This article shares a story about an "activist" early childhood teacher encountering the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). Specifically, it focuses on the overarching concepts of "belonging" and "becoming" through the EYLF's call for early childhood educators to engage with theory in their everyday practice. In order to do this, the author…

In this article, the authors interrogate the use of "belonging" in "Belonging, Being and Becoming: the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia" (EYLF), Australia's first national curriculum for early childhood education and care settings and, from the authors' interrogation, possibilities are offered for thinking about and working with the…

Early childhood education and care have assumed importance in many government policy agendas. This attention is often accompanied by calls for greater accountability regarding the anticipated learning outcomes for young children. In Australia, the expected learning outcomes for children aged birth to five years are outlined in the recently…

In Australia, as elsewhere, many factors have contributed to making the struggle for recognition of the professional status of early childhood difficult and ongoing. Arguably this has led to instabilities surrounding professional identity and how members of the field regard themselves and their work. The development and release of the Early Years…

This article articulates the appeal of different conceptualisations of community to the curriculum writers of Belonging, Being and Becoming: the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia and to the Council of Australian Governments that commissioned the Framework, and the tensions within and between those respective conceptualisations. It then…

The World Conference on Education for All (1990) stated that learning begins at birth. The Dakar Framework for Action (2000) included the expansion and improvement of early childhood care and education as the first of six global goals. A number of countries have launched a variety of efforts to meet their global commitment to the development of…

Meyers & Kroeger situate two young writers in current ideologies of childhood and literacy and argue for creating dialogic classroom spaces in which children can be recognized by themselves, other children, and teachers as literate. Duckles & Larson build on the authors' attention to the potential constraints of dominant discourses and highlight…

The goal of implementing a culture-based curriculum that draws upon indigenous knowledge, traditions, and language is currently in competition with demands placed on schools by high stakes educational reform to implement a standards-based curriculum in schools. Though often left out of the policy conversation, Native teachers in particular have…

Current neoliberal educational policies are impacting young children and their teachers in the United States in many ways. Young children and teachers find themselves in vulnerable positions within a framework of an imperialist education in the age of standardization. Part of the struggle is to open spaces of decolonization that include home…

This article suggests placemaking as a framework to more deeply understand how teaching and learning can take into account young children's cultural histories. Placemaking, a form of analysis commonly found in land development literature, critically interprets the relationship between power, politics and the production of place. In this article,…

In an era of normative standardised literacy curriculum continuing to make space for culturally responsive literacy pedagogy is on ongoing challenge for early childhood educators. Collaborative participatory research and ethnographic studies of teachers who accomplish innovative and inclusive early childhood education in culturally diverse high…

If students are to be equipped with skills necessary to meet the challenging and diverse demands of different forms of communication brought about by the introduction of new technologies, then a broader definition of literacy is required. A pedagogy of multiliteracies recognises that there are multiple modes of representation that communicate…

Drawing on examples from classroom practice, this article explores implications of regarding multiliteracies pedagogy in early childhood settings as relationally and culturally situated. The author argues that investigating human dimensions of multiliteracies pedagogy involves interrogating assumptions about children and their capacities--viewing…

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptions of dialogue, monologue, and chronotope, the authors ask readers to consider how different values and actions ultimately create the teaching and learning spaces in which children are recognized as literate. Using qualitative data that focus on the relational writing practices of two preschoolers, this…

This article draws from a larger study that examines the multiple literacies inherent in children's drawings. The author discusses a qualitative research project conducted with a split grade one and two classroom in Toronto, Canada. She argues that pictorial images can be read as a form of literacy, where thought is made public through visual…