In "Learning Without Lessons," David F. Lancy fills a rather large gap in the field of child development and education. Drawing on focused, empirical studies in cultural psychology, ethnographic accounts of childhood, and insights from archaeological studies, Lancy offers the first attempt to review the principles and practices for…

Friedrich Froebel is well-known for the invention of kindergarten and the pioneering educational philosophy he developed in the 1800s, which respected children's self activity and women's capabilities for the role of teacher, while promoting play as the primary medium for learning. His radical ideas and principled approach to early childhood…

This ethnographic research case study of five early childhood classrooms in rural Appalachia explores how the decline of the coal industry and shift to natural gas fracking impact classroom play spaces in the region. Child development orientations influenced educators' approaches to teaching about the natural world. The children's and teachers'…

Using a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) approach, the current study evaluated use of the Adolescent Media Project (AMP) as a pedagogical approach within an undergraduate adolescent development course. The AMP divided students into smaller groups (n = 8) in relation to an adolescent themed TV show. Students viewed the first season (or…

This article offers a detailed study of one child's relationships to Israel from kindergarten (2012-2013 academic year) through 7th grade (2019-2020 academic year). By tracing Avigail over the course of eight years, I argue that children do not develop "a relationship" with Israel but rather many different relationships over time. Using…

Questions of children's agency have experienced a resurgence in education theory over the past years. Yet, there have been few attempts to examine children's agency in the context of a primary classroom from the viewpoint of the curriculum. This gap is being addressed by a longitudinal project exploring the impact of the National Curriculum for…

Conceptualizing numbers as discursive constructs generated in, and for the sake of, communication, we investigated the development of the numerical discourse of Milo, a boy who was 2 years and 8 months old when we first met him and whom we then followed for 18 months. Our analyses of the child's evolving responses to the question "Where is…

Learning to descend stairs requires motor and cognitive capacities on the part of infants and opportunities for practice and assurance of safety offered by caregivers. The American Academy of Pediatrics prescribes the age strategy to teach toddlers to safely descend stairs but without much consideration for individual differences in infants'…

There is a considerable body of research on children's number knowledge development, and in particular on children ages 4 years and older and who have some counting experience. Children in early care preschool settings (ages 2 and 3) and who are not yet experienced counters are an understudied population. We conducted a multiple-case study on five…

This paper presents a narrative case study of an innovative Froebelian approach to professional development, implemented in a large Nursery School and Family Centre in southern England undertaken as part of an extended programme of research and development funded by the Froebel Trust from 2021-2024 which was trans-national, including two early…

This paper highlights the use of a participatory, trauma-informed approach in the creation of "Ahlan Simsim," a Sesame Street television program for the Middle East, and asserts the importance of using a participatory approach to designing culturally relevant SEL content. "Ahlan Simsim" is a component of a larger initiative of…

Pedagogical documentation is practised in early childhood centres all over the world as a means to gauge the learning and development of children. From the point of view of teachers, however, documentation must compete with numerous other tasks. This paper explores the strategies teachers employ in order to integrate documentation into their…

There is mounting evidence that information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to support children's development and early learning when used effectively, appropriately, and intentionally. In an attempt to improve teachers' performance in integrating ICT into early learning, this study was designed to examine the effect of ICT…

Supporting children's schemas in play-based activities and curricula are a valued and embedded part of early childhood practice in many education systems (Meade, A., and P. Cubey. 2008. "Thinking Children, Learning About Schemas." Berkshire: Open University; Nutbrown, C. 2011. "Threads of Thinking Schemas and Young Children's…

There is widespread enthusiasm for 1:1 computing in education. Recognizing that secure innovation of educational practice should be built upon contextual sensitivity, this article reported two case studies anticipating the potential development of 1:1 classes in the particular cultural context of China. The first case described how the new…