{"title":"Embodied with data: Early childhood education and care centre director's stories about living with datafication","authors":"Hanna Toivonen","doi":"10.1177/14639491241266317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241266317","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents autoethnographic short stories that describe an early childhood education and care (ECEC) centre director's work for one year in a municipality in Finland. The purpose of this article is to provide a glimpse into what it is like to enter into an ECEC director position and live everyday ECEC life with economic data that are produced by frequently fluctuating child–staff ratios. This study contributes to a better understanding of the transformational implications of datafication by providing insight into affective interrelations held together by economic aspirations. It shows that datafication is a powerful tool to affect and to be affected in the female-dominated care work of ECEC. The study highlights the possibilities of using an autoethnographic analysis to recognise how data affect the body in data dominated ECEC and how to utilise this very recognition as resistance.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141924183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The economics of human development: ‘Investing in children’ or ‘children as an investment’? And why it matters","authors":"Liliana Fernandes","doi":"10.1177/14639491241268126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241268126","url":null,"abstract":"Traditional Human Capital Theory (HCT) views ‘children as an investment’ and is concerned with how children can be turned into productive members of society. The Economics of Human Development (EHD) grew out of the HCT but positions itself closer to the Capability Approach (CA), where ‘investing in children’ means a social commitment to children's human development. The purpose of this article is to critically analyse the EHD and its actual positioning. It concludes that the EHD's approach is essentially the same as that of the HCT, paying attention to children insofar as they are the future adult workforce. Although having appropriated the terminology of the CA, the EHD reduces social problems to economic problems, ultimately promoting a social policy that puts economic returns ahead of human development.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141921987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The organisation for economic co-operation and development's international early learning and child well-being study: Here we go again!","authors":"Peter Moss, Mathias Urban","doi":"10.1177/14639491241266320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241266320","url":null,"abstract":"This colloquium brings information about a second cycle of OECD's International Early Learning and Well-being Study (IELS) to the early childhood community, and offers a further critique of the approach to comparative research that the IELS embodies.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141881001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Children and materialities: The force of the more-than-human in children's classroom lives by Casey Y. Myers","authors":"Esther Maeers","doi":"10.1177/14639491241266334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241266334","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141785404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Rethinking Environmental Education in a Climate Change Era: Weather Learning in Early Childhood by Tonya Rooney and Mindy Blaise","authors":"April Stevenson","doi":"10.1177/14639491241255054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241255054","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141149548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Melanie Kate Dickerson, Marianne Fenech, Tina Stratigos
{"title":"Emotional labour while working with families: Potential affordances for supporting early childhood educators’ wellbeing","authors":"Melanie Kate Dickerson, Marianne Fenech, Tina Stratigos","doi":"10.1177/14639491241252753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241252753","url":null,"abstract":"Partnering with families is an explicit regulatory and role requirement for early childhood educators, yet the emotional labour involved is implicit and relatively unacknowledged. While research has found that complex work demands jeopardise educator wellbeing – resulting in unprecedented turnover and attrition in Australia and internationally – little research has investigated emotional labour and associated educator wellbeing in relation to partnering with families. This article argues that the limited research on educators’ emotional labour with families and its ensuing invisibility may pertain to both its positioning within social constructivist and interpretivist paradigms that render such work as naturally inherent and to conceptualisations of emotional labour theory that entrench this work in maternalistic discourses. The article positions emotional labour theory within a critical feminist lens and as a worthwhile line of inquiry to extend this body of research and disrupt maternalistic discourses that diminish educators’ skilful labour. The potential affordances pertaining to the illumination of this work as skilful for early childhood workforce policy are considered.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140883806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From a crisis management tool to proactive death education in Swedish preschools","authors":"Tünde Puskás, Anita Andersson, Virginia Slaughter","doi":"10.1177/14639491241246121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241246121","url":null,"abstract":"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 theory of didactic transposition the analysis sheds light on how death education and crisis management related to death in Swedish early childhood education represents a disconnect between the practitioners’ discomfort with teaching about biologic death and the children's need of comfort and understanding of what biologic death entails. The realization of this disconnect prompted the practitioners to consider developing a child-friendly didactic tool that would better support children's emotional processing and that could also be used for proactive death education. Our findings indicate that early childhood educators are in need of training in how to teach about the biological facts of human death in terms of universality, irreversibility, nonfunctionality, causality, and noncorporeal continuation. Only this way can educators be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to engage in open and age-appropriate conversations with children about biologic death, fostering a supportive and safe environment for them to express their feelings and ask questions.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140628959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructing the space of transition within the early childhood education and care pedagogical environment: A child's resources and positions","authors":"Raija Raittila, Mari Vuorisalo, Niina Rutanen","doi":"10.1177/14639491241246120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241246120","url":null,"abstract":"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 the space of transition and, particularly, on children's active involvement in this process. The data include video recordings from children's first days in ECEC. We focus on children's resources and discuss how the pedagogical environment enabled newcomers’ active positions, which they used to reshape daily practices in ECEC. The emerging space of transition was constructed on the basis of the relations that the newcomers enabled in the situation. The results shed new light on the strengths of the newcomers as co-constructors of daily practices of the ECEC pedagogical environment, even on the first day of the transition. In addition, the space of transition as a new conceptual way to explore educational transitions is discussed.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140591532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Angela Molloy Murphy, Will Parnell, Larisa Callaway-Cole, Elizabeth Quintero
{"title":"Polyphonic storying with human and more-than human co-collaborators","authors":"Angela Molloy Murphy, Will Parnell, Larisa Callaway-Cole, Elizabeth Quintero","doi":"10.1177/14639491241229228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241229228","url":null,"abstract":"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 equitable, care-filled, and relational ways of living, especially with young children and their families. Thinking with storying as a liberatory and transformative process, we believe the perspectives of our human and more-than-human co-collaborators—the people, places, and materialities that collectively co-create these stories—are urgently required to offer satellites of hope amid the darkness and to practice living in radical relationality and a project of love.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139956628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial 25(1)","authors":"Susan J. Grieshaber","doi":"10.1177/14639491241233154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241233154","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139839356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}