Abstract
This issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood contains articles that reflect both the breadth and depth in our field of research. The articles are eclectic and range in topics from our sense of place to parents’ views about new technologies.
In the first article, ‘When one of them is in our place: Early childhood settings as spaces of resistance’, Sonja Arndt explores Otherness by relating the story of an immigrant early childhood teacher. The narrative ‘provokes and challenges orientations, towards teacher-foreigners in a teaching team, towards difference and towards considerations of our place, as culturally drenched in local knowledges, values and practices, as relationally complex and as a possible site of resistance’. In her work, Arndt disrupts the construct of Other and positions teachers as subjects via a Kristevan lens.
Next, Lorna Arnott, Deirdre Grogan and Pauline Duncan explore the use of iPads as part of a child-centred data collection approach to understand young children’s creativity. Their article, ‘Lessons from using iPads to understand young children’s creativity’, presents empirical data from a research project with three- to five-year-old children. They analyse the children’s engagement with iPad video diaries and free applications over a period of three months. Their data illustrates that iPads can provide a means to afford children the opportunity to document their creative play and encourage their active involvement in the research process.
Katie A Bernstein’s contribution, ‘Post-structuralist potentialities for studies of subjectivity and second language learning in early childhood’, explores the relationship between second language learning and identity. Most of the work in this area has been done with older children. Using a post-structuralist perspective on identity, Bernstein opens up possibilities for research with young children using alternative constructs, and highlights the need to interrogate traditional views of language and language learning from diverse theoretical stances.
The focus for Kathryn Bown and Jennifer Sumsion is policy in ‘Generating visionary policy for early childhood education and care: Politicians’ and early childhood sector advocate/activists’ perspectives’. Their work ‘contributes to the global conversation about generating a “vision” in early childhood education and care policy by reporting on an investigation of influences on politicians’ policy decisions in early childhood education and care in Australia’. They utilize the work of Sara Ahmed to interrogate the cultural politics of characterizing the early childhood education and care sector as being ‘fragmented’. They present and discuss the practice of ‘agonism’ as a suggested conceptual viewpoint ‘for examining the material effects of being characterized as “fragmented”, and for reconfiguring political and public spaces’.
In their article, Christopher P Brown, Natalie Babiak Weber and Yeojoo Yoon document the pedagogical and practical struggles of some US-based early educators who participated in a professional development course. The experience offered them opportunities to engage with alternative conceptions of teaching and to critically question the taken-for-granted norms and practices of contemporary high-stakes neo-liberal early education systems. They discuss the challenges faced by the teachers during this process and highlight some salient issues that need to be considered as we engage with contexts that require us to think about our practices in different ways.
We return to the topic of new technologies in the final article, which reports on a survey given to parents of young children in the UK by the authors, Jane O’Connor and Olga Fotakopoulou. The article presents and analyses data from their survey in order to consider the ways in which young children are using touch-screen technology in UK homes. The article exposes what parents perceive to be the potential benefits and disadvantages of using new technologies, and the changes in parenting practices that they reported as a result of their children using these types of technologies.
We complete this issue with a colloquium that considers assessment processes for entry into the English primary schooling system, by Sofia Guimaraes, Sally Howe, Sigrid Brogaard Clausen and Michelle Cottle, and a book review by Dana Hagerman and Suzanne Porath of the title Bridging Literacy and Equity: The Essential Guide to Social Equity Teaching, by Althier M Lazar, Patricia A Edwards and Gwendolyn Thompson McMillon.