Jean Piaget, whose work continues to be very influential in early childhood education, associated young children's animism with their 'primitive thought' claiming children remain animists until they reach a more advanced and rational stage of development. This article proposes a rethinking of the Piagetian view of animism, suggesting instead that…

This article shows how two Latina bilingual teachers provided opportunities for their Latinx students from immigrant families to enact their agency in a highly regulated Head Start bilingual preschool classroom in ways that aligned with culturally sustaining pedagogy. Using video-cued ethnography and data from the Blinded Study, the authors center…

What does it mean to be an early childhood teacher in a time of pandemic? Which stories remain constant in our profession and which are lost to the hand of physical distance? This narrative inquiry explores the persistent role of story in the creation of the body of the classroom community, and the sustaining of a practice of an early childhood…

This study aims to conceptualise a drama-integrated curriculum devised from process drama as an approach to play-based pedagogy and curriculum to realise the policy initiative of learning through play. By investigating teachers' perspectives and practices in relation to the curriculum of a local kindergarten, examples of effective…

The voices of both early childhood education teachers and children tend to be weak in the choir of agents that constitute the aims and practices of early childhood education. In this article, a video that a teacher made of four children playing dragons, followed by open-ended interviews exploring why she found this particular activity of interest…

In this article, the authors problematize the dichotomization of play and learning that often shapes the agenda of early childhood education research and practice. This dichotomization is driven in part by the tendency to define learning in terms of formal learning (i.e. learning as an outcome of direct instruction and school-based approaches that…

Childhood and time are closely linked concepts in education. Childhood as a modern domain is a cornerstone of the human narrative of being in time, with birth as the beginning and death as the end. A newborn child marks new beginnings and hope for the future, and geopolitically early childhood education is now seen as a cornerstone for building…

In an online graduate-level early childhood education course, the authors sought to playfully disrupt and transform educators' conceptions of children's "dark play," as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the course participants problematized and expanded their…

This article examines how creativity and the arts can assist teachers who teach from a social justice perspective, and how knowledge built through meaningful experiences of difference can make a difference. Just as imagining is central to visual arts practice, so too is the capacity to imagine a necessity for social justice. The authors ask what…

The international trend to increase the cognitive achievement of early childhood children has generated a need for better understanding how concept formation occurs within play-based programs. Yet the theories of play for supporting early childhood professionals were originally not conceptualized with this need in mind. In this article, concepts…

Animal- and bird-becoming is an aspect of play as metamorphosis connected to spirituality in early childhood settings. The reconceptualisation of play presented here is supported by research that explored the spiritual experiences of young children in different early childhood contexts. Qualitative case study research carried out in Aotearoa New…

This article describes an emerging theoretical framework for examining relationships between learning dispositions and learning architecture. Three domains of learning dispositions--resilience, reciprocity and imagination--are discussed in relation to the structures and processes of early childhood education settings and new entrant classrooms.…

This inquiry applied Bakhtin's dialogic process to the pretend play of preschool children using an interpretive approach. It used vignettes from videotaped data and Bakhtin's theories of dialogism and heteroglossia to provide an understanding of how children appropriate social roles and rules in pretend play and use a variety of "voices"…