{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Sue Grieshaber","doi":"10.1177/14639491231197554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231197554","url":null,"abstract":"As the excitement of the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) Women’s World Cup comes to Australia and New Zealand, we are excited as this is the first issue that publishes eight articles per issue as a regular occurrence. This is a way of moving articles more quickly from OnlineFirst to official publication. Professionalisation, professionalism and quality have long been discussed in the international literature. So has neo-liberalism and its continuing and pervasive effects on education and society. In the first article of this issue, the professionalisation of practitioners and working conditions in Ireland are addressed by Geraldine Mooney Simmie and Dawn Murphy (‘Professionalisation of early childhood education and care practitioners: Working conditions in Ireland’). They locate the professionalisation of practitioners in the context of policy reforms and use a critical feminist inquiry to investigate the lived reality of practitioners. The policy analysis, survey and interviews exposed a market economy where increased credentialism, surveillance and performative demands by the state prevailed over a group of women with low skills and precarious employment, and their rights as workers. Conflict, natural disasters, the environment, poverty, politics and being a member of a vulnerable group are some of the reasons why people become refugees. Images of families in refugee camps and the difficult conditions there are often shown by western media outlets. Less is known about what happens after refugees are resettled in their new country. The second article theorises the pōwhiri (‘Pōwhiri: The ritual of encounter’), the traditional Māori welcome ceremony or ritual of encounter, ‘as a metaphor for refugee families and children coming to belong in Aotearoa New Zealand’. The authors, Lesley Rameka, Ruth Ham and Linda Mitchell, consider how Māori ways of knowing, doing and understanding the world can be used to develop and strengthen a sense of bicultural belonging yet support refugee families to maintain a sense of belonging with their home countries. The theory-building draws on a range of observational, conversational and documentation resources, and shares responses from refugees to this powerful ritual. Returning to the neo-liberal reform agenda and in contrast to the pōwhiri ritual of encounter, Olivera Kamenarac explains the reconstruction of teacher professional identities and professionalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (‘Business managers in children’s playground: Exploring a problematic (or not!) identity construction of early childhood teachers in New Zealand’). Marketisation and privatisation have produced changes that construct teachers as business managers and, in the process, altered the purpose of early childhood education and the ‘core professional ethical values’ of teaching and professionalism. These same values used to be grounded in collective democracy, equity and social justice. As an alternative, Kamenarac sugges","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46590003","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: Emotionally responsive teaching: Expanding trauma-informed practice with young children by Travis Wright","authors":"Melissa Sherfinski","doi":"10.1177/14639491231190990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231190990","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44513193","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":"“‘You cannot come to this country’—that's what the government says sometimes, when you’re Brown”: African American children's critical literacies and emergent solidarity","authors":"Wintre Foxworth Johnson","doi":"10.1177/14639491231176898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231176898","url":null,"abstract":"Decades of research demonstrate that young children make meaning about race and racism. Yet there remains a dearth of scholarship about whether and how African American children are thinking across racial and ethnic difference to make sense of systemic inequities. Moreover, there are but a handful of scholars who have documented the ways that children and youth engage in acts of solidarity. Extending the growing body of literature that privileges young children of color's critical perspectives, this article examines African American first-graders’ sociopolitical awareness; in particular, it explores how they expressed their understanding that racial discrimination undergirded contemporary US immigration policies. These data reveal that the children possessed a capacity for demonstrating solidarity with other non-white people, in that they named and critiqued the marginalization experienced by immigrant communities of color. Drawing on Black feminist epistemologies, critical literacy, and critical consciousness, the author argues that the children's emergent solidarity can be understood through their three rhetorical moves: (1) interchanging Black and Brown people in name; (2) advancing a critical moral ideal by juxtaposing current and former political leaders; and (3) invoking knowledge of US history. Although popular media and political discourse seldom portray immigration as an issue that concerns Black communities in the US, African Americans have long understood that their own liberation is connected to that of other marginalized groups. As such, this article urges early childhood researchers to examine the nature of the questions being asked about young African American children's racial meaning-making practices and knowledges about belonging, equity, and inclusion within and outside schools.