In Portugal, professional preparation for working with infants and toddlers is often characterized as insufficient and/or inadequate in light of the specific professionalism required for working with very young children. This study is situated in initial professional education (IPE) and, in particular, on practicum experiences within an early…

This article offers a methodological reflection on how "baby-cam" enhanced ethically reflective attitudes in a large-scale research project that set out to research with infants in Australian early childhood education and care settings. By juxtaposing digital images produced by two different digital-camera technologies and drawing on…

Montessori the physician and educational philosopher was probably one of the most prominent and famous education theorizer in the field of preschool education. Current research attempts to extract and clarify the major elements of curriculum by reliance on Montessori viewpoints. In this paper first the philosophical basics of preschool education…

The ancient Greeks articulated three types of knowledge, "episteme," "techne" and "phronesis." Education has emphasised two of these--"pure" knowledge and technical skills--while neglecting the latter. Within early childhood a key aspect of "phronesis"--practical wisdom--is emotion work, and its…

This article is about experimentation in both practical and mental activity and uses data from a series of studies with preschool children. The article focuses on personal experimentation, which is aimed at discovering relations, rather than the more utilitarian experimentation that is aimed at solving practical tasks. Personal experimentation…

Developmental studies on heuristics and biases have reported controversial findings suggesting that children sometimes reason more logically than do adults. We addressed the controversy by testing the impact of children's knowledge of the heuristic stereotypes that are typically cued in these studies. Five-year-old preschoolers and 8-year-old…

A basic problem of daily life is determining who owns what. One way that people may solve this problem is by relying on a "first possession" heuristic, according to which the first person who possesses an object is its owner, even if others subsequently possess the object. We investigated preschoolers' use of this heuristic in five experiments. In…

Teaching is successful only to the extent to which students are able to grasp it fully. In this age of science and technology, the process of teaching has reached new dimensions. Teaching is not a one sided affair. In the context of modern developments teaching is a tripolar process. The traditional teaching of 30 or 40 students is no longer…