Abstract
As we continue to experience challenges for all to live peacefully and sustainably in a global world, this issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood offers articles from three countries: Norway, Australia and the USA. As usual, this issue contains six peer-reviewed articles, one colloquium (not peer reviewed) and one book review. We begin with an article by Cary A Buzzelli that critiques the ubiquitous human capital approach – something from which few education systems throughout the world have escaped. While Buzzelli does not contemplate replacing the human capital approach completely, he does suggest integrating it with a capabilities approach in a way that addresses the critiques of human capital approaches. He makes an argument that the suggested alternative provides a more inclusive way of understanding and addressing the challenges facing early childhood education. The second article comes from Australia, where Tina Stratigos addresses the notion of belonging for an infant aged eight to nine months in a multi-age family day-care context (in-home care). Attending to the politics of belonging through an emphasis on categorisation, Stratigos draws on the Deleuzian concepts of lines and segmentarity to investigate how social categories influence who belongs (and who does not), who gets to decide who belongs, and on what grounds. Although the category of ‘baby’ was influential, Stratigos proposes that categories are permeable and that other factors besides categories can come into play. She advocates finding examples of places where categories are broken or do not work, as it is such places that offer opportunities for extending what might be understood as belonging.
Writing from Norway, Karianne Franck and Randi Dyblie Nilsen investigated staff members’ constructions of the ‘(in)competent’ child in four Norwegian day-care settings. They interviewed 16 staff members and asked them to describe and reflect on children who had raised concern for them because of their conduct and demeanour. These children had not been formally diagnosed but were considered to be in between what might be described as ‘normal’ and ‘deviating’ in these institutions. The authors express caution about the competent child discourse and show how, in the current political climate of assessment, it has worked to identify potential deviance in children, and therefore results in a process of othering. The focus of the fourth article is the approach of two teachers working with dual language learners in a Head Start program in California, near the border between the USA and Mexico. Sarah Garrity and Alison Wishard Guerra take a cultural communities approach to learn about the different ways in which teacher beliefs influence classroom practice, specifically in regard to language use. The authors show that, despite similar ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, the teachers had very different beliefs and approaches to classroom language use. The study reveals how teacher beliefs are related to membership of cultural communities and that there is variation within groups, regardless of apparent similarities.
Returning to Norway, Kathrine Bjørgen and Birgit Svendsen used a phenomenological approach to interview 10 kindergarten practitioners in order to explore their reflections on the importance of their involvement in physically active outdoor play. They found that the practitioners positioned themselves as role models for children and experienced physical energy as contagious. Intersubjective processes, such as presence and responsiveness in the moment, were pivotal to children’s inspiration, involvement, persistence and mastery of physical tasks. The final article in this issue is a teacher response to what happened in a preschool classroom in Boston, USA, as a result of the bombings associated with the Boston Marathon. Dana Frantz Bentley uses classroom conversations as examples of what the children were concerned about in the aftermath of the bombings. She shows how these concerns were handled in daily classroom activity, and the way in which families and community members were involved.
This issue concludes with a colloquium by Joohi Lee, who discusses three strategies for promoting young children’s mathematical communications, and a book review by Maylan Dunn-Kenney, who responds to the book Reframing the Emotional Worlds of the Early Childhood Classroom, edited by Samara Madrid, David Fernie and Rebecca Kantor. We hope that you enjoy this issue and that the contributions inspire rich and stimulating discussions!