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42278955","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":"Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics.","authors":"Adam Wj Davies","doi":"10.1177/14639491231155555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231155555","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, the author forwards the importance of mad autobiographical poetic writing to challenge and disrupt epistemic injustice within pre-service early childhood education and care. They explore their own mad autobiographical poetic writing as a queer, non-binary, mad early childhood educator and pre-service early childhood education and care faculty member, and argue that mad poetic writing can methodologically be used as a form of resistance to epistemic injustices and epistemological erasure in early childhood education and care. This article argues for the importance of autobiographical writing in early childhood education and care, and the necessity of centralizing early childhood educators' subjectivities and histories when addressing - and transforming - issues of equity, inclusion and belonging in early childhood education and care. The personal and intimate mad autobiographical poetic writing of this article - written by the author - focuses on how personal experience with madness as it pertains to working within pre-service early childhood education and care can challenge norms that govern and regulate madness. Ultimately, the author argues that transformation in early childhood education and care can take place by reflecting on experiences of mental and emotional distress, and considering poetic writings as starting places for imagining new futurities and a plurality of educator voices and perspectives.</p>","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/b0/06/10.1177_14639491231155555.PMC10312068.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10303397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Justice for whom and according to whom? (Re)considering equity, inclusion and belonging in early care and education","authors":"Pamela H. Epley, Mariana Souto-Manning","doi":"10.1177/14639491231180691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231180691","url":null,"abstract":"For this special issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, we wondered what it would mean, and ultimately what it might yield, to invite scholars in the field of early care and education to engage critically in conceptualizations of justice—for example, restorative justice (Zehr, 2015) or transformative justice (Winn and Winn, 2021)—and to imagine, explore, and critically (re)consider equity, inclusion, and belonging in early childhood. Our interest in this special issue reflects current dominant conceptualizations of justice that seek to protect privileges and safeguard entitlements (National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2020) for White, heteronormative, cisgender, and ableist communities at the continued expense and harm of those who are intersectionally marginalized. Countering such dominant conceptualizations of (in)justice, we share the work of colleagues and peers who critically theorize justice and consider: “Justice for whom and according to whom?” (Souto-Manning, 2014). The matter of “Justice for whom and according to whom?” is highlighted in two of this issue’s articles—Soojin Oh Park’s “Transforming a cemetery into a garden of languages: A justice-oriented, family-centered framework for cultivating early bilingualism and emergent biliteracy” and Adam Davies’ “Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics.” In questioning the universalistic assumptions about early language and literacy development that dominate early childhood settings, Park explores counterstories of Asian American parents and the practices in which they engage to resist linguistic erasure and cultivate their children’s early bilingualism and biliteracy. Based on the stories of 10 Chinese and Korean immigrant, multiracial, and multilingual families, Park shares the vision of immigrant parents as gardeners—planters, pollinators, and pruners of bilingualism and biliteracy in their children, and challengers of monocultural and monolingual definitions of school readiness and success. Davies shares their own experiences, framed through the theoretical lens of mad studies (LeFrançois et al., 2013), which centralizes the voices and perspectives of people who experience psychiatric classification and violence, through autobiographical poetic writing. Davies challenges developmental and psychological perspectives of normative development and the role early childhood teacher training programs have in reproducing harmful ableist theories of learning and development that negatively impact intersectionally minoritized early childhood education faculty, teachers, and children and families. This special issue also seeks to enact a “sociology of potentiality” (Povinelli, 2011: 16), including works that move from ideologies, methodologies, and pedagogies of expectability (what is expected based on the history of the field and the concepts of equity, inclusion, and ","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41976816","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":"(Re)considering equity, inclusion and belonging in the updating of the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia: The potential and pitfalls of book sharing","authors":"Helen Adam, L. Barblett, Gillian Kirk, G. Boutte","doi":"10.1177/14639491231176897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231176897","url":null,"abstract":"Few would dispute the importance of equity, inclusion and belonging in early childhood education and care, yet translation into meaningful practice rarely centres the priorities of historically divested communities. The national learning framework for early childhood in Australia is the Early Years Learning Framework, positioning the child as a capable agent and describing inclusive, culturally competent practice. This article presents part of a larger study investigating educators’ beliefs and practices when using culturally diverse literature to address the Early Years Learning Framework’s diversity principles. A critical theoretical framework enables a robust examination of how the Early Years Learning Framework constructs, maintains, legitimises and/or disaffirms social inequities, implicitly probing how literacy education mediate/s messages children receive about their identity, cultures and roles in society. The findings suggest that instead of pursuing anti-racism and transformative justice, educators’ pedagogical practices were likely to legitimise existing racist structures. The findings are discussed in relation to 20 recommendations published by a consortium of experts in the updating of the Early Years Learning Framework. The implementation of the updated Early Years Learning Framework must act on questions of justice for whom and according to whom. To move to ideologies, methodologies and pedagogies of potentiality, it is necessary to interrogate and reject oppressive and harmful practices, inaccurate and insensitive portrayals, and pedagogies damaging to Black, Indigenous, and other communities of Color which this study shows have beenevident in the EYLF to date.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45713449","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}
