This article revisits the widely used yet underexamined concepts of equity, inclusion and belonging in Australian early childhood education. Building on Sumsion and Wong's interrogation of ‘belonging’ in the original Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) for Australia V2.0, it traces how the concept has been taken up across policy, practice and scholarship, including EYLF V2.0 and contemporary work on care, book sharing and cultural responsiveness. It argues that these approaches, while well intentioned, often individualise belonging, obscure ongoing colonial relations and privilege Euro-Western, human-centred ontologies that normalise some children, families and places while marginalising others, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and Country. In response, the article brings dominant constructions of belonging into dialogue with Indigenous and critical theoretical perspectives, including Aboriginal relational ontologies and decolonial pedagogies. Drawing on Indigenist research, Red Pedagogy and critiques of culturally responsive practice, it reimagines belonging as relational, place-based and more-than-human. Through illustrative pedagogical vignettes, the article considers what it might mean for educators to read-with texts, care-with assemblages and blog-with Place in accountable relationship with First Nations communities and sovereignties. In doing so, it offers conceptual and practical provocations for reconfiguring pedagogies of care, equity and belonging-with Country within early childhood education.
This article argues that centralising aesthetics can strengthen early childhood teacher self-efficacy by reframing aesthetic sensibility as a lived capacity rather than a domain-specific skill. While aesthetic approaches have long been associated with early childhood education, they are increasingly marginalised within broader educational contexts shaped by standardisation, accountability and measurable outcomes. Drawing on portraiture methodology and the written image of ‘Priscilla’, an academic – artist – teacher, this article explores how aesthetic sensibility is sustained and enacted as an embodied and multimodal disposition. In doing so, it challenges distinctions between artist and non-artist, positioning aesthetic engagement as inherent to early childhood teachers in contemporary classroom settings. Through Priscilla's account, taken-for-granted assumptions are questioned, shifting attention from what students produce to what early childhood teachers make possible within learning environments. Within this framing, early childhood teachers are positioned as learners, and the artistry of being is understood as integral to teaching. The findings highlight concepts of becoming, multiplicity and displacement as conditions that strengthen teacher self-efficacy within arts-based practice. This article challenges neoliberal framings of early childhood education and positions aesthetics as central rather than peripheral to confident and agentic ways of teaching for early childhood teachers today.
This article shares excerpts from the authors’ conversations across racial, generational, and gender borders, exploring our perspectives on and experiences in the field of early childhood education. Our goals were to construct a process of critical dialogue and provide direction to the necessary anti-racist work of early childhood educators. We identify our work as a duo-ethnography with conversations modeled on the kitchen table talk and pláticas of feminists of Color. The article begins by noting the relevant theory and literature and a description of our methods and continues with stories, excerpted from our conversations, recounting our educational journeys. We highlight our histories as racialized learners and educators and our engagements with a range of EC pedagogies and scholars, what we have learned and what we have discarded, and the confrontations and complicity. Our focus is on the critical pedagogies of educators of Color who we believe are moving the field forward, bringing marginalized educators, children, and communities to the center. The article concludes with reflections on critical conversations, implications, where we stand now, and where our field must go.
The field of early childhood education and care (ECEC) has received increasing political and administrative attention over the past three decades, fuelling external expectations and intentions about how pedagogues as staff conduct themselves as professionals. Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, this paper shows how the everyday pedagogical environment – manifested in learning objectives, screening tools, pedagogical artefacts and expert guidance – materialises intentions which are rooted in historical pedagogy, curriculum mandates, societal expectations and private company involvement in professional development. Through perspectives from the sociology of emotions, the paper examines how moral distress arises when pedagogues navigate this congestion of ‘good’ intentions encompassing multiple and conflicting moral imperatives. Rather than stemming solely from professional values meeting external constraints, our findings highlight how moral distress emerges from the congested interplay between forces, as pedagogues internalise, enact and reconcile competing ideals of care, learning and professional responsibility.
Nature-based kindergartens are increasingly recognized as a defining feature of Nordic early childhood education. They are linked to child autonomy, holistic development, and ecological awareness. This colloquium examines this image by unpacking how “nature” functions as a physical setting and as a pedagogical partner. Applying the concept of affordances, we suggest that opportunities for play and learning do not arise automatically from Nordic landscapes; they are co-constructed through relational and sociocultural practices. Drawing on examples from kindergartens in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, we identify shared values, such as child-centered learning and a focus on sustainability, alongside variations in how these values are enacted through cultural traditions, institutional philosophies, and local environments. These differences nuance the idea of a uniform “Nordic model” and highlight the need for contextual sensitivity in nature-based pedagogy. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of making implicit pedagogical values explicit and situating nature-based practices within broader debates about place-based learning and sustainability education.
