Drawing on the work of Celia Genishi, this article discusses data from an ethnographic case study of young Latina/o children, starting in their four-year-olds classroom in a Head Start Program through their first grade year in a dual-language program in a public school. The children attended a bilingual Head Start program that followed a…

As researchers interested in the pursuit of high-quality/high-equity literacy learning outcomes, the authors focus on the learning experiences of five early years French students, with a special regard for those who are already considered as being at risk of educational failure. The authors narrow the empirical focus to a single lesson on a…

Whilst sex education in Australia has moved beyond a focus solely on abstinence, it is still in many instances shaped by what Silin refers to as the "silences" that accompany topics considered unspeakable to young people. The present article focuses specifically on one such silence, namely the representation of non-heterosexual sexualities and…

Australian women make decisions about returning to paid work and care for their child within a policy environment that presents mixed messages about maternal employment and childcare standards. Against this background, an investigation of first-time mothers' decision-making about workforce participation and childcare was undertaken. Four…

There is a growing body of literature about the potential for early childhood settings to serve as community hubs to develop relationships with families. However, there is limited information about the ways in which families and early childhood staff interface in defining what constitutes "quality" within settings. Researchers have rarely studied…

The early childhood education (ECE) sector in Australia is marked by a habitus where "professionalism" is confined to objective, technical practices. The authors suggest that this is a diminished view of professionalism, and one that compromises high-quality ECE. This article is concerned with how teacher professionalism can be re-imagined and…

As early childhood education continues to gain prominence on the agendas of policy makers across the globe, members of the field of early childhood education are concerned that these reforms will create new governing discourses that restrict how early educators are defined and limit their work with young children. While these neo-liberal policies…

As neoliberal polices that emphasize governing the modern state through market-based principles expand across the globe, they are altering the training of early childhood teacher candidates. This creates a range of challenges for those teacher educators who are critical of this reform process. This article presents an instrumental case study that…

This article reports findings from a study that explored the nature of sibling relationships when one child in the family has autism. It employs a collective case study approach to capture the perspectives of parents and young children (aged four to seven years) from three different families. A multifaceted exploration of sibling relationships was…

This article describes an emerging theoretical framework for examining relationships between learning dispositions and learning architecture. Three domains of learning dispositions--resilience, reciprocity and imagination--are discussed in relation to the structures and processes of early childhood education settings and new entrant classrooms.…

The established place of the arts within early childhood education is rarely questioned. Nevertheless, social, cultural and political shifts in values, beliefs and practices impact on approaches to the arts, as early childhood practitioners grapple with increasingly complex views on how children learn and what factors impact on their learning.…

This layered account of arts education is produced through the three authors' critical reflections of experiences in their own early childhood education, and their pre-service teacher education. The first layer establishes links between the arts, learning in the arts and critically reflective practices through an account of teaching and learning…

Early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand includes different philosophical perspectives, may be part of the public or private sector and aims to be inclusive and holistic. The early childhood curriculum, Te Whariki, supports these aims. Aspects of the curriculum that are holistic may be conceptualized in diverse ways and this qualitative…

There has been minimal Australian research focused on leadership and management aspects of directors' work in centre-based child care to date. In Australia, practices in early education have been drawn largely from studies in other cultural contexts, particularly research undertaken in the United States. It is timely that Australian research…

In this age of greater accountability, local school districts within the USA increasingly use summer school programs as an intervention service to provide students who have failed to meet classroom, district, or state performance requirements with the opportunity to "catch up." Although such programs attempt to provide varying types of…