Early childhood education and care is a major policy issue for national governments and international organisations. This book contests two stories, both infused by neoliberal thinking, that dominate early childhood policy making today - ‘the story of quality and high returns’ and ‘the story of markets’, stories that promise high returns on investment if only the right technologies are applied to children and the perfection of a system based on competition and individual choice. But there are alternative stories and this book tells one: a ‘story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality’ in which early childhood centres are public spaces and public resources, places where democracy and experimentation are fundamental values, community workshops for realising the potentiality of citizens. This story calls for transformative change but offers a real utopia, both viable and achievable. The book discusses some of the conditions needed for the story’s enactment and shows what it means in practice in a chapter about project work contributed by a Swedish preschool teacher. Critical but hopeful, this book is an important contribution to resisting the dictatorship of no alternative and renewing a democratic politics of early childhood education. It is essential reading for students and teachers, researchers and other academics, and for all other concerned citizens.

Early childhood education and care is a major policy issue for national governments and international organisations. This book contests two stories, both infused by neoliberal thinking, that dominate early childhood policy making today - ‘the story of quality and high returns’ and ‘the story of markets’, stories that promise high returns on investment if only the right technologies are applied to children and the perfection of a system based on competition and individual choice. But there are alternative stories and this book tells one: a ‘story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality’ in which early childhood centres are public spaces and public resources, places where democracy and experimentation are fundamental values, community workshops for realising the potentiality of citizens. This story calls for transformative change but offers a real utopia, both viable and achievable. The book discusses some of the conditions needed for the story’s enactment and shows what it means in practice in a chapter about project work contributed by a Swedish preschool teacher. Critical but hopeful, this book is an important contribution to resisting the dictatorship of no alternative and renewing a democratic politics of early childhood education. It is essential reading for students and teachers, researchers and other academics, and for all other concerned citizens.

This edited volume provides a critical discussion of globalization and transformation, considering the cultural contexts of early childhood education systems as discourses as well as concrete phenomena and ‘lived experience.’ The book focuses on theoretical explorations and critical discourses at the level of education policy (macro), the level of institutions (meso), and the level of social interactions (micro). The chapters offer a wide range of interpretative, contextualized perspectives on early childhood education as a cultural construct.

Across the globe the work of early childhood educators, who are predominantly women, is misunderstood, underpaid and undervalued. Perspectives on early childhood educators are highly contentious: are they child development experts, oppressed workers, maternal substitutes, technicians, facilitators of early learning, or something else? This volume features chapter authors from Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the USA and New Zealand, examine a range of contemporary feminist theories in relation to the early childhood educator. The feminist theories covered include materialist feminism, poststructural feminism, decolonizing feminisms, posthumanist feminism, new materialist feminism, feminist ethics of care, womanist feminism, postcolonial feminism, femme theory and feminist queer theory. The editors of the volume offer an introduction and commentaries that explore solidarities and tensions between the feminisms to generate critical conversations about the work, lived experiences, and agency of early childhood educators. The volume contributes to shifting understandings of the early childhood educator in the contexts of culture, practice, policy and politics.

This book investigates the position of young children’s self-determination within a range of social contexts, such as education, social care, mass-media, health, politics, law and the family. It brings to the fore the voices of the children in the present, with their interests, agendas and rights. Based on original primary research, the chapters tackle hegemonic discourses on children’s self-determination as well as current policies and practices. They address a broad range of topics, from the planning of role-play to national policies, from the use of digital technologies for pedagogy to children’s health and well-being, and from democratic practices in the classroom to the preservation of traditional family values. The book presents case studies to unravel how childhood and young children’s self-determination are constructed at the intersection with intergenerational relationships. Coming from different disciplines and using a diverse range of methodological traditions, the contributions in the volume eventually converge to generate a rich, complex and multi-layered analysis of contemporary cultures of childhood and young children’s rights.

This book provides a revitalised account of the study of children’s drawing by outlining a departure from existing approaches privileging developmentalist accounts and presenting drawing as a specialised human endeavour separated from other material entanglements constituting children’s everyday experiences. The book takes on current developments in the fields of early childhood arts and early childhood literacies to advocate for process-oriented, new materialist and decolonial approaches that re-conceptualise the study of children’s drawing. It proposes a future-oriented approach, centred on thinking experimentally with a focus on nonrepresentational elements, such as movement, sensation, intensity, rhythm, story and place, which singularly assemble in drawing events. Thus, the book discusses drawing as a process of sense-making that is not enclosed in the individualised body of the child and that unfolds corporeally in time and space. It revises the relation of drawing with symbolisation by suggesting that the use of language and signs in drawing form in entanglement with matter and sensation in processes of creative speculation connected with the movement of thought. Presenting a series of contributions by internationally recognised scholars and artists, the book aims to create synergies between theory and practice that speak of everyday realities interconnecting children, learning and sense-making.

The Datafication of Primary and Early Years Education explores and critically analyses the growing dominance of data in schools and early childhood education settings. Recognising the shift in practice and priorities towards the production and analysis of attainment data that are compared locally, nationally and internationally, this important book explores the role and impact of digital data in the ‘data-obsessed’ school. Through insightful case studies the book critiques policy priorities which facilitate and demand the use of attainment data, within a neoliberal education system which is already heavily focused on assessment and accountability. Using an approach influenced by policy sociology and post-foundational frameworks, the book considers how data are productive of data-driven teacher and child subjectivities. The text explores how data have become an important part of making teachers’ work visible within systems which are both disciplinary and controlling, while often reducing the complexity of children’s learning to single numbers. Key ideas covered include: The impact of data on the individual teacher and their pedagogical practice, particularly in play-based early years classrooms The problems of collecting data through assessment of young children How schools respond to increased pressure to produce the ‘right’ data – or how they ‘play with numbers’ How data affect children and teachers’ identities International governance and data comparison, including international comparison of young children’s attainment Private sector involvement in data processing and analysis The Datafication of Primary and Early Years Education offers a unique insight into the links between data, policy and practice and is a crucial read for all interested in the ways in which data are affecting teachers, practitioners and children.