Research into imaginary friends or companions has a long history, and these companions are known to appear at specific ages, typically between 2 and 7 years, although their presence has been reported in children as old as 9 years. In addition to psychological and developmental effects, childhood imaginary companions play an important role in terms of orientation to life and social interaction. By broadening the view of childhood imaginative companions as sympoiesis , this theoretical article with an autoethnographic touch will provide an intriguing and dialogical viewpoint on the research of childhood imaginary companions, care and societal sustainability. A child growing with her/his imaginary companions could be reframed with the idea of coming into being in/with/through sympoiesis.
This article examines how early childhood education (ECE) policies in Indonesia construct, position and ultimately marginalise caregiving work. ECE in Indonesia relies on a vast, female-dominated and low-paid workforce. Although their caregiving roles are fundamental to both education and the state, policy systematically subordinates their labour and knowledge. To unpack this paradox, I employ the concept of the ‘maternal body’, which is derived from Kristeva's notion of the abject and re-elaborated through a Butlerian perspective. Drawing on a post-structuralist feminist discourse analysis of legal documents, standards and curricula defining the figure of the teacher and expectations for them in Indonesia between 2003 and 2025, I argue that these texts discursively enact a process of abjection that marginalises caregiving through four recurring mechanisms: legal exclusion, whereby nonformal carers are placed outside the official category of ‘teacher’; recognition of the body solely in terms of functional readiness, while caregiving itself is not acknowledged as a competency; the positioning of caregiving at the lowest level of the competency hierarchy; and the dissolution of the carer figure into the agency of the child. Overall, caregiving may be inscribed in policy, but it remains subordinated to a patriarchal logic operating through texts, a mechanism that is clearly illustrated by the Indonesian case and is applicable wherever caregiving undergoes professionalisation.
Looking through the lens of dialogism, this article seeks to deepen our understanding of how baby room educators and nursery leaders conceptualise quality provision for children aged 0–2 years old in England. Analysing 16 focus group conversations with a total of 207 baby room educators and nursery leaders, it contributes to our understanding of high-quality provision by listening to ‘on the ground’ perspectives and experiences, which are typically scarce in conceptualisations of quality found in the literature. Based on the discussions, we explore how quality is nestled within interactions with babies; how quality is positioned in the environment; and how quality is located within conversations with families. We discuss the tensions that arise both in what and how baby room educators and nursery leaders conceptualise quality, ultimately positioning quality as ongoing, relational, authentic and responsive.
This article critically examines the possibilities and challenges of using telephone interviews in large-scale research with young children. Drawing on a reflective methodological framework, the study analyses how the specific features of telephone interviews shape the conditions for children's participation, focusing on informed participation, trust-building, and the interview context. Empirically, the analysis is based on the Finnish Child Barometer, a nationwide telephone interview study which involves 6–7-year-old children, complemented by children's own accounts of their interview experiences. While most children described their participation positively, the findings reveal important ethical and methodological tensions related to consent, voluntariness, trust, and contextual control. The article argues that telephone interviews can support children's participatory rights when accompanied by critical reflectivity and context-sensitive practices.
This Colloquium continues the critique of the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS ), an international large-scale assessment study of 5-year-olds by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). After revisiting what IELS is, it focuses on a recently published report on the second cycle of IELS, taking a critical look at this report, highlighting what we regard as being four particularly problematic areas and questioning the study's rationale. In conclusion, this Colloquium asks why the OECD persists with pursuing its array of international large-scale assessments, in the face of mounting criticism, and we suggest it is part of an existential effort to secure OECD's global influence.
We show how temporally informed views of childhood can help us better understand parental actions and experiences. We do so by examining how parents made decisions about whether and where their child would attend a public PreK program. How parents spoke about their children's experiences showed that their understandings and decisions were grounded in their own pasts, as well as their children's more immediate moments, children's imagined futures, and the relational nature of 4K/childcare and kindergarten. Time was an ever-present construct as parents created understandings about the purposes of PreK and kindergarten and sought particular experiences and resources for their children. Considering the temporal nature of parenting draws attention to the dynamic interplay between parents and children, time, and institution. Here we can learn about what parents want for their children, how they seek it, and how we can create systems that increase access to worthwhile early education experiences for all families.
