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From a crisis management tool to proactive death education in Swedish preschools Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2024-04-20 Tünde Puskás, Anita Andersson, Virginia Slaughter
This study is part of a larger project with the general aim of developing the ability of preschool practitioners to reflect critically on their practice related to children's grief and questions about death. The article is based on six focus-group interviews and a workshop during which preschool practitioners reflected on and worked with a national crisis management tool: the crisis box. Through the
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Constructing the space of transition within the early childhood education and care pedagogical environment: A child's resources and positions Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Raija Raittila, Mari Vuorisalo, Niina Rutanen
This article examines how the space of transition is constructed within and linked to the early childhood education and care (ECEC) pedagogical environment during a child's first transition to ECEC. In many studies, this transition has been characterised as a stressful situation in which to cope successfully with the demands of the new environment. In this study, the focus is on the construction of
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Polyphonic storying with human and more-than human co-collaborators Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Angela Molloy Murphy, Will Parnell, Larisa Callaway-Cole, Elizabeth Quintero
We believe that our most powerful approach to defy the erasure of people, knowledges, and open ways of living and being is generative storying together with children and families, educators, and the more-than-human. Storying takes many forms and is about more than overcoming coloniality or the earthly survival of humans. It is about taking a stance with a “citizenship of strangers” to compose more
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Examining the ecology of preschool inclusion in New York City: A mixed-methods study underway Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Sarika S. Gupta, Gregory A Cheatham, Natasha Strassfeld, Xiaohan Zhu, Cristina Medellin, Mark Nagasawa
Our team was awarded a grant by a private organization in partnership with a local research network to examine disparities in the special education referrals and services provided to young children in New York City (NYC). Our convergent mixed-methods study is exploring how the NYC preschool ecology—consisting of process, people and their positionalities, and practices—influences teachers’ decisions
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Agonist relationships in the toddler classroom: Exploring the connection between conflict and care Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Cassie Sorrells, Samara Madrid Akpovo
Dominant Western discourse in early childhood education frames conflict as a disruptive and damaging force that is antithetical to the “ideal” classroom environment. However, critical early childhood scholars have begun to reconceptualize the role of conflict in early childhood classroom dynamics, exploring its potential as a productive and necessary force that supports current and future political
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Minecraft and Super Mario as enacted in a preschool setting: Children's engagements with digital popular culture beyond player–interface–screen ecologies Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Emilie Elsa Moberg
The present paper explores how the video games of Minecraft and Super Mario become enacted through children's play, material settings and toys in a Swedish preschool. Ethnographic methods, including participant observations and informal conversations, have been used and the empirical materials produced have been analyzed with methodological resources from Actor-Network Theory. The analysis focuses
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Forms of disrespect: Toddler's peer conflicts in early childhood education and care Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Gloria Quinones, Annukka Pursi, Lasse Lipponen
This article discusses the ways in which toddlers carry out forms of disrespect during peer conflicts in Australian and Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. We investigate forms of disrespect in naturally occurring peer interactions by applying interaction analysis and Honneth’s theory of recognition. Drawing on Honneth , our study provides an empirical foundation for examining
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Early care and education after COVID-19: A perspective Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Taren Swindle
This perspective highlights the experiences and observations of an early care and education researcher reentering the field after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in the USA. Specifically, this...
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Transforming a cemetery into a garden of languages: A justice-oriented, family-centered framework for cultivating early bilingualism and emergent biliteracy Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Soojin Oh Park
One in three children enrolled in US early childhood programs is a dual language learner. While dual language learners have been the target of sweeping educational reforms under the guise of justic...
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The everyday advocacy work of the baby room leader Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Mona Sakr
There is a growing body of literature on leadership and leadership development across the early years sector. Early years leadership research has so far tended to focus on positional leadership dem...
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Resisting hyperreality? Talking to young children about YouTube and YouTube Kids Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jane O’Connor, Olga Fotakopoulou, Kelly Johnston, Sarika Kewalramani, Shannon Ludgate
This article reports on a study investigating how 13 young children in English-speaking countries (England, Scotland, Australia and the USA) watch and engage with digital content on YouTube and You...
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Abolition and ethnic studies in early care and education Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Cathery Yeh, Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, Alejandra Albarran Moses
The authors enter this conversation on equity, inclusion, and belonging in early care and education with abolition and ethnic studies as necessary standpoints that must be embodied to build what th...
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Artificial intelligence as a double-edged sword: Wielding the POWER principles to maximize its positive effects and minimize its negative effects Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Jennifer J Chen, Jasmine C Lin
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) over the last few decades are transforming the world, pervading nearly all sectors of society, including education, and many aspects of life. In the educati...
