Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

In response to the perception that climate change is too abstract and its consequences too far-reaching for us to make a difference, recent feminist environmental humanities scholars have drawn attention to connections that can be forged by noticing the intermingling of bodies, relations, materials, places and movements in the world. Inspired by these ideas, Tonya Rooney has proposed that there is potential in working with child–weather relations as a pedagogical response to making climate change more connected and immediate for young children. Mindy Blaise and her colleagues have also shown how ‘matters of fact’ dominate early childhood teaching, and call for new pedagogies that attend to ‘matters of concern’, such as climate change. In this article the authors build on these ideas by drawing also on María Puig de la Bellacasa’s suggestion that we extend our concern to ‘matters of care’ as an ‘ethically and politically charged practice’. The authors report on their work with educators and children in an Australian-based preschool where they have started to engage with matters of concern and matters of care to create new types of pedagogies that they call ‘weathering-with pedagogies’. These are situated, experimental, embodied, relational and ethical, and, the authors suggest, reflect a practice of care, thus providing young children with new ways of responding to climate change. The authors take as their starting point Donna Haraway’s invitation to ‘muddy the waters’ as a way to stir up the possibilities, tensions and challenges in doing such work.

Challenging the conventional binary of morality and subversion as opposing forces, this article presents a new construct of ethical subversion in early childhood education and care professional practice. The conceptual framework combines constructs of emotional labour and care ethics, and theorising on power and subversive tactics. Text generated from focus group discussions and individual semi-structured interviews with graduate early childhood education and care practitioners provides the concrete corpus for Foucauldian discourse analysis. Critical analysis elucidates how, on the one hand, practitioners working in England experience ethical boundaries reflecting dominant discourses, while, on the other, they feel morally committed to care responsively even if it contravenes rule-based ethics. Ethical subversion is born from both reason and emotion: these are acts of loving disobedience by experienced practitioners who possess a deep understanding of risk and the critical implications of their rule-bending. Ethical subversion is relational and individualistic, supporting a care pedagogy focusing on the individual care needs of young children. Conceptualisation of ethical subversion raises important issues in the areas of ethics, management and professionalism: ethical subversion is constructed as a powerful phenomenon, with potential for effecting positive transformation in the lives of children and their families, while simultaneously augmenting constructs of professionalism in early childhood education and care in England.

This article asks the question of what documentation is doing, rather than what documentation means in the context of early childhood education. By focusing on the documentation of a young child’s playful exploration with water that inhabits a classroom wall, new materialist theories are put to work to ponder documentation’s agentive capacities and intra-activities. What is argued is that documentation is inviting powerful creating and resisting actions that offer senses of belonging for a child. Consequently, it is proposed that teachers both shift from and overlay matters of fact and matters of concern. The implication is that documentation can be put to work in influential ways when its actions (rather than meanings) within spaces are foregrounded. This article offers original contributions to contemporary debates regarding agentive readings of documentation practices that can influence forms of ethical and flourishing pedagogies in a policy climate that can otherwise confine.

Pedagogical documentation has been understood as an important way for early childhood educators to provide high-quality learning environments for children. The authors explore the contested nature of quality and its interpretation in two cultural contexts: in Western Australia, where pedagogical documentation is a relatively uncommon practice, and in Sweden, where pedagogical documentation is a relatively common practice. These locations were selected to provide a comparison between educators from these two different cultural and policy contexts. The main purpose of pedagogical documentation within the Swedish preschool system is to gain knowledge of how to systematically improve the quality of the preschool. This contrasts with the demands on Australian early childhood educators to ensure children meet achievement standards in the Foundation Year. Six preschool educators in each country responded to interview questions regarding what enables or hinders their systematic quality work. The participants in both countries were using some form of pedagogical documentation in their professional practice. This article draws on interview data and elaborates on the ways these educators understood the role of pedagogical documentation in what they regarded as systematic quality work. The findings provide insight into the impact of both policy and cultural contexts on individual educators' practices when using pedagogical documentation as a means to promote quality. The results indicate that differences in early childhood education policies between countries may lead to important differences in how pedagogical documentation is used by educators in their practice.

This article aims to interrogate the Cartesian rationality determining current early childhood mathematics by highlighting the irrational aspect of mathematics learning, which is usually underemphasized and even devalued by the dominant discourse. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of refrain as the method, the article explores the unfolding emergence of a child’s off-task behavior in a number activity as it conceptualizes the child’s body in relation to its surroundings. The article also explores how this conceptualization of off-task behavior helps to rethink mathematical ability and conceptual construction in responding to and elaborating on research on embodied mathematics. Based on these explorations, the article hopes to contribute a strategy for the vision of adopting a more democratic manner in mathematics learning.

The aim of this article is to illustrate the potential of ‘atmosphere’ in order to consider more inventive ways of developing the language of young Norwegian ethnic minority children. The article draws on ethnographic data that emerged from doctoral studies. The analysis of the data draws on aspects of Arendt’s philosophical work and Bakhtin’s theorizations concerning language. It is these theoretical frames, together with theorizations concerning atmosphere, that allow one to ask different questions in relation to language development. It is by attempting to address these questions that different pedagogical paths begin to emerge. However, the article argues that in order to take such paths, there is a need to suspend certain universal principles, including privileging the mind over the body and the logical over the non-logical.

This article presents ways to promote children’s measurement reasoning in a preschool classroom setting using a non-standard unit. Providing children with a personalized ruler allows them to practice measurement as part of their daily routine.