Traditional games are commonly understood for their long establishment, passed down over generations and characterised by the simplicity of their materials. The aim of this article is to explore traditional games where materials are at the centre, focusing on games with stones. Through a new-materialist perspective, using Barad's concept of 'intra-activity' and Lenz Taguchi's notion of 'performative agency', stones are not seen as passive things or objects for play. Rather, they are considered as an active player of the games. A case study of a multi-age classroom in a primary school in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, is analysed. Different encounters with stones are read diffractively to create a space for new ideas to emerge. Through this reading, performative understanding as a new way of looking at traditional games is explored by addressing the complex relations with stones and the continuous intra-activity that takes place in the games. The implications of this research are the consideration of materials and how they are used in traditional games. This, in turn, affects pedagogical practices in which children and materials are coexisting and affecting each other in a learning process.

In the original publication of the article, the term “Indigenous” in the title was not capitalized. As the article is specifically referring to Indigenous people in Australia, the correct article title should be as given below.

Mapping not only the entanglements in which animals are situated but also our own positions within tangled skeins of humans relationships can be a method of coming to understand the workings of that daunting term intersectionality. (jones, 2015, p. 99) pattrice jones (2015) entreats us to not only map the entanglements in which animals and humans are situated but to interrogate the intersections of human-animal boundaries and that which demarcates the former from the latter, to see how they support and prop each other up. In this chapter, we trouble the intersections of childhood/animal/education seeking to circulate and disrupt the normalizing ideologies of speciesism that reinforce human exceptionalism and dominion. This chapter contributes to political and ethical conversations in early childhood education (ECE), as we argue that the commodification of nonhuman animals infiltrates educational praxis, in ways that contribute to our epistemological uncertainty as we search for possibilities of animal liberation and the desire to live without places of injustice and violence (White, 2015). Research with children and their families in an Australian ECE context uncovered stories about life, love, and death. The impression given by these stories is that humanist thinking and anthropocentric viewpoints dominate what parents and teachers share with children and the way they talk about their children's experiences and retell their own childhood stories that concern relationships with animals. Redefining the human species as one among many offers the potential to not only challenge anthropocentric systems but also attempt to move beyond humanist principles and human-centered ways of relating ethically to the other (human or animal) (Kendall-Morwick, J Mod Lit 36:100–119, 2013; Lévinas, Entre-Nous: On thinking of the other. Columbia University Press, New York, 1997). Theoretical borders are also being tested here as we roam in and out of human, posthuman, and critical theoretical realms playing with old and new ontologies in our search for pedagogical resistance, anarchy, and places without violence. Specifically, we engage "post" methodologies and theories, to pay epistemological and theoretical attention to animal species (Hamilton, Taylor, Ethnography after humanism: Power, politics and method in multi-species research. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017).

This article reviews the Montessori literature through the lens of leadership, using Maria Montessori’s writings for a perspective on leadership aligned with her principles and practices. Dr. Montessori was a strong leader who argued that adults, as leaders, should take direction from children as the spiritual builders of human beings. Her concept of the prepared environment, including the prepared adult, supports this foundation for leadership and has applications beyond the classroom context. Leadership in the Montessori context has a biological base but incorporates elements of service and morality that guide social reform with a peaceful telos. While there are overlaps with existing models of leadership, this review suggests that a distinct perspective on leadership does begin to emerge from Dr. Montessori’s legacy.

The concept of domesticity plays out in early childhood educational settings and has a long tradition. Domesticity in its pre-domestic, domestic and post-domestic phases is used here as a site for reconsidering the role of Maria Montessori. The ideas put forward here are intended as a provocation and methodologically the device of constructing an assemblage of materials from various sources is used to enable different ideas to be brought forward. New possibilities emerged through a diffractive approach to this theoretically driven work. The ambiguities Montessori embodied in her life are revisited and by looking at her focus on the materials of 'practical life' a way to be intra-activelyengaged with regenerative forces became possible. Repositioning Maria Montessori as 'domestic goddess' tangles with contemporary ideas in order to unsettle her image. This analysis draws on new feminist materialist theoryto question what being domestic/ate/d means in terms of being a woman in a femin/ised/ist educational space.

This article explores Montessori's concept of the Prepared Environment, which includes adult leadership, as an important contribution to the field of Children's Spirituality. Montessori elevated the spiritual development of children to a central place in social life. She advocated preparation of the teacher as a community leader who works through the environment to guide a pedagogically-oriented process that underpins spiritual development. This model of leadership offers the child a reciprocal relationship with the Prepared Environment, which operates as the child's true teacher. The preparation of the adult, as an element of the Prepared Environment, has a spiritual tone and is a key aspect of Montessori science and philosophy, designed to support the holistic development of the child as both a hope and a promise for human beings.