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Unfinalizability: An exploration of a young child’s emergent identities through living stories Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Hoa Pham, Janet S Gaffney
Drawing on a Bakhtinian idea of unfinalizability and a semiotics lens of multimodality, the authors conceptualize children's everyday narratives as chains of living stories that emerge at home and ...
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Reorienting curriculum materials as agents of restorative justice in early literacy classrooms Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Daniel E Ferguson, Bessie P Dernikos
Amidst numerous curricular reforms across the USA that censor reading materials and promote standardized literacy policies, the authors ask in this article: What rights do early childhood teachers ...
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Unpacking power: The role of critical reflection in preschool internship Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Charlene Montaño Nolan, Carolyn Brennan, Tasha Tropp Laman
This study examined the potential role of critical reflection as a tool to support pre-service early childhood teacher interns in understanding and questioning pedagogical choices witnessed in thei...
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Speculative spaces: Children exploring socio-ecological worlds with mythical nature spirits Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Jenny Byman, Kristiina Kumpulainen, Jenny Renlund, Chin-Chin Wong, Peter Renshaw
Drawing on Donna Haraway's notion of speculative fabulation, in this study the authors investigate how a pedagogy grounded in mythical nature spirits, children's imaginative explorations and storyi...
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Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Adam WJ Davies
In this article, the author forwards the importance of mad autobiographical poetic writing to challenge and disrupt epistemic injustice within pre-service early childhood education and care. They e...
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‘Diplomatically bossy’: Discursive constructions of ‘good’ leadership in early childhood told through educators’ memories Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-03-02 M White, M Gibson, M Theobald, A Farrell
This article puts forward a discursive analysis of early childhood leadership in Australia, offering new ways of understanding the work of early childhood leaders and adding to the methodological t...
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Removing the guardrails of democracy: Silencing critique of early childhood policy and practice Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Sara Michael-Luna, Daniel J Castner
In this article, the authors consider the shift from neoliberalism to authoritarian practice and its chilling effect on early childhood education policy, practice, and advocacy work. Firstly, they ...
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Communities of practice as a launchpad for social justice planning in early childhood education Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-02-19 Victoria Damjanovic, Jennifer K Ward
This qualitative case study aims to explore the ways in which communities of practice support teacher learning, decision-making, and the purposeful infusion of social justice topics that are import...
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Equity, inclusion and belonging for teachers in early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Kiri Gould, Jennifer Boyd, Marek Tesar
This article troubles themes of equity, inclusion and belonging for early childhood teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. The authors argue that relationships between teachers matter and, in pursuit of...
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The infant/toddler teacher as willful subject: A critical narrative analysis of gendered discursive regimes in US-based early care and education Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Cassie Sorrells, Samara Madrid Akpovo, Meghan Leclerc
Dominant narratives of teacher emotion in early care and education rely on historical discourses of white femininity and white maternalism to position early childhood teachers as naturally adept an...
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Managing newly arrived children's double transition: Towards inclusionary practices in rural Swedish preschools Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Charlotte Löthman
This study examines preschool practitioners’ accounts of managing newly arrived children's double transition into rural preschools with little previous experience of migration. The narratives are a...
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Encounters with public art in teacher education: Timely pedagogies disrupting colonial relations with place Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Elaine Beltran-Sellitti, Tahmina Shayan
Public art is placed in relation to its surroundings, conveying messages that are open to interpretation and thus proposing conversations between art/aesthetics, geography, histories and the subjec...
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What about teachers’ cultures? Elevating early childhood teachers’ culture stories through a Kristevan lens Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Sonja Arndt, Clare Bartholomaeus
Curricula and policy documents in Australia and elsewhere commonly call for early childhood teachers to nurture cultural belonging for young children and their families. Meanwhile, there remains a ...
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Exploring the perceptions of early childhood educators on the delivery of multilingual education in Australia: Challenges and opportunities Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Criss Jones Diaz, Beatriz Cardona, Paola Escudero Neyra
Australia lags behind other linguistic and culturally diverse countries in policy direction and approaches to early multilingual education, despite well-established research documenting the intelle...
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Self-identified Spanish-speaking early childhood educators abriendo puertas for bilingualism through a care-based linguistic stewardship of Spanish Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Ryan W Pontier, David Riera
This article focuses on self-identified Spanish-speaking early childhood educators’ experiences with and views of bilingualism as they learned about translanguaging—a dynamic, liberatory, and cultu...
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Femmephobia in kindergarten education: Play environments as key sites for the early devaluation of femininity and care Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-11-27 Jessica Prioletta, Adam W Davies
In this article, the authors argue for a rethinking of kindergarten education from a critical feminist perspective. They illustrate how the devaluation and denigration of femininity and care – othe...
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Exploring the role of Black feminist thought in pre-service early childhood education: On the possibilities of embedded transformative change Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Janelle Brady
As a Black feminist scholar who teaches in an early childhood studies program, the author has witnessed how dominant theories and methods used for pre-service early childhood education and care dis...
