Abstract
We are pleased to publish the final edition for 2024. This has continued to be a turbulent year globally. We have witnessed children in crisis and being displaced, in several locations across the world, and we continue to hope for peace, so that children can live safely, in good health, free from trauma, and enjoy their families and communities—but it seems so elusive at this point in time.
The edition embodies what we celebrate in terms of critical early childhood scholarship in terms of the in-depth analyses of early childhood studies and the interdisciplinary nature of our scholarship.
The first of the eight papers, by Manni and Löfgren, examines the daily, ordinary moments in early childhood education, using a mixed-methods research design. The authors argue that their reflective methodology has the potential to align research and practice to support knowledge creation. They offer the methodology as a respectful way to gather information from practice and simultaneously provide opportunities to change practices.
In “Scarcity and surveillance in early childhood education,” Sloan writes about professionalization in the context of the work by early childhood educators in the US. By adopting a critical approach using narrative inquiry to share the stories of early childhood education, two emergent themes of scarcity and surveillance appear as neoliberal agendas that permeate their everyday work and encounters in the system.
Valencia-Mazzanti notes that the purpose of “Translanguaging, multilingualism, and multimodality in young children's mathematics learning” is to foreground the complex language practices of multilingual children as they learn mathematics. Over a period of three years, Valencia-Mazzanti reveals that a “disruptive understanding and enactment of language” can assist meaning making and knowledge building in mathematics learning, by “dismantling hierarchical power structures” that exist.
Nuttall and Minson argue that Australia's policy and practice discourses of assessment in early childhood education need to be more explicit. They provide data to give insights into two educators’ assessment practices. They suggest that “storied” assessment is often conflated with the “learning story” approach and stress the need for attention be given to concepts of assessment in the scheduled update of the learning framework that occurred in 2022, and we now hope that this has occurred to their satisfaction.
The authors of “Assessing children's psychosocial well-being: Norwegian ECEC teachers’ challenges when completing a global screening tool” document some of the challenges and dilemmas of Norwegian early childhood teachers on the introduction of a global screening tool (UPSI-5) which measures the psychosocial well-being of 5-year-olds. The article presents in-depth analysis of 19 teachers who shared their challenges and critical reflections concerning the assessment items. The findings illustrate which dimensions teachers find challenging and how they respond to problem issues.
In the paper “Exploring enactments of the big screen and the small screen in a Norwegian ECEC,” Sorrenssen adopts a socio-material perspective to explore the use of varying digital resources by young children. She uses actor-network theory (ANT) and video-ethnographic data of young children using tablets and interactive whiteboards (IWB) to show how the type of use is related to the actors in the assemblage, and in doing so we can see how human and nonhuman actors influence the type of activity for their own purposes.
Pontier and Riera discuss educators’ experiences with, and their views of, bilingualism as they learned about translanguaging—which the authors describe as “a dynamic, liberatory, and culturally and linguistically sustaining theory and practice of language.” Their data reveal that the teachers developed a language of “care” that frequently included making space for translanguaging to occur where Spanish was both expected and highly valued. This then was the basis for growth in bilingualism for the children and their families.
Jones-Diaz, Cardona, and Escudero's paper entitled “Exploring the perceptions of early childhood educators on the delivery of multilingual education in Australia: Challenges and opportunities” exposes the gaps in the provision of language education in Australia. They share data from a study on early multilingual education and discuss how two different early childhood settings created contexts that supported the diverse linguistic and cultural assets of children and families. The authors used Bourdieu's framework of social practice, to examine the policy and practices that validate children's bi/multilingualism. Their findings suggest that “despite educators' well-developed understandings of the benefits of early multilingualism, there is confusion regarding appropriate pedagogical approaches for bi/multilingual support in ECE.”
We also have a colloquium that explores the learning ecology of preschool inclusion in New York City in the US and two book reviews for your consideration.