Early years care and education have been high on British political agendas. This includes partnership working between early years practitioners and parents. Yet, more research is needed to examine how childcare staff engage with parents and vice versa. This study addresses the role of position and positioning in parent-practitioner relationships,…

Children represent their efforts to make sense of their social worlds in various ways. Having, making and being friends are common foci of children's interactions and identity development. These efforts may become visible through analysing video-recorded snippets of children's play. In particular, repeated viewing of episodes of children's…

The following study examines two researchers' perspectives on play in the lives of children from diverse cultural contexts. Two questions guided this study: (1) how do researchers conceptualize children's play and (2) what shapes their understanding of play. In order to answer these questions, a critical discourse was established between two…

Drawing on data collected for a larger study investigating kindergarten teachers' online discussions of play, the present qualitative study examines teachers' discussions of gender. Findings suggest that teachers' project onto their kindergarten students many of their own gender prejudices about play. These teachers reinforced gendered attitudes…

The complex notion of the public/private distinction of social spheres has not been systematically investigated in sociolinguistics; particularly in the case of bidialectal kindergarten age children and how they construct their social lives around this distinction in a public environment such as that of school. No simple continuum can clearly…

Early childhood practitioners' professionalism is a contested concept, with interpretations that include professionalisms based on qualifications, on accountability, on relational skills and on critical advocacy. Understandings of professionalism as situated in ecological frameworks rather than within individuals have led to the concept of a…

A history of framing the teaching of young children as a matter of "natural" female aptitude has led a number of researchers and educators to oversimplify men's experiences as a foil or antidote to the ills of schooling. In this qualitative study of men, women, and "feminisation" in early education and care environments,…

Immersion education in Finland is a one-way (monolingual) early total Swedish programme for Finnish-speaking students. This immersion provision is offered at kindergarten level (ages 3-5), at preschool (age 6) and at primary levels (grades 1-9). Here, a brief synthesis of Finnish research studies on the early years in Swedish immersion is first…

From an ethnographic case study of a state-funded residential school for the Deaf, the authors employed Critical Discourse Analysis to identify competing discourses in the talk of educators. These discourses are embedded in the historical oppression and labeling of deaf people as disabled and the development of Deaf culture as a counter-discourse.…

This exploratory netnographic study describes how a sample of Ontario kindergarten teachers perceive the new Ontario Full Day Kindergarten (FDK) curriculum. Discussions from teacher message boards, the comment sections of online news articles, and interviews with kindergarten teachers were analyzed and coded using a qualitative approach. Analysis…

This qualitative case study examines the nature of a dual language preschool teacher's instructional practices and extratextual talk during shared-book reading practices with two different genres of books in Spanish and English. Specifically, I explore the interpersonal, ideational, and textual features of one teacher's talk in English- and…

Current studies on language and literacy in hearing children have pointed to face-to-face linguistic interaction as one crucial factor in the emergence of literacy. Studies that explored the language and literacy of preschool children, both in the their homes and in school, have found that the kind of talk and the quality of talk that transpires…

The focus of this article is on Finnish pre-school curricula from the early pioneering years to the start of the new millennium (1972-2000). Pre-school has been part of the Finnish education system for nearly 40 years. It has been undergoing a challenging reconstruction process and changes influenced significantly by the increasing call for…