This book is designed to help students face the ethical, methodological and theoretical challenges and complexities involved in engaging children in rights-based, participatory research.

Based on extensive research, and grounded in everyday classroom practice, the authors of this book explore important issues surrounding play in the early years curriculum. The book presents children’s views on, and response to their role-play environment, alongside examples of good classroom practice, and addresses vital questions such as: Will structuring role play replace children’s own attempts to create scenarios that grow out of their interests and relationships? Has an over-emphasis on subjects like literacy and numeracy eclipsed the important processes inherent in children’s social play? How we can ensure that provision for role play fully benefits all young children? Critically, the authors present the child’s perspective on play in schools throughout, and argue firmly against a formal, inflexible learning environment for young children. This book will be fascinating to all students on primary education undergraduate courses and early childhood studies. Researchers and course leaders will also find this book a ground-breaking read.

"This is a book which I will return to over time. It carries a powerful, and empowering, message about the task of researching children's views...(It) deserves to find an automatic place in staffroom libraries. I happily recommed it." - Support for Learning" The 1990s have been marked by a growing emphasis, in various professional contexts, on obtaining the views of clients, including children. This position is an international one, shared across the developed world, and encapsulated in the UN Convention on the rights of the child. This book addresses the issues and practicalities surrounding the obtaining of children's views, particularly in the research context. The book takes a deliberately and explicitly pluralist stance. Its distinctiveness rests on the scrutiny of methodological issues pertaining to the collection of children's views and practical applications. The book is structured around two main sections. Section 1 examines five aspects of theoretical and conceptual issues (ethical issues and codes of conduct, children's rights, the legal perspective, developmental dimensions and sociological issues). Section 2 illustrates these aspects by focusing on methods and applications in obtaining children's views in specific projects. The book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in psychology, social sciences, education, health and law. It will also be of value to a range of professionals involved in eliciting children's views (e.g. psychologists, teachers, social workers, medical workers and the police).

For decades, politicians, businessmen and other leaders have been concerned with the quality of education, including early childhood education, in the United States. While more than 50% of the children between the ages of three and five are enrolled in preschool and kindergarten programs in the United States, no state, federal, or national standards exist for science or technology education in preschool or kindergarten programs. Knowledge about science and technology is an important requirement for all in contemporary society. An increasing number of professions require the use of scientific concepts and technological skills and society as a whole depends on scientific knowledge. Scientific and technological knowledge should be a part of every individual’s education. There are many ways to enhance young children’s scientific thinking and problem-solving skills as well as their technological abilities. The purpose of this volume is to present a critical analysis of reviews of research on science and technology education in early childhood education. The first part of the volume includes contributions by leading scholars in science, while the second part includes contributions by leading scholars in technology.

More young children than ever before are spending their time in some form of early childhood service. But how do we know what they think about it? While there has been a move to take children's views into account more generally, very little attention has been given to listening to young children below the age of six or seven.This book is the first of its kind to focus on listening to young children, both from an international perspective and through combining theory, practice and reflection. With contributions and examples from researchers and practitioners in six countries it examines critically how listening to young children in early childhood services is understood and practised.Each chapter is rooted in the everyday lives of young children and presents a range of actual experiences for students and practitioners to draw from. Beyond listening goes further to address key questions emerging from early childhood services and research. These are What do we mean by listening? Why listen? How do we listen to young children? What view of the child do different approaches to listening presume? What risks does listening entail for young children?The authors are leading experts in this area of rapidly growing interest and have themselves developed innovative methods such as the Mosaic approach, which is discussed in the book.

The Mosaic approach views children as ‘experts in their own lives’, and offers a creative framework for listening to young children’s perspectives. At a time of shifting policy in early years, this second edition offers a timely reminder that listening to young children is still important for reviewing service provision.The Mosaic approach has been applied by practitioners throughout the world. This new edition reflects on the authors’ original ground-breaking work, with new introductions, updates and examples of how the Mosaic approach has been adapted, and offers case studies that will encourage practitioners to use the framework in their own setting.will be of interest to policy makers, practitioners in nurseries, children’s centres, pre-schools and schools and residential settings. It will also be welcomed by early childhood students and other researchers who are engaged in searching for new theoretical, practical and imaginative ways of listening to young children.

As researchers and theorists, teachers and teacher educators, parents and grandparents and advocates for children, the authors featured in Ethics and Research with Young Children share a common inclination to counter the idea of an ethics that is conventional-i.e., an ethics that reinforces existing models and discourses, which position children as irrational and incompetent; that de-anonymize children's ways of working and being in the world; that reduces and distorts the social, cultural and political forces that shape children's everyday realities; and, that routinely subtracts from these realities the complex responsibilities that adults have (especially as researchers) to recognize ethics as situated, relational, intersectional, and provisional. Aligned with the interdisciplinary commitments of a Childhood Studies approach and informed by a range of theoretical and practical frameworks, the perspectives offered in this volume are grounded in relationships between and among adults and children, their shifting social, cultural, political and material realities, and a world of ideas and experiences that impel them to face and reorient their ethical commitments to each other.