Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

This article discusses the teaching of history in early childhood education and care centres and children’s understanding of history. Based on interviews with eight Norwegian early childhood education and care teachers and on interpretative phenomenological analysis, the article shows how the early childhood education and care centres teach history, how children respond to the teaching, and what kind of understanding of history and historical time children express. The findings are discussed in light of theories of history didactics. The teachers had positive experiences with the implementation of history projects and developed a variety of methods and teaching approaches. They also expressed a highly positive assessment of children’s ability to acquire knowledge of history. In particular, it appears that physical and bodily experiences, along with teachers’ storytelling, stimulated the children’s interest and understanding of history. Some of the older children – the five- to six-year-olds – expressed an emerging historical consciousness. This indicates that although historical understanding in early childhood might be limited, the teaching of history in early childhood education and care can lay the foundation for historical consciousness and its later development at school.

This article approaches newcomer migrant girls’ experiences with social competition and relational aggression. This the authors do through a detailed analysis of the interactional practices that a group of preschool-aged girls make use of as they socially exclude one of two newcomer migrant girls from participating in a sharing activity involving self-made artefacts. The data is drawn from ethnography combined with video recordings of natural and situated activities of the girls’ interactions in a Norwegian day-care institution over the course of nine months. Combining structural and social-constructivist perspectives, the authors discuss how a day-care group is a social field comprising multiple subfields characterized by agents struggling over position and power. Overall, this article addresses another side of the generally accepted positive view of day care for migrant children, revealing how relational aggression might be embedded within seemingly harmless activities and set in everyday child-governed activities. Finally, the authors reflect on implications for pedagogical practices and make suggestions for future research.

Documentation has become an important issue for policy, practice and accountability in many national contexts. The documentation of children’s activities is a requirement in the national syllabus for the Swedish preschool. However, the documentation of children is always a social construction that focuses on certain things and excludes (possible) others. Such constructions can be linked to broader discourses of the competent and self-governed child, and the tendency to label the child as autonomous and competent in policy documents. The purpose of this article is to explore how constructions of the competent and self-governed child are performed in documentation panels in Swedish preschools. The theoretical framework is taken from visual methodology combined with an analysis of intertextuality. Three images (pictures and written text) of the preschool are discerned: the child as a good pal; the child as an autonomous investigator; and the child as a public speaker. In all three images, the children are depicted as competent in different respects. The result is discussed by relating the findings to broader discourses emphasising the competent and self-governed child.

Australia’s National Quality Framework identifies responsibilities for early childhood educators who work with infants to plan for and assess their learning. Educators are urged to be ‘responsive to children’s ideas and play’ and to ‘assess, anticipate and extend children’s learning’. Responsiveness in relation to infants is often couched in terms of emotional support and attention to the attachment relationship, or in detailed guidance about supporting the infant in care routines. Drawing on Levinas’s ideas of ethical encounter to frame a consideration of infants’ learning more broadly, this article suggests the possibility to see beyond traditional perceptions of infants as objects of the attachment relationship, and identifies the potential for infants to be viewed as ‘initiators’ who guide educators’ responses. Working with Levinas’s ideas of absolute responsibility in the face-to-face encounter, the notion of ‘response-ableness’ is used to examine educators’ decisions and actions as they share in learning encounters with infants. Using video footage captured during an infant’s encounter with learning, the decisions of the educator prove influential. Creating a narrative of this experience illuminates the educator’s response-ableness, and shows how an infant’s ideas and investigations might form the basis of the learning encounter. Close examination of educator response-ableness may lead to richer possibilities for infants’ encounters with learning, beyond the curriculum of care.

This article seeks to explore the development of the relationship between a group of early childhood academics from the same university and practitioners from a particular early years setting in the north of England into an innovative professional development and research project (2-Curious). The article uses Foucauldian notions of heterotopia to theorise an approach to professional development and research concerned with examining the discourses and practices associated with provision for two-year-old children. In place of a transmission model of professional development and scientific preoccupations with research purity, the authors explore what is offered by an alternative approach that involved a broader engagement with ideas, feelings and the body, and the layering of research complexity. The authors consider what emerges when the practitioners take the learning from the project back into their own settings, and conclude by considering the possibilities and complexities of academics and practitioners working together to research and represent what emerged from the project.

This article considers the contribution of memoir as a method for understanding complex early childhood issues. It recounts the author’s first visit to Tanzania, a low-income country with a chequered history of independence from colonial rule. The article uses memories from that initial visit to reflect on the changing interpretations of colonial history and early childhood interventions. Looking back, it also considers the impact of that visit on the author’s own work trajectory, as an epiphany which led to new areas of work and conceptualization.

Hope is at the heart of the educational endeavour. Yet it is a challenge for educators to sustain a sense of hope in a worried world where terrorism, mass migrations, global warming and ultra-right political movements are on the rise. Acknowledging that hopefulness always involves risk, this article identifies three pedagogical practices which support potential and possibility in children: letting go of worry, engaging in the pleasures of forgetting, and learning to wait. Drawing on his work as an early childhood educator, AIDS advocate and caregiver to his aging parents, the author suggests that self-restraint – checking the impulse to fix and remediate – may be the most effective way to help others. Leaving aside excessive rules and abstract theories enables teachers to stay in the moment and in relation with others. Rejecting a blind hope that defends against remembering the ravages of personal and social histories, the author proposes embracing a modulated or educated hope (José Muñoz) that can keep us grounded in the real, even as we imagine the world differently.

This article presents the correlation analyses of mathematics item response theory scores from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998 and 2010 data, and proposes the critical need for systematic efforts to improve the quality of pre- and in-service teachers of young children in teaching mathematics.