This article examines men's career decisions in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) using feminist post-structural agency theory that postulates a hybridization of 'male' and 'female' agentic factors. Anzaldúa's concept of "new mestiza" provides a theoretical foundation. The research focuses on the careers of three veteran male…

Special education in the United States has been historically problematic for several reasons, and limited research has been conducted to examine the close connection between teachers' experiences in the classroom (both general and special education teachers) and principals' leadership. Teacher perceptions have a great impact on the learning of…

Introduction: This paper presents the results of research focused on identification of preschool teachers' progress in relation to the use of children's preconceptions in formal pre-elementary education. It represents the theoretical concepts that are applied in the work with children's preconceptions in schools. It analyses them and creates a…

The article focuses on preschool teacher education in Sweden. The purpose of the study is to explore and analyse opportunities for and impediments to cooperation around digital competence among three groups: preschool teacher students, local teacher educators, and teacher educators at a university. The study presented in the article is performed…

Multilingual assistants may be invited into the parent-teacher conference to interpret in educational settings. The article examines the role of the multilingual assistant in the parent-teacher conference in the Norwegian early childhood education and care. What characterizes the role of the multilingual assistant in parent-teacher conferences,…

This volume examines the agency of second/foreign language teachers in diverse geographical contexts and in both K-12 and adult education. It offers new understandings and conceptualizations of second/foreign language teacher agency through a variety of types of empirical data. It also demonstrates the use of different methodologies or analytic…

Human agency is significant to the understanding of professional identities and actions. It is through human agency that individuals can become powerful in changing or authoring their own identities. Stemming from a larger narrative inquiry focused on understanding the professional identities of public preschool teachers, this paper draws on…

Since the early 2010s, there has been a proliferation of new platforms for children's stories (e.g. storybook apps or iBooks), but not necessarily greater diversity of story content or children's greater interest in reading. This article argues for a new approach to address the apparent paradox of a wider availability of children's literature…

This paper takes a 'networking of theories' approach to understand the complexity of the phenomenon of agency. We examine an episode, where a kindergarten teacher and nine children work on an addition problem, from three different perspectives: Valsiner's zone theory; Radford's theory of objectification; and Pickering's dance of agency. Our…

In this essay, Jennifer Keys Adair aims to clarify the concept of "agency" as a tool for improving the educational experiences of young children in the early grades. She conceptualizes agency in the context of schooling as the ability to influence what and how something is learned in order to expand capabilities, drawing on economic…

This overall aim of this paper is to report on PhD (Education) research critically examining the nature and significance of academic identity for students in early childhood field-based initial teacher education (FBITE) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Student academic identity is defined as the appropriation of academic values and practices within a…

This article focuses on student teachers' professional development and explores how the students connect theory and practice in these processes. Data consist of 17 talks during weekly seminars with 15 preschool student teachers and a group of researchers both at campus and at the practicum placements during their first term. Initially, the…

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services are vital in the establishment of optimal infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices and long-term health. This qualitative study, informed by Social Cognitive Theory, aimed to describe ECEC infant feeding environments. Nineteen formal long day care and family day care ECEC services and 124…

This article presents a six-week long action research study in two primary school classes, with the aim of exploring how a Storyline approach can facilitate learning and acting on sustainability issues, and how this approach might enhance pupils' agency. This study is underpinned by and analyzed through theories of relational pedagogy, in which…

To address the limited time and support for elementary science, science instruction is sometimes distributed among classroom teachers, science specialists, and informal science educators, creating a complex school science culture. We investigate how student agency may be enabled and constrained when school science learning happens simultaneously…