Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of 2024! The eight articles in this issue provide some stimulating reading and cover a wide range of different topics, adopt different theoretical perspectives, and challenge ways of thinking, being and doing. In the global context, we recognise the continuing displacement, suffering and dire conditions of children and families in the world's trouble spots. Basic necessities of water, food, shelter and access to medical assistance and sanitation remain elusive for many. Hopes for peace and workable solutions prevail.

In the first article of this issue, Karen Nociti takes readers on a journey of how she moved beyond reflective practice and blogged-with place to (re)imagine place based-education (Beyond Reflective Practice: Blogging-with Place as a Diffractive Practice for (Re)imagining Place-Based Education). Reflective practice, and critical reflective practice remain part of daily professional practices for many early childhood educators. In this journey, we learn about practices of hesitating, (de)composing and unlearning weeds and time as alternatives to the patterns and practices of normativity in everyday life. Unlearning the certainty and linearity of the reflective cycle was also necessary and happened in conjunction with practices such as ‘reading-with Aboriginal authorship and thinking-with concepts’. This article is a prompt for deep thinking about the use of critically reflective practices.

Data from interviews with early childhood educators in Chile are used by María José Lagos-Serrano to challenge ‘oversimplified’ ideas about school based early childhood educators. The title ‘“I feel like the ham of the sandwich”: The contested professional identities of school-based early childhood educators in Chile’ reflects some of the tensions experienced by this group of teachers. Free-associative group interviews were analysed using a psychoanalytically informed discourse analysis, with Lagos-Serrano proposing a liminal identity as a way of beginning to carve a space for considering the subjectivities of these educators. A liminal identity is conceptualised as a space of becoming and offers opportunities for investigating and reimagining subjectivities as provision of early childhood education in school settings in Chile and other places increases. Lagos-Serrano offers a way to think differently about this group of educators.

In the third article, ‘Redefining engineering for early childhood educators through professional development’, Tingting Xu and Lexa Jack raise awareness of the importance of engineering in early childhood education as part of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). They report on an intensive professional development program that 17 early childhood teachers undertook to increase their knowledge of engineering and self-efficacy in teaching it. While the programme was seen to be successful because teachers increased their engineering content knowledge, pedagogical skills and confidence in teaching engineering, the authors highlight the importance of engineering (and STEM) in early childhood teacher preparation as well as continuing professional development to address the gap in this content area as well as the difficulty in finding professional development programmes that do this well.

Assessment is a contested topic in early childhood education (and education generally), and the source of much tension including in the early years of schooling. Teachers in the first year of formal schooling are aware of the pressures of national standardised tests that are undertaken by learners in Australia, with the first of these occurring in Year 3. In ‘Mixing performance and competence: Pedagogic orientations to assessment of writing and text production in the early years’, Deb Brosseuk reports on an exploratory case study involving design-based research with 14 children in the first year of schooling. Basil Bernstein's two pedagogical orientations to assessment (competence and performance) ground the study theoretically. While not an easy task, Brosseuk argues that using a mix of competence and performance approaches to assessment can not only be done, but also provides a more ‘expansive idea of what learners know, understand and can do’. However, pedagogical flexibility is essential as learners need encouragement and support to construct knowledge in different ways and forms from those required by standardised tests.

In the fifth article, Linnea Bodén provides a unique insight into relations between young children and researchers while children are undertaking standardised tests as part of an intervention project. The article is titled ‘In the middle of a standardized test: The emerging relations of young children in research’ and adopts a relational approach to consider the complexities of this type of testing. Bodén suggests that the contextual nature of such testing has been neglected and that the relationality of the testing situation enables ‘children and researchers [to] jointly question and queer the standardizations’. It matters that such matters have been overlooked because, as Bodén indicates, relational perspectives attune to context, complexities and contingencies that occur among children and researchers in the testing situation.

Joy is a concept that is associated with young children, and often in the context of play. It features in the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and indicates that children can expect to have experiences of joy while attending early childhood settings. Alexandra Nordström sets out to disrupt and reimagine the way that joy is considered and researched in ‘Reimagining joy as a performative force in early childhood education’. She adopts a post-qualitative methodology and draws on relational ontology to think with what joy as a performative force can do. Mundane events are shown to hold exciting possibilities for ways in which knowledge can be produced, and how educational practices and research can be reimagined.

Natalia Kucirkova introduces the idea of sensory reading in her article The explanatory power of sensory reading for early childhood research: The role of hidden senses’. Sensory reading may be new to many readers. It engages all six human senses and the three that will be most familiar are vision, hearing and touch. Those that may be less well known are gustation, olfaction and proprioception, which Kucirkova calls the silent senses, and it is these that Kucirkova suggests we should know more about. This means moving beyond surface dimensions of reading which are medium- or mode-centric. As well as advancing the under-researched area of innovative reading studies, Kucirkova says that different insights can be gained from different types of sensory engagement such as affect. And the gustation aspects of sensory reading offer some novel approaches.

