The Highlander Nursery School, run by the Highlander Folk School from 1938 to 1953, provided no-cost early care and learning to the white working-class children of Summerfield, Tennessee. While Highlander is best known as a democratic education and movement-building hub that builds adults' capacity to shape labor and racial justice in their…

This hearing of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions examines cutting childcare and preschool costs for working families. Opening statements were presented by: (1) Honorable Patty Murray chair, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; and (2) Honorable Richard Burr, Ranking Member, a U.S. Senator from the State of…

Access to early child education services has been proven to be an efficient tool in fighting educational inequalities. However, while wealthier families are likely to use childcare services, disadvantaged children tend to be left out. Research has explained this effect, known as Mathew Effect, and has studied both the constraints in the…

A powerful discursive formation claims 'bad parenting' amongst the poor predisposes their children to educational underachievement. A small number of children in poverty succeeding within early education potentially undermines this construction of 'parent blame'. This requires an explanation which perpetuates the dominant discourse about…

This paper focuses on the educational experiences of pupils at 'Lillydown Primary', a state school for 3-11 year olds, located in a former mining community in the north of England. It mobilises Avery Gordon's notion of social haunting to illustrate how experiences of school are shaped not only by current socioeconomic circumstances but also by…

In 1900, London infant school head teacher and Froebelian, Lucy R. Latter, travelled to southern India to introduce kindergarten pedagogy to schools in Mysore. A hundred years later Froebelians continue to implement projects in very different environments from kindergarten's European roots, including Soweto, South Africa and Kolkata, India. This…

This article analyses the impact on Early Years Education policy of the crisis provoked by COVID 19 pandemia and raises some questions about the future. For a better understanding of this impact COVID 19, I present the construction of this educational level since the nineteenth century contrasting two essential models -- the educational assistance…

Children's experiences and understandings are often marginalised in discussions of their own television viewing. Moreover, rarely is attention paid to the meaning children make "from" and "with" the ideas and images in media, much less in horror movies. This inquiry examines the horror media talk of a preschool girl in a poor…

This paper reports on data drawn from an "Economic and Social Research Council"-funded project investigating the experiences of UK-based students training on level-2 and level-3 childcare courses. We focus on the concept of emotional labour in relation to learning to care for and educate young children and the ways in which the students'…

This article explores policy development for under-fives and its implementation in nursery schools in the first two decades of the twentieth century and draws parallels with current policy initiatives such as Sure Start and the "Troubled Families" programme. It interrogates how discourse on British racial health shaped policy and…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has proved that in Germany the impact that socio-economic background has on 15-year-old pupils' achievement is stronger than in other countries. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) showed that the correlation is less with 10-year-old children, but is still apparent.…

This article draws on data from two recently completed Economic and Social Research Council funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities in choice of school and choice of childcare. The authors argue that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice…

According to Bernstein (A sociolinguistic approach to socialization; with some reference to educability, Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1972), middle-class parents transmit an elaborated code to their children that relies on verbal means, rather than paralinguistic devices or shared assumptions, to express meanings. Bernstein's ideas were used to argue…

This paper examines the interactions between teachers and children based on a micro-ethnographic study of an early childhood classroom in which the teacher attempts to scaffold children's learning. The attempts at scaffolding are subverted by children as they resist the teacher's endeavors to modify their play. Teacher's attempts at scaffolding,…

This qualitative study investigated mothers' views about their role in their children's education and their expectations of their child's preschool. A particular focus of the study was to contrast the views of mothers with differing degrees of parenting self-efficacy and to contrast the perceptions of working-class and middle-class mothers.…