inclusive uses of AI in arts education.

Preschool literacy (PL) is a critical period in the development of children’s literacy skills, which has a significant impact on their reading ability and academic achievement. In this context, there is a fragmentation of knowledge as PL involves different disciplines such as education, psychology, and linguistics. This is despite the existence of a large body of literature on PL. However, many studies focus on specific topics, which makes it difficult for researchers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current status, research hotspots, and trends in PL research, leaving a knowledge gap. Therefore, this study adopts a quantitative research approach for the literature data between 1992 and 2022 for a period of thirty years. This study used arithmetic in Microsoft Excel and bibliometric visualization tools, including VOSviewer and Biblioshiny. The aim was to analyze the current situation, trends, and future development of literacy at the preschool level, providing a scientific basis for preschool practice and policy development. An analysis was performed on 1208 screened documents from the Scopus database in Excel, resulting in the identification of annual publication trends, the 20 most cited documents, the 15 most productive authors, the top 10 institutions, and the 20 countries with the highest number of publications. Visual collaborative networks and co-occurrence analysis maps via VOSviewer and Bibliometrix were also conducted. The study found that the number of research papers published on PL has shown a steadily increasing trend, that the United States is a pioneer in the field of preschool literacy and is increasingly collaborating and researching with other countries, and that international connections are growing between publications and authors. Furthermore, preschool institutions, teachers, and families have positive attitudes towards preschool literacy, as reflected in theoretical research, teaching practice, and sustainable knowledge construction. Meanwhile, the findings of this study also revealed that new PL research has been extended to emerging literacy skills, family-based literacy models, and literacy intervention models. Future researchers can benefit from this study by increasing collaborative research that can sustainably add to the body of knowledge and improving the sustainability of PL.

The research on teaching scaffolding for preschool children’s oral language development (OLD) has become an important topic in the academic world. However, there remains a lack of evidence-based research on the integration of scaffolding strategies integrated into creative art contexts to support children’s creative expression and language production. In this study, a qualitative case study was conducted to analyze the non-participatory observation and artwork analysis of five-year-old children’s drawing activities in a kindergarten in China based on socio-cultural and scaffolding theories. Three types of core scaffolding strategies were summarized. The findings reveal that the three strategies work together dynamically within the children’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): (1) the visual prompt strategy enriches the vocabulary diversity of metaphors, adjectives, and ordinal words; (2) dialogic narrative co-construction effectively improves narrative coherence across exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution; and (3) emotional engagement strategies foster a safe expressive environment, promoting the integration of affective vocabulary with intrinsic motivation. Accordingly, a three-dimensional integrated “visual-linguistic-emotional” scaffolding model was constructed, emphasizing the practical guidelines of simultaneous scaffolding and gradual scaffolding withdrawal during the warm-up, creation, and sharing sessions of the drawing activity. This study expands the application of scaffolding theory in unstructured art contexts, and provides a systematic practical framework for the design of cross-contextual language support strategies and teacher training in preschool education.