This paper is a combination of a grandfather's musings over his grandson's drawings, combined with a reconsideration of hermeneutics as an early childhood educational theory.

Access to Friedrich Fröbel's essential writings continues to be a challenge for non-German-speaking scholarship. Many essential writings have never been translated, and existing translations are outdated. This article discusses the challenges of translating Fröbel by translating and analyzing one of the essential letters during the establishment…

Education doctoral programs have an essential role to play in this moment of American history, as we train, teach, guide, and prepare education professionals to learn, unlearn, and lead as antiracist education activists. EdD program faculty and administrators sit in critical roles and must examine our own antiracist beliefs, while also…

The authors begin this article with an account of the crises in education in the US today. Curriculum theory is applied to the ideas in the 4th edition of NAEYC's 'developmentally appropriate practices,' and the relationship between the ideas in this edition to current issues is discussed. The authors also present a brief description of democratic…

This paper traces a conversation between the authors about their long-standing (Urban) and more recent (Gómez Muñoz, Zárate Pinto) engagement in and with RECE. The conversation revolves around the role and potential of reconceptualist thought in contexts of early childhood realities in the Global South, most prominently in Latin America, where two…

High-quality preschool programs are heralded as effective policy solutions to promote low-income children's development and life-long wellbeing. Yet evaluations of recent preschool programs produce puzzling findings, including negative impacts, and divergent, weaker results than demonstration programs implemented in the 1960s and 70s. We provide…

Chen Heqin (1892-1982), who studied at Columbia University's Teachers College, is an important Chinese descendant of Dewey's pragmatic education. Chen Heqin proposed his own 'living education' theory through inheriting, transforming, and surpassing Dewey's 'life education' theory. This theory was based on Chinese experiments and multi-dimensional…

Contemporary early childhood classrooms in the United States are becoming even more diverse with increasing cultural, linguistic, and developmental complexity. Given the movement toward implementing universal early education and care and the changes in educational policy toward inclusive education, early childhood classrooms have become important…

Appeals to transformative education are so ubiquitous that if an educational advertisement claimed to only offer instruction, consumers might worry they were being shortchanged. However, the meaning of transformative education is often superficially understood, shifting between various conceptions, each bearing distinct ethical complications. The…

What is pedagogy, exactly? "Merriam-Webster" defines it simply as "the art, science, or profession of teaching." In contemporary academic discourse, however, pedagogy is generally left undefined -- with its apparent implicit meanings ranging anywhere from a specific "model for teaching" (e.g., behaviorist or…

In this paper, we turn to the notion of networking theories with the aim of contrasting two theoretical mathematics education perspectives inspired by Vygotsky's work, namely, the Theory of Objectification and the Documentational Approach to Didactics. We are interested in comparing/contrasting these theories in accordance with the following three…

Children's right to participate in all matters and decisions affecting them has gained recognition in society. Its promotion is recommended from an early age -- namely, in early childhood education settings -- and it is described as benefiting children, adults and the community in general. Given the complex and polysemic meaning of participation,…

The ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences has prompted some scholars of education to shift their focus of inquiry away from questions of epistemology (i.e., knowledge) to metaphysical matters related to being and the nature of existence. In this paper, I turn to ontology and make an argument for integrating and explicitly teaching…

New materialism has the potential to deepen critical engagement between vibrant things, everyday places and intra-actions between humans and non-humans in early childhood education. This article explores Australian pre-service teachers' understandings of children and childhood when encountering the vibrant forces of things and places. The authors…

We propose a novel estimator for use in a fuzzy regression discontinuity setting. The estimator can be thought of as extrapolating the traditional fuzzy regression discontinuity estimate or as an observational study that adjusts for endogenous selection into treatment using information at the discontinuity. We show that it can be motivated as…