Spatial reasoning is seen as increasingly important in STEM fields. Within mathematics, geometry is a potential site to study and support young children's spatial reasoning. In this paper we revisit Piaget and his colleagues' theoretical perspective on children's development of geometry concepts and take note of projective geometry in that theory.…

The preschool years are fundamental for children's social development as they navigate novel and complex social situations, which include interaction sequences and relationship features. As young children notice aspects of human difference, they develop schemas by classifying and situating attributes (e.g., skin color, hair type, communication…

Seeing children--noticing the details of their actions and words and seeking their perspective to catch a glimpse of how they experience the world--brings joy and deeper understanding to the author's work and life. Over the years she has cultivated the practice of slowing down and observing closely to see the child's point of view. She has…

Childhood research has long shared a bio-political terrain with state agencies in which children figure primarily as "human futures". In the 20th century bio-social dualism helped to make that terrain navigable by researchers, but, as life processes increasingly become key sites of bio-political action, bio-social dualism is becoming…

The current paper proposes a Relational Frame Theory (RFT, Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001a) conceptualization of empathy and perspective taking that follows previous literature outlining a relationship between those phenomena and general functioning. Deictic framing, a relational operant investigated by RFT researchers, constitutes the…

Child development theorists, researchers, and educators have long known that play is one of children's most valuable resources, vital to their social, emotional, and cognitive growth. Through play children make sense of the world around them and work through new experiences, ideas, and feelings. But in recent years, a host of social forces and…

Recent research on cognition demonstrates how significant it is to listen to and hear what children say about their experience. When we understand what they analyse about the daily events of school, we get a very different picture of what they go through than the official policies would suggest. Children have clear insights into the formal and…

This paper examines the concept of "teaching" in early education and childcare and argues that the activity of teaching, broadly defined, concerns all adults who work in this area and occurs in all phases of the educational system. Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological perspective on human development is applied to conceptualise teaching as (1)…

Maintains that one of the most difficult aspects of early childhood teaching is to set aside preconceptions and really pay attention to what children are doing. Maintains that music specialists who go into the early childhood room only at music time should seek other opportunities to observe students. (CFR)

In Latin America and the Caribbean, poverty is not merely a problem of marginalized communities. It is the situation in which 240 million people--50 percent of the population--are living. This report describes research undertaken by the Quality of Life Project, which aims to improve the situation of children in these disadvantaged communities. The…