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Assessing children's psychosocial well-being: Norwegian early childhood education and care teachers’ challenges when completing a global screening tool Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Karianne Franck, Monica Seland, Johanne Rimul, Anne H Sivertsen, Margaret Kernan
In this article, the authors illustrate some of the challenges and dilemmas that Norwegian early childhood education and care teachers experienced when completing a global screening tool (UPSI-5: U...
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Exploring enactments of the big screen and the small screen in a Norwegian early childhood education and care setting Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-31 Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen
While much has been written about how to implement digital tools for learning and play in early childhood education and care, using a sociomaterial perspective this article seeks to explore what ty...
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Assessment for learning within Australia's Early Years Learning Framework: What is the place of Learning Stories? Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-31 Victoria Minson, Joce Nuttall
Early childhood assessment in Australia is guided by Australia's Early Years Learning Framework and a ‘storied’ approach. This article argues that Australia's policy and practice discourses of asse...
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Circuits of sympathy: Posthuman child, vibrant forces, things and places Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-31 Gloria Quinones, Iris Duhn
New materialism has the potential to deepen critical engagement between vibrant things, everyday places and intra-actions between humans and non-humans in early childhood education. This article ex...
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GoPro(blem)s and possibilities: Keeping the child human of colour in play in an interview Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-31 Karin Murris, Joanne Peers
In response to the call for papers for this special issue and the questions it poses, the authors show how the ontological posthumanist shift of agential realism does not erase but keeps the child ...
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Why aren’t we there yet? A typology for evaluating resistant and counter-hegemonic practices Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-22 Bin Wu, Catherine Oxworth
Neo-liberalism continues to expand its grip on education, despite fierce opposition. As an economic and political hegemony, neo-liberalism silences alternative viewpoints and neutralises resistance...
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Scarcity and surveillance in early childhood education Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Katie Sloan
At a time when national discourse in the USA centers the need for professionalization, regulation, and surveillance, this article emphasizes the ways in which neoliberal logics harm those working i...
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Translanguaging, multilingualism, and multimodality in young children's mathematics learning Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Cristina Valencia Mazzanti
The purpose of this qualitative research study is to portray the complex language practices of multilingual children when learning mathematics. To do so, I draw on data collected as part of a three...
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Methodological development through critical reflections on a study focusing on daily valuable encounters in early childhood settings Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Annika Manni, Håkan Löfgren
This article focuses on the methodological experiences that emerged from a study investigating how teachers valued their daily encounters with children in early childhood education. Early childhood...
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Beyond reflective practice: Blogging-with Place as a diffractive practice for (re)imagining place-based education Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Karen Nociti
This article proposes the diffractive practice of blogging-with Place as an alternative to a reflective journal. Reflective practice is a priority for teachers, with reflective journaling often emp...
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Tensions as opportunities for transformation: Applying DisCrit Resistance to early childhood teacher education programs Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Hailey R Love, Christine L Hancock
Efforts to “professionalize” early childhood through professional standards, licensure requirements, and standardized assessments have aimed to support effective practice and rectify the pay inequi...
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The sounds of memory: Troubling the professionalization of knowledge through Black women’s memoir and interpretive disability studies Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Elaine Cagulada, Madeleine DeWelles
In this article, the authors encourage the consideration of the use of Black women’s memoir to inform pre-service early childhood education by exploring Mary Herring Wright’s memoir of growing up B...
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Stop ‘under-mind-ing’ early childhood educators: Honouring subjectivity in pre-service education to build intellectual and relational capacities Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-10-02 Kimberly P Bezaire, Lisa K Johnston
The stubborn dominance of objectivity in child observation in pre-service early childhood education warrants letting go of as we confront its limitations as outdated, problematic, Eurocentric, neo-...
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Welcoming entanglements with ghosts: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable in teacher education Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Cara E Furman
Posthumanist and antiracist thinkers contend that justice, as articulated by Karen Barad, demands response-ability to ghosts of the past and those yet to come. Normative conceptions of the child do...
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“Jeg skal sjekke”: Urban buggy-wayfaring and adventurous lines with data-ing and reconfigurations of children1 Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse, Ann Merete Otterstad, Kelly Boucher
In this article, the authors experiment with data-ing as a methodology, and wonder how three researchers—two in Oslo (Norway) and one in Melbourne (Australia)—can come closer to-with the research m...
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Frictional matterings: (Re)thinking identity and subjectivity in the coming-to-be of literacies Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Candace R Kuby, Erin Price, Tara Gutshall Rucker
The authors take up the guest editors’ invitation to address the difference that posthumanist and feminist ‘new’ materialist theories make and why this matters politically and ethically. Alongside ...
