Many governments have launched the top-down early childhood curriculum (ECC) reforms to enhance the accountability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. The present discourse analysis of latest ECC policies across four diverse but representative countries -- Australia, China, New Zealand, and Singapore -- aims to examine the…

An expansive view of care is vital to understanding children's sense-making of their care experiences in early childhood education. Yet, scant literature explores how toddlers enact and express understandings of care in their play with objects and others. This article identifies play situations where toddlers enact and express understandings, and…

This article uses explores how young children use self-directed spontaneous singing at home as a tool of personal agency. Although researchers are increasingly interested in spontaneous singing that takes place outside formal education and care settings, there remains little research into young children's self-directed singing at home. With…

The goal of the study was to examine preschool teachers' (N = 96) and parents' (N = 82) perceptions of seriousness, empathy, likelihood to intervene, and intervention responses for perpetrators and victims of hypothetical scenarios depicting relational and physical aggression. After establishing differential associations between relational and…

Friedrich Froebel is well-known for the invention of kindergarten and the pioneering educational philosophy he developed in the 1800s, which respected children's self activity and women's capabilities for the role of teacher, while promoting play as the primary medium for learning. His radical ideas and principled approach to early childhood…

With the increasing acknowledgement of the benefits of early childhood education, there is a need to ask critical questions about whether ample leadership exists for guiding ambitious systemic change in the field. This review of leadership in early childhood educational contexts between 1995 and 2015 examines the epistemological assumptions…

Inclusive education has long been implemented in regular educational settings in many jurisdictions including New Zealand (NZ). Since many children with special educational needs (CSEN) are not identifiable in a family environment, to ensure all CSEN are supported in a timely manner, early identification should be an integral component of the…

In Birth-2 early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, where evidence-based practices are still emerging, tensions exist about what it means to be an infant educator. While it is widely accepted that infants require responsive, supportive and care, relationships between educators and infants in early childhood settings necessarily involve…

Ethnographic methods are used to investigate infant--toddlers relationships in an early childhood setting. The metaphorical and emotionally based concepts of holding [Winnicott, D. W. (1960). "The theory of the parent-infant relationship." "International Journal of Psychoanalysis," 41, 585-595.] and container: contained [Bion,…

Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group.…

This article investigates the approach of care as curriculum and teachers' perceptions of this notion. It is a descriptive account of the interviews of four Aotearoa New Zealand-based infant and toddler teachers' perceptions of care as curriculum. Care as curriculum is a pedagogical approach that was brought to the research process. This was an…

This study examined play memories from adults who grew up in a wide range of international contexts. Surveys and semi-structured interviews asking adults to recollect play memories were completed with 135 adults (100 Females, 35 Males) who grew up in 21 countries. Play memories were analysed to identify adults' favourite types of childhood play,…

For preservice teachers in early childhood education, having a rich exposure to multiple forms of literacy in diverse communities is an essential dimension of their teacher education. In this study, 10 Australian preservice early childhood education students, in the first year of their course, visit two early childhood settings in a large city in…

Using mixed methods to analyse the experience of a 4-month-old and a 10-month-old infant in a high-quality New Zealand education and care setting, this paper utilises dialogic methodology to foreground the importance of key teacher proximity to infant relationships with adults, peers and artefacts in a group context. Quantitative findings…

A total of 659 photographs of text in early childhood environments were gathered by student teachers in New Zealand and Sweden, replicating an earlier Swedish study [Gustafsson, K., & Mellgren, E. (2002)." Using text in pre-school: A Learning Environment." "Early Child Development and Care", 172(6), 603-624]. The findings…