Mainstream images of "toddler" tend to serve a humorous purpose in mass media, most often presenting children of this age (18 months-3 years) as out-of-control. This assumed "barbaric" toddler promotes early childhood as a time for intervention, expecting adults to be the shapers of behavior and knowledge within discourses of…

In this article, we argue that picturebooks about food production, consumption, and distribution can provide rich opportunities for early childhood educators to facilitate critical conversations about culture, power, social action, and justice with their students.

This article applies the theoretical lens of Bourdieu to explore leadership and the distribution of power between teachers and early childhood practitioners in the private voluntary and independent (PVI) sector in a good practice partnership. It questions the effectiveness of such partnerships in bringing about sustained improvements to practice…

In recent years, many programs and manuals for 'norm criticism´ have been produced for schools in Sweden. In this article, I situate norm criticism and norm critical pedagogics within discourses of values and norms, legal rights and policies through a close reading of the material produced for the Swedish pre-school. I explore the targets, modes,…

An important factor that may be missing from recent attempts to counter, resist, and/or reconceptualize the neoliberal framing of the early education process is the actions of children, particularly those that reinforce the neoliberal assemblage of schooling they learn through their interactions with their teacher in school. This article begins to…

Equitable instruction is reflected in how students are positioned in the classroom and how their identities evolve through purposeful interactions that value and recognize the intellectual capacity of each student. In this article, the authors describe how a kindergarten teacher planned and facilitated a geometry lesson that attended to the…

Global flows and their geopolitical power relations powerfully shape the environments in which children lead their everyday lives. Children's images, imaginations and ideas of distant places are part of these global flows and the everyday activities children perform in preschool. Research explores how through curricula young children are moulded…

In 1900, London infant school head teacher and Froebelian, Lucy R. Latter, travelled to southern India to introduce kindergarten pedagogy to schools in Mysore. A hundred years later Froebelians continue to implement projects in very different environments from kindergarten's European roots, including Soweto, South Africa and Kolkata, India. This…

This study investigated the manner in which 56 infant educators used language to direct the behaviour of infants (defined as children aged birth to two years), on the basis that the ways in which educators frame their commands represent an important component of young children's learning experiences. Underpinned by systemic functional linguistic…

Early childhood personnel preparation programs must prepare future early educators who can counteract racism and ableism to provide all children with an equitable and just education. We applied Dis/ability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) Classroom Ecology to early childhood and specifically to preschool settings. We argue that early childhood…

This article highlights autoethnography as an arts-based methodology in early years research, giving consideration to its challenges and critics as well as the power of its application to elicit voices in a way that other methodologies do not. It embraces and models autoethnography through sharing a performative autoethnographic narrative of one…

This case study using ethnographic methods addresses how teachers shape cultural processes related to girlhoods, and the roles of children's play in this dynamic. Poststructuralist theory of the carnival was used to analyze gendered, classed power dynamics within two rural Appalachian preschool classrooms influenced by a popular local festival.…

This paper offers a critical analysis of the imposition of Fundamental British Values (FBVs) in schools and nurseries as part of Prevent, the UK's counter-terrorism strategy, and compares the rationale of this policy with the motivation for Theatre in Education (TIE). This paper argues that the 'values' promoted through education under Prevent…

Regional scholars in the Caribbean context have long advocated for quality early childhood education. The majority of their contributions however, focus primarily on curriculum, policy, and to a lesser extent, teaching practices. In this article, we broaden the scope of extant literature by conceptualizing a model for Caribbean early childhood…

An increasing amount of attention and public funding has been dedicated in recent years to the field of Early Childhood Education and the expansion of early childhood programs in the United States. Program quality in early childhood is evaluated based on program-level structural features and instructional support (e.g. problem solving, feedback,…