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‘Draw yourself and write your name’: Material-discursive agency of names and drawings in early childhood Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Theresa Magdalen Giorza
A documented transcript and a series of still images from two spontaneous, incidental and intra-active pedagogical encounters in a preschool are the focus and the source of this article. A turning ...
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Twitter, #PreKWeek, and neoliberal childhoods: Posthuman reimaginings of a sigh Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Jaye Johnson Thiel
This article concerns itself with the everyday politics of childhood and the ways research might continue to attend to inequities while simultaneously engaging in an ontological flattening of the c...
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The explanatory power of sensory reading for early childhood research: The role of hidden senses Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Natalia Kucirkova
Sensory reading refers to reading that engages all six of the human senses – vison, hearing, touch, gustation, olfaction and proprioception. The author proposes that increased attention be paid to ...
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Risking erasure? Posthumanist research practices and figurations of (the) child Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Karin Murris, Jayne Osgood
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Book review: Social leadership in early childhood education and care: An introduction by J O’Sullivan & M Sakr Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Eva Mikuska
The mission to develop models of leadership that suit early childhood education and care (ECEC) and engage greater practitioner participation is a concern in England and beyond (Palaiologou and Male, 2019). Government policies and reports are trying to include the importance of leadership in workforce development and quality standards (Nicholson et al., 2020) but they tend to lack clarity about forms
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In the middle of a standardized test: The emerging relations of young children in research Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Linnea Bodén
The performance of standardized tests is an ongoing matter of concern for childhood researchers. Standardized tests are often described as neglecting the ethical complexities of doing research with...
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Grappling with the miseducation of Montessori: A feminist posthuman rereading of ‘child’ in early childhood contexts Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Jayne Osgood, Sid Mohandas
This article demonstrates how feminist posthumanism can reconfigure conceptualisations of, and practices with, ‘child’ in Montessori early childhood contexts. It complicates Montessori’s contempora...
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Feeling like ‘the ham of the sandwich’: The contested professional identities of school-based early childhood educators in Chile Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-17 María-José Lagos-Serrano
Present-day early childhood educators face the challenge of producing their professional identities in highly neo-liberal contexts, negotiating contested discourses on professionalism, education quality and the overall purpose of early childhood education. While it has been suggested by critical scholarship that the early childhood workforce responds to these challenges by developing a unified professional
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Care-full pedagogy: Conceptualizing feminist care ethics as an overarching critical framework to interrupt the dominance of developmentalism within post-secondary early childhood education programs Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-17 Brooke Richardson, Rachel Langford
This article offers a theoretical provocation through conceptualizing a pedagogy of care as a means of caring with students and each other to interrupt the dominance of developmentalism in Canadian post-secondary early childhood education programs. The authors’ conceptualization of care-full as pedagogy is rooted in the premises that education is always ethical and political, and caring about, for
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Day-to-day life during the COVID-19 pandemic: A longitudinal qualitative study with Canadian parents of young children Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-07 Caroline Sanders, Theresa J Frank, Tess Amyot, Katie Cornish, Erica Koopmans, Megan Usipuik, Lauren Irving, Chelsea A Pelletier
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about changes to the lives of families with young children. It has been associated with physical and psychological risk, yet the impact on younger children is poorly examined. The aim of this qualitative study was to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the day-to-day life of parents of young children living in a small northern city in British Columbia, Canada. Ten
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Redefining engineering for early childhood educators through professional development Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Tingting Xu, Lexa Jack
This study examined the impact of an intensive professional development series on early childhood educators’ content knowledge of engineering and their self-efficacy towards teaching engineering. Seventeen early childhood teachers participated and responded to questionnaires, surveys, and focus-group interviews before and after the professional development. The results show that these early childhood
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When ethnographic work turns into distant screen visits: A note on flexible inflexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-06-12 Helena Sandberg, Ebba Sundin, Ulrika Sjöberg
This colloquium shares experiences from doing ethnographic fieldwork with young children and the challenges that followed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project DIGIKIDS Sweden has its focus on very young children (birth to three years) and their engagement with digital media technologies in their homes. The pandemic put the project on hold, but in the families where the fieldwork had already started
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(Un)finding childhoods in citational practices with postdevelopmental pedagogies Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-06-09 Nicole Land, Alicja Frankowski
Taking up the contention that child development manifests through the developmental logics it enacts, the authors work with citational practices as iterations of how developmentalism's logics are done in everyday practices in early childhood and teacher education. They work with Erica Burman's method of ‘found childhood’ to propose citational practices as artefacts of found childhood – as traces of
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Editorial Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Pub Date : 2022-05-13
This issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood is published as we are emerging from a pandemic that has reshaped our lives in such diverse ways. The articles are rich and varied, and reflect the wide range of alternative issues and methodologies that the journal has come to be known for over the past 23 years.