Play is an essential component of childhood, but parents and educators sometimes view it as an optional add-on, which gets in the way of learning. This view persists in spite of evidence that play is helpful and sometimes critical to learning in multiple domains, perhaps because precise mechanisms whereby play occasions learning are not well…

Children learn words in a social environment, facilitated in part by social cues from caregivers, such as eye-gaze and gesture. A common assumption is that social cues convey either perceptual or social information, depending on the age of the child. In this review of research on word learning and social cues during early childhood, we propose…

Learning progressions have become increasingly prevalent in mathematics education as they offer a fine-grain map of possible learning pathways a child may take within a particular domain. However, there is an opportunity to build upon this research in ways that consider learning from multiple perspectives. Many current forms of learning…

This paper invites us to reconsider our usual understanding of infancy, no longer as something that passes but as "infantia." The Latin word "infantia," which is not easy to translate, means a lack of speech, a lack of eloquence, and also infancy, babyhood, and dumbness. Drawing on Barbara Cassin's works on the untranslatables,…

In "Learning Without Lessons," David F. Lancy fills a rather large gap in the field of child development and education. Drawing on focused, empirical studies in cultural psychology, ethnographic accounts of childhood, and insights from archaeological studies, Lancy offers the first attempt to review the principles and practices for…

New brain imaging methods are helping us better understand how children learn, writes neuroscientist John Gabrieli. But "education neuroscience" has become the source of both promise and debate.

Play is widely acknowledged as being critical for children's development, yet opportunities for play are becoming more scarce for many children.

In Pangbisa village in Paro, Bhutan, a unique institution is a testament to His Majesty the King's recognition of the critical role of education in enriching the lives of people and the society, nurturing successive generations of leaders and building a strong, secure, and prosperous nation. The Royal Academy consists of three centers--the School,…

Many scholars are influenced by the theoretical contributions of Lev Vygotsky. Significant post-Vygotskian scholarly writing highlights sociocultural perspectives of understanding everyday, informal learning as an important phenomenon. Ideas of participatory learning, and knowledge building through participation and inquiry, are included in the…

The involvement of whanau in the teaching and learning process is important at every juncture of a child's educational journey. Rich understanding of the curriculum enables whanau to make deep and meaningful contributions to discussions about their child's development. It also presents an interesting challenge for educational settings to create…

Children develop and learn within dynamic contexts, yet the simplifying assumptions of common statistical methods often relegate such complexity to unexplained error. This chapter discusses ideas from the dynamic systems literature, which focuses on the interplay within and between components of complex systems, such as individuals and their…

The authors propose decentering the child as a critical motion in the education of pedagogists who work to refuse developmental pedagogies in early childhood education. Tracing how child-centered developmental practices are obstacles for deeper ethical and intellectual work and reiterate anthropocentric relationalities, they offer two propositions…

How can we use Friedrich Froebel's play theory in order to analyze ECEC, Early Childhood Education and Care? Wolfgang Klafki builds his theory of categorical "Bildung" on Froebel's play theory, which presupposes the interaction between child, adult and content, as in the didactic triangle. Froebel's play theory was lost in the hands of…

This article seeks to connect ethnographic findings from a study on parenting, childcare and early childhood in Chile's Mapuche communities with facets of the LOPI model. From Facet 1, we observe that children are included in social situations from an early stage, which empowers them to learn how to interact through such instances as greeting…

New energy, new evidence, and an emerging consensus on how learning happens have created a remarkable opportunity to galvanize widespread adoption of a whole child approach. However, messages about how learning happens are often obscured by confusion over terminology, weakening the field's overall ability to tell a compelling story about social,…