With a focus on Parker, a Black second-grader, this paper explores how photographs taken "by" children reveal aspects of identity that adults do not always capture or deem important in school spaces. In fact, while Parker was often imaged and positioned in deficit ways, children's photographs expanded static narratives told about Parker.…

Swedish preschool education is, by law, non-confessional. Yet, it is also an educational context within which most children aged 1-5 encounter traditions that carry Christian connotations. This paper explores how two Swedish preschools maintain a balance between keeping education non-confessional and paying attention to the traditions that are…

In response to dominant discourses of quality and an over-reliance on humancentric practice, the "Learning with Place" framework emerges as an innovative way to rethink practices, structures, and policies within education and beyond. 'Learning with Place' views the local Place as agentic, recognising Place as inclusive of local First…

In this research, we explore the use of storybooks as an educational tool for fostering a meaningful understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for children and consider how AI should be depicted in storybook narratives to achieve this. We present guidelines for the depiction of AI in narratives for four- to six-year-old children…

This paper employs Mikhail Bakhtin for a dialogic reading of dialectics, conceptualising how early childhood education (ECE) teachers' political dialogues are opened up and closed down. Explorations of 'political dialogue', or "how" teachers respond to issues they deem of political concern, is pertinent for teaching's inherently…

This study explores in-service early childhood educators' understanding of children's spirituality. Utilizing the recently validated instrument, "Early Childhood Educators' Spiritual Practices in the Classroom (ECE-SPC)," responses to the question, "What do you understand children's spirituality to be?" were analyzed.…

This paper presents a conceptual framework drawn from philosophies of education underpinned by an Islamic worldview. The framework offers an interconnecting network of Islamic educational concepts that can be used by contemporary educators in Muslim contexts think through how they might reconstruct preK-12 education in a more authentic and…

This paper draws from a series of Place-thought walks that the authors took at an open-range zoo. It practices a feminist common worlds multispecies ethics to challenge the systems that maintain nature-culture divisions in early childhood education. Postdevelopmental perspectives (i.e., feminist environmental humanities, multispecies studies,…

Christian schools seek to educate students from a biblical worldview to produce graduates who know God and can discover their unique role in furthering God's kingdom. To achieve this goal, Christian schools need teachers steeped in a biblical worldview. However, studies have shown that many Christian school teachers trained in secular educational…

Research Findings: Previous studies have found that a growth mind-set was associated with optimal learning and well-being outcomes. However, much of this research has been conducted among adolescents and young adults. Relatively little is known as to whether these associations also apply to young children. The present study aimed to examine…

Through this art-based paper, I bewilder the 'pioneering' approaches of Reggio Emilia by troubling how pedagogies mobilise through social media. With research-creation and posthuman theories, I notice a human-more-than-human digital entwinement inter-related with academic performativity. Whilst media lends itself to the sharing of pedagogical…

How does a researcher investigate phenomena that continually emerge through, with and as various practices? This paper explores this question, drawing on transformative reflections on the unfolding process of an empirical research project investigating professional practice in Dutch early childhood education. The project initially applied an open,…

This paper presents an innovative approach to examine reflexivity in educational research. Adapting Brookfield's autobiographical lenses to identify the four perspectives from a personal life history (as the mother of a child with multiple chronic illnesses who died aged 18) and professional perspectives (as a paediatric nurse, a teacher, and a…

This article demonstrates how feminist posthumanism can reconfigure conceptualisations of, and practices with, 'child' in Montessori early childhood contexts. It complicates Montessori's contemporary reputation as a 'middle-class phenomenon' by returning to the earliest Montessori schools as a justice-oriented project for working-class children…

In this position paper we consider the significance of global climate activism by children and young people in the light of ongoing western adult-centric policies and educational practices that largely continue to exclude Indigenous perspectives. Reflecting on the implications of this hegemony in the face of the convergent crises of climate and…