In the last article of this issue, we are reminded that change to everyday life is more of an expectation now than ever before. Sanders and colleagues indicate that of the many studies that have investigated the effects of COVID-19, the impact on younger children is one area that remains inadequately researched. Their study, ‘Day-to-day life during the COVID-19 pandemic: A longitudinal qualitative study with Canadian parents of young children’, also made the point that much research has been undertaken in urban settings and with older children and adolescents. Thus, they focus on 10 mothers with children aged birth–5 years who were living in a small northern city in British Columbia, Canada. Disruption to daily family life extended to limited access to health services, and like many other countries, access to early childhood services was restricted to children of essential workers. The lack of opportunities for children's social interaction in educational settings and the difficulty in engaging with health and educational service personnel for support reduced well-being. Nevertheless, the resourcefulness of the mothers was key to creating family resilience.

This issue has two colloquia. The first is from Gunilla Dahlberg, Peter Moss and Alan Pence, who, as the title indicates (‘Reflections on Beyond Quality at 25 years’) consider what has happened since the publication of the first edition of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives. It's hard to believe that it was 25 years ago that the field was introduced to the ideas in this book, many of which have been the catalyst for ongoing research and provocative conversations.

The second colloquium by Jennifer Chen and Jasmine Lin addresses a topic that has produced a lot of discussion, especially in the academy: ‘Artificial intelligence as a double-edged sword: Wielding the POWER principles to maximize its positive effects and minimize its negative effects’.

Thank you to Robby Anggriawan, who reviewed the book Technology's Child: Digital Media's Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up, authored by Katie Davis.

As usual for the first issue of a new year, we sincerely thank those who reviewed for the journal in 2023. We very much appreciate your professionalism and the way that you contribute to mentoring others as part of the reviewing process and thank the following people for their contributions:

Adam, Helen. Edith Cowan University, Australia

Ailwood, Jo. The University of Newcastle, Australia

Aldemir, Jale. University of North Carolina at Wilmington, USA

Ascenzi-Moreno, Laura. City University of New York, USA

Berger, Iris. The University of British Columbia, Canada

Bjervås, Lise-Lotte. Linnaeus University, Sweden

Boldt, Gail. Pennsylvania State University, USA

Bortoli, Anna. La Trobe University, Australia

Boyd, Jennifer. The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Bradbury, Alice. UCL Institute of Education, UK

Brown, Ayanna. Elmhurst University, USA

Brown, Christopher. The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Bryan, Nathaniel. Miami University, USA

Byman, Jenny. University of Helsinki, Finland

Compton-Lilly, Catherine. University of South Carolina, USA

Cumming, Tamara. Macquarie University, Australia

Degotardi, Sheila. Macquarie University, Australia

Delaune, Andrea. University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Dezuanni, Michael. Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Duhn, Iris. The University of Tasmania, Australia

Fenech, Marianne. University of Sydney, Australia

Flint, Tori. University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA

Frankenberg, Sophia. Stockholm University, Sweden

Gaches, Sonia. The University of Otago, New Zealand

Gibson, Megan. Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Hackett, Agigail. Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Hamm, Catherine. The University of Melbourne, Australia

Henderson, Linda. Monash University, Australia

Hodgins, Denise. University of Victoria, Canada

Hunkin, Elise. La Trobe University, Australia

Huston, Lori. University of British Columbia, Canada

Iruka, Iheoma. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Johnson, Wintre. University of Virginia, USA

Johnston, Lisa. York University, Canada

Jukes, Scott. Federation University, Australia

Keränen, Virve. University of Oulu, Finland

Krieg, Susan. Flinders University, Australia

Kwon, Jungmin. Michigan State University, USA

Land, Nicola. Ryerson University, Canada

Linzmeier, Kristin. University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, USA

Lytje, Martin. University of Bergen, Norway

Madrid Akpovo, Samara. The University of Tennessee, USA

McMullen, Mary. Indiana University, USA

Mikuska, Eva. University of Chichester, UK

Mintz, Joseph. University College, London, UK

Muller, Meir. Medical University of South Carolina, USA

Murris, Karin. University of Oulu, Finland

Nagasawa, Mark. Erikson Institute, USA

Newberry, Jan. University of Lethbridge, UK

Nicholas, Howard. La Trobe University, Australia

Nociti, Karen. Edith Cowan University, Australia

O’Connor, Jane. Birmingham City University, UK

Pahl, Kate. Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Powell, Sarah. Macquarie University, Australia

Press, Frances. Griffith University, Australia

Psaros-Andriopoulos, Haris. University of Groningen, Netherlands

Puckett, Kate. Eastern Oregon University, USA

Puskás, Tünde. Linköping University, Sweden

Recchia, Susan. Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

Ritchie, Jenny. Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Ryan, Sharon. Rutgers University, USA

Thapa, Sapna. Metropolitan State University

Theobald, Maryanne. Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Yuan, Ting. College of Staten Island, USA

Yuen, Gail Kwan Wai. The Education University of Hong Kong, SAR

Winston, Joe. University of Warwick, UK

Wood, Liz. The University of Sheffield, UK

Woodrow, Chris. University of Western Sydney, Australia

Wright, Travis. University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Wynter-Hoyte, Kamania. University of South Carolina, USA

Wyver, Shirley. Macquarie University, Australia

Thank you again to all who supported Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood in 2023 – authors, reviewers, book review editors, readers and editorial board members. I hope you enjoy this issue and that we see a more peaceful 2024.