Juliet Bromer, Crystasany R. Turner, Samantha A. Melvin, Aisha Ray
{"title":"“We are that resilience”: Building cultural capital through family child care","authors":"Juliet Bromer, Crystasany R. Turner, Samantha A. Melvin, Aisha Ray","doi":"10.1177/14639491231177354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231177354","url":null,"abstract":"Family child care professionals are a critical sector of the early care and education workforce. Utilizing critical race theory and Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth model, the current study seeks to examine the strengths and assets that family child care professionals of color bring to their early care and education work and to the children and families in their programs. The authors identified evidence of four types of cultural capital (aspirational, familial, navigational, and resistant) in the focus group narratives of family child care professionals of color across four regions in the USA. Their narratives describe an orientation to caring for children and families that counters exclusionary and biased systems. The family child care professionals of color envision themselves as educators and supporters of community advancement in opposition to racialized stereotypes of home-based child care work as babysitting (aspirational capital); they leverage the home as a place for racial healing and sustain intergenerational connections with families through practices of othermothering and an ethic of love (familial capital). The family child care professionals of color describe the ways they enact navigational and resistant capital in their perseverance and participation in licensing and quality systems, despite inequities. The family child care professionals’ counternarratives of family child care work suggest their essential role in societal functioning and well-being. The study’s findings hold implications for (re)defining early care and education quality and (re)designing systems that celebrate and recognize the strengths, resilience, and capacity of family child care professionals of color to support equitable futures for children, families, and communities.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49617961","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":"WeDesign: Conceptualizing a process that invites young children to codesign inclusive learning spaces","authors":"Sarika S. Gupta, Mark Nagasawa","doi":"10.1177/14639491231179000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231179000","url":null,"abstract":"The environment shapes the foundation of healthy development and learning. The aim of this colloquium is to share the authors’ recent research efforts to center children as necessary codesign partners in their built learning environments. To do this, the authors believe that it is important to reposition preschool inclusion as a bottom-up, or micro-driven, practice that begins with the child. This ecological shift acknowledges children as able-bodied, dynamic individuals who move in multiple ways and can contribute to decision-making conversations.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41603638","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":"Children's ideas about COVID-19 and learning loss: Interviews with 10 second-graders","authors":"C. Stearns","doi":"10.1177/14639491231172203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231172203","url":null,"abstract":"In 2020 and 2021, there has been extensive scholarly and popular discussion about children's learning loss due to COVID-19 and its related school closures. This conversation generally overlooks the voices of young children. This study, set in a US context where children spent a year or more attending school exclusively remotely, reports from interviews with 10 second-graders about how they conceive of loss related to COVID-19 and particularly what it might mean to lose learning. The study finds that the children have extensive ideas about what it means to lose something tangible or intangible, and that their theories about loss are based in well-understood personal experience. It also shows how children use loss narratives to make sense of sociopolitical events and concepts in the world around them, and it offers the possibility that the upheaval wrought by COVID-19 has helped some children become quite emotionally aware and able not only to tolerate but also adaptively defend against difficult feelings. The article emphasizes the importance of foregrounding children's ideas and voices in making sense of their educational experiences.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43915689","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}
Michael Friedrich Walter Blume, Anette Lindahl Mikkelsen
{"title":"Falling: An existential experience in early childhood","authors":"Michael Friedrich Walter Blume, Anette Lindahl Mikkelsen","doi":"10.1177/14639491231165292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231165292","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, falling is considered as an existential bodily experience of the youngest children, aged one to three. No toddler can avoid falling; it is simply a condition of being bodily situated in the world. Active toddlers are falling toddlers, but even though the struggle with gravity appears to play a crucial role in the everyday lives of young children, it has been only a limited subject in early childhood research. Therefore, the authors examine the phenomenon of falling on the basis of empirical material collected in a focused ethnographic study carried out in two Danish nurseries. The findings are presented as a kind of typology, which includes analyses of five different fallings situations that were observed and videotaped in planned physical education activities. From an existential point of view, falling can be characterized as a negative experience with which the toddler must reconcile as a consequence of participating in movement activities. Even though it often starts as negative, falling seems to develop productive qualities, such as increased body consciousness or basic wakefulness. Physical active toddlers soon become experienced fallers, and this expertise makes it possible to use falling as a motor skill in playing situations or as a tool for communication. The authors use an existential framework to highlight and discuss the productive qualities of falling with the purpose of making it explicit for work in early childhood education.","PeriodicalId":46773,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45000522","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}