With focus on teachers' experiences and understandings of manual-based programmes, this article explores the implications for teacher professionalism. It locates teachers' use of manual-based programmes in the intersection of two currents of ideas in contemporary society and within education: therapy culture and the evidence movement. The article…

In this paper, we explore how professional and policy contexts can mediate early childhood teachers' relationship with the official curriculum. Using their assessment practices as an impetus for discussion, we probed 28 Greek kindergarten teachers to talk about their engagement with the prescribed curriculum and explain how they construct its…

This article focuses on junk materials and how they invite and encourage children to play and construct without the need to name, define or label the constructions. The article also deals with how practitioners' expectations can disturb this creative and transitory process. The article is based on one aspect of my study entitled "When matter…

This article provides an overview of the results of our project "The Kindergarten Room: A Multimodal Pedagogical Text". Our major initiative was to investigate what the multimodal texts in kindergarten represent and the extent to which they reflect and provide attributions to the children's activities. In addition, we wanted to…

This study explores how kindergarten spaces and materiality can be vital for children's exploration of participation and how the physical environment enables children to interact and position themselves in play and meaning making. Methodologically this study is based on ethnographic fieldwork with two groups of 2- to 5-year-old children in two…