Editorial

We live in a changing and shifting world, with the invention of new technologies, reforms, challenges, risks, and opportunities. New technologies in everyday living and learning are (re)configuring our ways of being. The dominant trend(s) of political, economic, and sociocultural atmospheres are merging together to form a different “climate” in our social worlds to prescribe the normative ways of becoming and belonging. New and dangerous social epistemologies and ontologies are formed and widely circulated around the globe as hegemonic truth.

The collection of articles in this issue, while each addresses a different topic, comes together to echo critical perspectives to challenge the dominant system of reasoning to open new discursive spaces for rethinking what constitute normality in the field of education. In the first article, Yamada-Rice looks at how new digital technology (re)creates children’s social communication practices and play. Looking at the formation and design of a new form of screen-less digital wooden toy known as Avakai, Yamada-Rice raises an important aspect of new challenges and opportunities on the topic of children’s play and digital toys. In this case of studying Avakai, Yamada-Rice has highlighted the key linkages between toy design, culture, and implication for children’s uses of the toy (i.e. literacy activities, imaginative socio-dramatic play, and communication practices). The application of new technology in children’s toys has created significant changes in children’s contemporary learning and living experiences. Digital toys, as materials, have brought forth different ways of being, becoming, and belonging for children in that the “evolution” of technology and the emergence of different designs of digital toys (i.e. with or without screens) have reconfigured different/new kinds of learning for the “digital natives.” The new challenges in understanding children’s learning and development will require stronger connections between academics and toy designers/makers to understand children’s “multiple usages” of the materials (toys) in the production of meanings and the co-construction of knowledge.

In the second article, Martin-Bylund explores early childhood bilingual education in Sweden. Challenging the traditional conception and understanding of bilingual education, this article draws on the works of Deleuze and Guattari to reconceptualise children’s bilingual learning as “in the middle” experience for a new production of being. Offering a different epistemological and ontological understanding of bilingual children’s learning and being, Martin-Bylund looks at the tensions or conflicts in bilingual education which are embedded in learning a new dominant language (Swedish), while grounded in a minor language (Spanish), as an opportunity for interrupting the “normative standard and the dominant”; the language learning process is negotiating and navigating between the known and the unknown and the fluidity of being and becoming between literate and illiterate.

In the third article, Sadlier takes us to a different socio-political and cultural context and looks at a local teacher-driven activist education and the mobilization of a mainstream historical personage as a “pedagogical package” for social justice and equality in Oaxaca, Mexico. In this article, Sadlier highlights the concerns with packaging selected materials together as an activist package for political advocacy. Unpacking the dangers of activist packages in Mexico, Sadlier moves further to emphasize the importance of understanding the intersection and correlation of activism and classroom pedagogical practices (i.e. curriculum and instruction). Such a shift from activist package to pedagogy package in advocacy has elements of a democratic education which opens up the opportunity for students to learn to live democratically from schools and hopefully to spread this into the society. As noted, the greatest potential of a pedagogy package is turning the school learning spaces into more social and emergent ones for all children, parents, and teachers for the formation of quality education in a democratic society.

In the fourth article, Brown critically reflects on the effects of neoliberalism in the field of early childhood education that alters the meaning of professionalism and professionalization. Looking into a graduate course on critical perspectives in early childhood education, this article examines how students deconstruct the roots of the neoliberal early childhood education system that dangerously promotes ideas of markets, credentials, and individualism through reading the literature with critical perspectives and completing required course assignments/projects while acquiring the skills necessary to becoming critical scholars and educators. As the findings in this study demonstrate, Brown emphasizes the need to develop/grow the communities of critical scholars and educators in the field of early childhood education to support as well as to empower early childhood educators’ critical pedagogical practices.

Sharing a similar concern of neoliberal alterations to the field of early childhood education, in the fifth article, Stuart critiques the recent policy changes that shifted education as a commodity for social investment in New Zealand. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, Stuart’s article reconceptualizes how a popular but dangerous construct of early childhood education as investment in a neoliberal political economy can further marginalize the already disadvantaged “vulnerable children” in New Zealand.

In today’s dominant sociocultural and political economic construction of the “child,” a narrowed narrative and/or a normative way of be(come)ing has been dangerously legitimatized as the “truth.” In Lo’s article on changing childhoods, she challenges the privileges and injustices in the lives of children whose family models do not fit the traditional and “normal” category. Focusing on children with gay and lesbian parents, Lo critically examines and identifies systemic and cultural biases to deconstruct the notion of “normality” through a queer lens and intersectional methods to elucidate diverse aspects of childhoods and multiple cultures.

The need for multiple and critical perspectives to challenge biased understandings of children and their living and learning experiences cannot be ignored. As Gibson’s book review points out, the publication of the book entitled The Anti-Bias Approach in Early Childhood is timely. In a neoliberal global political economy, the dangerous trend to re-landscape early childhood education can further marginalize the already disadvantaged, while altering the meaning of equity and equality for all to a narrowed and limited definition.

The articles in this issue come together to reflect a critical framework in reconceptualizing children’s contemporary living and learning experiences across multiple geopolitical spaces and sociocultural contexts. In the formation of a narrowed and dangerous popular construction of what counts as “normal,” early childhood educators and leaders across different geopolitical spaces and sociocultural contexts are encountering a significant moment in challenging the dominant discourse. Collective and critical reflections are needed if we are to reimagine a future with equity and equality for ALL children.