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…

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…

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…

One of the outcomes of the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, "Te Whariki", is "working theories". Prior research on this concept has primarily utilised sociocultural theoretical underpinnings and neglected Piagetian constructivist theories. This paper explores ways the Piagetian concepts of equilibrium and disequilibrium…