Reforms in K-12 science education and their implications for PreK teaching, make this a critical time for developing a unified vision for early childhood science education. The goal of this essay is to provide a vision of what it might look like to leverage the best of both early childhood and K-12 science education reform efforts for meaningful…

Early years science education is not science, but a curricular construction designed to induct young children into a range of ideas and practices related to the natural world. While inquiry-based learning is an important approach to this, it is not of itself unique to science and there are a range of logico-mathematical constructions that come…

Since the rise of mass schooling in the 19th century, Americans have advocated for the teaching of science at nearly every level of the educational system. The reasons for its inclusion in the school curriculum, though, have varied over the years. The argument in the mid 1800s, for example, centered on the utilitarian value of scientific knowledge…

Mentoring relationships in academia have traditionally been described as a dyad between a mentor and a mentee. The mentor provides the mentee with both technical and psychosocial support to move toward obtaining their Ph.D. or gaining tenure and promotion. While there is an embedded assumption that mentoring is best suited when people of common…

Young American children in today's public schools live in a world in which tensions around about identity (i.e., ethnicity and race, gender continuums, language backgrounds and proficiencies, cultural values and beliefs, economic resources, schooled experiences, literacy, and im/migration history) are part of everyday conversation. However, many…

Science education become one prioritie of modern societies, with the purpose of forming scientifically literate youth and adults. They play an active role in solving the problems existing in society, making critical and informed decisions. In this paper we discuss the need for scientifically literate citizens and the relevance of practical work as…

Our concern is to offer support to the entire spectrum of staff wishing to nurture the development of early years science, from unqualified personnel through to early years professionals who may hold any one of the plethora of relevant qualifications. We reflect on what form that science might take, bearing in mind criticisms of science education…

The California State Board of Education (SBE) adopted the California Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to transform science teaching and learning in K-12 schools in 2013. The new standards emphasize "three-dimensional learning": disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices. They are aligned…

Previous psychological, neuroscientific, and educational research indicates that a focus on individual haptic modes of learning (touch, body movement, gesture, tracing), and on the development of emerging mathematical and scientific drawing, can enhance children's learning in mathematics and science. However, most of these studies have focused on…

Thinking alongside feminist science studies scholars, in this article I contend with how early childhood education pedagogies do metabolisms. To conceptualize metabolisms as an activity is to centre the ethical and political practices, relations, knowledges, and vulnerabilities that flood bodies in contemporary times. I ask: What possibilities for…

In this paper, I argue that the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and education have been deeply intertwined since the early days of AI. Specifically, I show that many of the early pioneers of AI were cognitive scientists who also made pioneering and impactful contributions to the field of education. These researchers saw AI as a tool for…

In 2002 Congress passed the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA), authorizing the creation of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) as the research, evaluation, statistics, and assessment arm of the Department of Education, and crystallizing the federal government's commitment to providing national leadership in expanding fundamental…

This article debates how muscles happen in early childhood education. Drawing on post-developmental pedagogies and feminist science studies, this article integrates moments from a pedagogical inquiry with movement in early childhood education to trace how muscles matter as complex and active ethical, political, and pedagogical concerns. After…

A Citizen Science approach to building the evidence base is well established in many science disciplines, but is far from main stream in the social sciences. Prompted from the inquiry by the Australian Government's Productivity Commission into the National Education Evidence Base and taking Early Childhood Education (ECE) as an example, this paper…

Today, institutions of higher education enroll rural students, and specifically rural women, at rates lower than their urban counterparts (Flora et al., 2018). Additionally, the disciplines of teaching and home economics continue to dominate the curricular choices of rural women. As higher education scholars continue to explore these phenomena, a…