The idea that infant participation in research is achievable by researchers "voicing" infants' experiences and "perspectives" is a central feature of current moves towards participatory research. In this article we offer an alternative. Specifically, we suggest a different point of reference than infants' own…

In the present article we aim to explore the link between Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology and what we call sensory pedagogy. The latter connects to recent sensory ethnography as presented by S. Pink ("Sensory ethnography." London: Sage; 2009). We discuss how these thoughts can be put to work in toddler pedagogy. This kind of sensory…

Scholars of childhood and child-centered education draw attention to the multiple accounts of the child that have attended its brief history. In this article I read George Orwell's "Such, such were the joys" as a demonstration of the contradictions inherent in our notions of childhood, but also as a possible model for understanding…

The implementation in 2009-10 of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) spearheaded the efforts of the Australian Commonwealth government to institute a national curriculum. The theme of the new early childhood framework follows three guiding concepts: Belonging, Being and Becoming. In this article, we discuss these three concepts in order to…

Rabelaian carnivalesque provided philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin with a means of exploring the significance of humour through an examination of Middle Age peasant culture and the influence of the Renaissance on its legitimacy. This article argues that a similar phenomenon exists in modern educational settings and provides evidence to suggest that very…

In a recent keynote speech Paul Standish noted "there is agreement in judgments. But how the response to those judgments is realised is always cultural" (paper presented to PESA Conference, Taiwan, 2012, p. 2). Making judgments about what constitutes "crisis" for children is not necessarily agreed universally, though clearly…

What do we mean when we say we want to put children at the centre of policy? What are the moral justifications for this approach? Has it become harder for us to understand this concept, when in practice paid work has been at the centre? In part confusion arises because the unpaid work of caring for children is invisible until it is marketized. In…

In this article we offer an ontological theorization of care. The article interrogates the self-evident quality of everyday meanings for "care" that might be generated from psychological or biological discourses; we aim to question the way that "care" is applied in a technical or an emotional sense within the field of early…

Recent government attention to the coherence between early childhood and compulsory school curricula in Aotearoa/New Zealand has led to debates regarding the educational aims of different education sectors. Concerns regarding a "push-down" of compulsory school aims are highlighted in this article, with reference to Nel Noddings's…

An intensification of interest in early childhood by government, parents, and employers, focuses primarily on the provision of private early childhood education services outside of the home. With a focus on New Zealand, the paper argues that the form of early education now promoted is a particular form of care and education that moves children…

The article explores the need to eat as a biological and social practice among children in a preschool in Norway. The children in this preschool are aged from one to two years of age, and some of them have just started there. Different events from mealtimes relate to Derrida's concept of touch and Grosz's notion of bodies in-place and…

Dialogue is a seminal concept within the work of the Brazilian adult education theorist, Paulo Freire, and the Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. While there are commonalities in their understanding of dialogue, they differ in their treatment of dialectic. This paper addresses commonalities and dissonances within a…

How a community constructs the notion of childhood and the child is fundamentally implicated in the practices and policies of that community. This article explores the positioning of the child in historical, contemporary and emerging trends in the provision and practices of Australian early childhood education and care. It argues that if left…

This article draws upon the Deleuzian/Guattarian idea of territorializing movements to trouble the notion of the identity of the learning pre-school child, produced by developmental psychology, as an individual, natural and developing child as well as the more recent image of the child characterised by autonomy and flexible behaviour. Accordingly,…

This paper considers the prospects for objectivity in reasoning strategies in response to empirical studies that apparently show systematic culture-based differences in patterns of reasoning. I argue that there is at least one modest class of exceptions to the claim that there are alternative, equally warranted standards of good reasoning: the…