This colloquium discusses the intersection of love, care, and education in the field of early childhood education and care. While the name of the field reflects the belief that both care and education are seen as legitimate elements of the field's professional discourse, love is still unspoken, undefined, and taken for granted. The author argues…

In this paper we explore datafication through a specific kind of evaluative practice in Swedish early childhood education and care (ECEC): the creation of quality reports by individual preschools. A theoretical framework is developed based on Dahler-Larsen's descriptions of three 'evaluation imaginaries' (the modern, reflexive modernity and audit…

Over the last 30 years, neo-liberalism has permeated early childhood, as all other aspects of life. Having introduced what neo-liberalism is, the article looks at some of its effects on early childhood education and care, including markets, imaginaries and governance. It argues that though neo-liberalism is a powerful force, it is resistible and…

In this paper, we ponder the ecologies of spacetimematterings folded into resistance practices and their relationality with figurations of agency outside and beyond datafication agendas. Accountability cultures bound up with datafication have consequences that include a diminished agency for both children and educators. We take inspiration from…

At a time when national discourse in the USA centers the need for professionalization, regulation, and surveillance, this article emphasizes the ways in which neoliberal logics harm those working in early childhood education in the USA. While stakeholders at every level debate proposed solutions to the early childhood education crisis, largely…

In early childhood education and care policy, there are two dominant discourses: 'investment and outcomes' and 'children's rights'. There is little research on how these discourses play out in educators' accounts. In this article, the authors examine the case of discourse pertaining to children's relaxation in early childhood education and care.…

This article considers opportunities and risks arising from the prominence of the belonging motif in Australia's Early Years Learning Framework and, more implicitly, in the National Quality Standard, against which the quality of the early childhood education and care services is assessed. A vignette constructed from case study data generated in…

This research examines one lead teacher's and two assistant teachers' emotional discomfort as they participated in an eight-month collaborative ethnography of 19 children's peer-culture aggression in an early care and education classroom in the USA. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the emotional themes of teachers in relation to…

This colloquium argues that writings on leadership in the early years commonly assume a service ethos. The aim of nurseries and other early childhood settings is to provide a service for children and their parents, and the task of leadership is seen to be to find effective ways of defining and realizing this aim. But increasingly, and especially…

Currently, little research exists on social studies within the context of Norwegian early childhood education and care, and how early childhood teachers work to familiarise children with social studies contexts . This article is a scoping literature review offering a preliminary research agenda. Its aim is to explore the ways in which the early…

This research uses focus group methodology to examine how a specific subset of family childcare providers--those participating in a voluntary quality rating and improvement system and serving a high percentage of children receiving childcare subsidy--define quality. The study builds on the limited existing research about family childcare quality,…

Theoretical perspectives, and a large body of empirical research examining sex-segregated occupations, identify the attitudinal barriers of the majority as pivotal for both workplace well-being and the retention of minorities. Globally, where more than 90% of the early childhood education and care workforce is female, understanding the attitudes…

Family child care professionals are a critical sector of the early care and education workforce. Utilizing critical race theory and Yosso's Community Cultural Wealth model, the current study seeks to examine the strengths and assets that family child care professionals of color bring to their early care and education work and to the children and…

Regulatory drivers of teacher quality and teacher professionalism are increasingly being utilised in Australia and internationally to improve children's outcomes. In the context of a recent national review on teacher registration, this article reports on findings from a small-scale study that investigated three early childhood teachers'…

Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to 'societies of control'. In societies of control, power operates through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a…