Present-day early childhood educators face the challenge of producing their professional identities in highly neo-liberal contexts, negotiating contested discourses on professionalism, education quality and the overall purpose of early childhood education. While it has been suggested by critical scholarship that the early childhood workforce…

Regulatory drivers of teacher quality and teacher professionalism are increasingly being utilised in Australia and internationally to improve children's outcomes. In the context of a recent national review on teacher registration, this article reports on findings from a small-scale study that investigated three early childhood teachers'…

Pedagogical documentation has been understood as an important way for early childhood educators to provide high-quality learning environments for children. The authors explore the contested nature of quality and its interpretation in two cultural contexts: in Western Australia, where pedagogical documentation is a relatively uncommon practice, and…

This article investigates the variety of factors that hinder the implementation of play (as defined by western scholars) in Asian preschools. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of policy borrowing, enactment and glocalisation, we analyse three jurisdictions that illustrate distinctive problematics: India, Mainland China and Hong Kong. The…

This study aims to conceptualise a drama-integrated curriculum devised from process drama as an approach to play-based pedagogy and curriculum to realise the policy initiative of learning through play. By investigating teachers' perspectives and practices in relation to the curriculum of a local kindergarten, examples of effective…

This article uses the concept of 'superdiversity' as a lens through which various conceptualisations of diversity in Norwegian early childhood education and care policies and professionals' understandings are made visible. Although Norwegian early childhood education and care is expected to highlight, value, and promote diversity and mutual…

Research shows that modern forms of colonization are vested with globalizing discourses which include early childhood education, gender, and curriculum policies and practices that are Euro-western based. In this collaborative qualitative study, four ethnographic researchers--two who conduct research in Nepal and two who conduct research in…

Child development ideologies have long informed early childhood education, shaping teachers' perceptions of children and their classroom practices through teacher education programs and education policies. Following the rise of post-developmental perspectives in the early childhood literature, the author uses a critical feminist lens to examine…

Drawing on case-study data, this inquiry explores the lived experiences of four universal pre-kindergarten teachers to address the question: How do practitioners narratively interpret a local school district policy directive of child autonomy, use their professional capacities to reconstruct the directive to address diverse students' needs, and…

An important factor that may be missing from recent attempts to counter, resist, and/or reconceptualize the neoliberal framing of the early education process is the actions of children, particularly those that reinforce the neoliberal assemblage of schooling they learn through their interactions with their teacher in school. This article begins to…

This study addresses leadership enactment in the context of early childhood education and care centres in Finland. The study was implemented at a time when the early childhood education and care legislation had changed. The research draws from relational leadership theory to address the following questions: How do leaders, practitioners and…

Leadership in early childhood education has been promoted as a collaborative process in which all teachers, rather than just the positional leader, are involved. Collaborative leadership practices are not well understood within the marketised Singapore early childhood education context. Beyond mandatory leadership training, little is known about…

Early childhood education settings are arguably places of community, togetherness and belonging. But what if they are not? What if individuals' senses of identity, place or reality clash, do not fit or, worse, repel or offend? This article picks up on the largely under-researched area of teachers' belonging and sense of cultural identity in early…

This article documents the pedagogical and practical struggles of a sample of early educators in a large urban school district in the USA who engaged in a professional development course which offered them alternative conceptions of teaching that critically questioned the norms and practices of their high-stakes neo-liberal early education system.…

Borderlands of practice are spaces where teachers are engaged in negotiating multiple conceptions of "best practices" within their daily teaching practice. Teachers at work in borderlands must actively negotiate varied conceptions, expectations, and assumptions about what is "best" for their students. These conceptions often…