This article examines processes of peripheralisation in early childhood education and care settings in urban and rural areas of eastern Germany. The social upheavals that came in the wake of German reunification and the shift to a post-socialist society have not only had a material socioeconomic impact on these regions in general but also a cultural impact on early childhood education and care institutions specifically. Those impacts have been shaped by collective experiences with socialism and neoliberal transformation. The empirical data on which the analysis in this article is based come from group discussions with childcare workers that were conducted as part of the NeOBi project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In this article, these discussions are analysed through a critical geopolitical and post-socialist lens to make the ‘power geometries’ of social change visible. By combining praxeological and spatial-analytical perspectives, it is possible to reconstruct how material conditions, demographic structures and the education and care curriculum are (re)presented in childcare workers’ perspectives. The article sets out methodological approaches and empirical results that can be used in the study of social change in ECEC settings and shows how social inequalities are produced spatially and historically.
Drawing on Matteo Cattaneo's notion of w/o/andering and Alison Clark's work on slow knowledge, the authors explore how wandering and wondering can serve as a pedagogical practice to nurture children's existential resilience within early childhood education and care. The inquiry is based on a filmed and observed walk in the local surrounding environment undertaken by a group of 13 children (aged three to four) and three adults in an early childhood education and care setting. Through an engagement with speculative vignettes, thinking with theory becomes a method for exploring how the courage to deviate from pre-planned routes, both physical and mental, holds possibilities for pockets of wonder. Such pockets emerge when educators and children allow themselves to dwell in moments that do not necessarily aim at producing concrete answers or predetermined knowledge outcomes. Instead, these moments cultivate an attentiveness to the extraordinary within the seemingly ordinary, nurturing children's attunement to the human and more-than-human world in ways that deepen their sense of connection, curiosity, and existential resilience.
Preschool socioeconomic segregation is prevalent in early childhood, including in New York City. New York City attempted to address school segregation through socioeconomic integration at the preschool level. We challenge how this implementation and the prevailing socioeconomic integration narratives have critically omitted family perspectives, inquiring if families see integration as promoting preschool as a space of belonging. We reclaimed those voices by interviewing 20 diverse families attending preschools in integrated and segregated settings. Using Critical Policy Analysis for this qualitative phenomenological study, we found widespread support for integration, tempered by concerns about logistics, power dynamics, social networks, and misconceptions deeply rooted in race and class bias. We advocate for a culture shift emphasizing antibias training across community members, including families. This study provided insights to redefine and repair preschool socioeconomic integration across international contexts as a space of belonging for all families.
In recent years, consent has become central to social and educational debate in Spain. However, consent in early childhood remains a controversial area, particularly concerning genital touching among peers. This article explores the narratives of 4- to 7-year-old children about these practices, drawing on 20 focus groups conducted in eight schools in the province of Barcelona (2022–2025). From a feminist new materialist perspective, we understand sexuality as a discursive-material assemblage and employ the concept of ‘thing-power’ to analyse how school objects – a gate, a poster – exercise agency in the production of (im)possibilities for childhood consent. The findings reveal the coexistence of two discourses: a dominant one (‘You cannot touch’) and an emergent one (‘Yes, with permission’), which often arises in intra-action with the researchers’ questions. In contrast to restrictive approaches based on surveillance and prohibition – which confine these practices to secrecy and guilt, hindering the detection of abuse – children produce lines of flight, such as a ‘penis–vulva’ game mediated by underwear, which temporarily deterritorialise the norm without openly confronting it. Talking about these practices with children opens up possibilities for adult support that mere prohibition forecloses.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly entering early childhood education (ECE) through tools that support pedagogical planning, communication, documentation and decision-making. While these technologies may offer practical benefits for educators, they also raise significant ethical concerns in early childhood contexts, where children's rights, privacy, well-being, agency and relational experiences require careful protection. This conceptual article argues that broad AI ethics principles, such as transparency, fairness, accountability and human oversight, are necessary but insufficient for guiding everyday decision-making in ECE. Drawing on relational ethics, children's rights and critical educational technology scholarship, the article situates generative AI within broader concerns about datafication, platformization, surveillance, commercialization and educator labour. In response, the article proposes a multi-pronged ethical approach to AI decision-making for early childhood educators. This conceptual guide is organized around three interconnected commitments: protecting children's rights, safeguarding well-being and relational pedagogy and strengthening educator AI literacy and accountability. By translating abstract ethical principles into contextualized pedagogical guidance, the proposed approach supports educators and institutions in making reflective decisions about when, whether and how to adopt, limit, or refuse generative AI in early learning environments. The article concludes that ethical AI use in ECE requires not only educator judgment but also institutional support, policy guidance and sustained commitment to relational, rights-based practice.