[abstract: Spirituality is often seen as private and personal. In early childhood education, spirituality is included in the curriculum frameworks Te Whariki (Aotearoa New Zealand) and the national Early Years Learning Framework: Being, Belonging and Becoming (Australia). Educational initiatives that include spiritual aspects show new levels of involvement in areas that involve interactions in the natural world, and through movement and activity. In this chapter, I look at programs that have been developed to encourage holistic education with young children:: yoga, walking, and the creation of beautiful environments. These are no longer marginalized activities and have entered early childhood education as a response to the demands of curricula and learning frameworks. Innovative pedagogical practice embraces these initiatives that show regard for holistic education. In this chapter, the spiritual dimension in all these activities is brought forward and threads from the past, diverse philosophies, indigenous influences, creative approaches to learning, current practice, and hope for the future are brought together. ]

Food and tourism inevitably go together on city holidays and in places where historical artefacts in the "new" cities of Australia are not the drawcard. This chapter highlights the ethical issues involved in not only making a certain species, a tourist attraction but also on making them ''killable''. In the context of the Melbourne food and tourism industry, it discusses some aspects of interspecies encounters that are often unspoken and invisible. The chapter refers the wild contact zones where animals are in their usual habitat and are not tamed or domesticated like pets or farm animals. It also refers the food tourism rather than culinary tourism, as the latter implies that the emphasis is on cooking and kitchen skills rather than on the product. Tourist encounters with animals are a potential site for negotiating difference and there are distinct cultural differences in the way animals are perceived.

ABSTRACTMuch has been written about ethical and human‐centred Information Systems (IS) design, most recently regarding the deleterious outcomes and negative affect of some machine learning applications that embed and perpetuate unethical or even inhumane automation. Terms such as ‘harm’, ‘damage’, and surprisingly, ‘weapon’ have entered the language of this discourse. However, these characteristics are not unique to applications of data science but have long manifested in IS that can also can exhibit opacity and establish tight vicious cycles. These, when coupled with a lack of governance feedback, can perpetuate injustice that has community or sector‐wide reach. In this paper, we explore how IS design that sets out with the best of intentions or at least, conceived as a ‘neutral’ system for managing transactional information, can emerge as ‘tools that punish’. We argue that there are crucial principles to be taken from Recordkeeping Informatics, concerned as it is with the entanglement of information and people across space and through time on multi‐generational timescales. In particular we discuss how transdisciplinary and critical approaches are necessary to cover more of the design space and surface issues, rights, stakeholders, and, most importantly, values that may be otherwise hidden from a here‐and‐now, transactional viewpoint.

This study explored how students (pre-service teachers) benefit from the support of having a peer with them during their first professional experience in preschool contexts, utilising a PAL (Peer Assisted Learning) approach. International students at a large Australian University were interviewed as part of this qualitative study. We found that peer engagement facilitated the development of friendships and social support among participants. Discussion is situated within a sociological framework of organisational friendship. This study extends conceptions of organisational friendships beyond managerial imperatives and peer relationships are highlighted as supportive, not competitive, engagements. The PAL approach highlights the benefit of collaborative professional learning.

This section of the handbook has contributions from authors who identify as part of Australasia as it extends from Australia and New Zealand to the Indian subcontinent. This area is characterised above all else by its variety. This introduction outlines changes and affiliations that characterise early childhood education in Australasia.

This philosophically driven work is intended to trouble the position of the small chair in early childhood settings. It is theoretically driven by an aspect of sociological and cultural theory called hauntology, and by the theories of new feminist materialism. The work of Sara Ahmed influences the direction taken here. An assemblage of personal narratives, memories, works of fiction, history, conversations and media reports, along with the documentation of a performative act, is produced. The methodological approach is intra-active and diffractive. The article argues that the small chair is a contentious and ambiguous artefact, which is taken for granted in early childhood settings, but also problematic when considered from different perspectives – an apparatus that both supports and betrays the body/ies that are in contact with it. Chairs, as objects that furnish human lives, can also haunt those lives and give contradictory messages of power, comfort and suffering. Now and to come, the chair is a trace, a symbol, an instrument of torture and object of desire.

Volunteer tourism takes place within neoliberal globalisation and reflects inequalities of privilege and mobility. This qualitative research examined the experiences of young female voluntourists who visited Delhi as part of a trip organised by an Australian University Postgraduate Student Association. The aim was to investigate the motives and potentialities embedded in their experience through interviews and journal contributions. Conceptualisations of mapping (cartography) and territorialisation informed the analysis. We found that participants mainly engaged with the experience on a superficial level within the known territory. This reflects ‘soft global citizenship’ as participants were uncritical about their interactions with the host community. Voluntourist experiences have the potential to destabilise the self in a process of deterritorialisation, and we contend that this is where change occurs. We bring the philosophical theorising of Deleuze and Guattari and their notions of territorialisation and cartography to the field of tourism and argue that their geophilosophical ideas lead to fruitful insights around negotiating volunteer expectations, tribulations and potential transformations.

Early childhood research has long established that drawing is a central, and important activity for young children. Less common are investigations into the drawing activity of adults involved in early childhood. A team of adult early childhood researchers, with differing exposures and familiarities with drawing, experimented with intergenerational collaborative drawing with colleagues, students, family members and others, to explore the effectiveness of drawing as a research process and as an arts-based methodology. This testing prompted critical thinking into how drawing might facilitate research that involves young children, to operate in more communicable ways, and how research-focused drawings might occur in reference to a research project.

A PAL (Peer-Assisted Learning) project supported research that focused on e-learning and Web 2.0 technologies as part of a pedagogical approach in the context of a tertiary institution. This project responded to a call for a rejuvenation of conventional approaches to pedagogy while teaching an early childhood unit in a large Australian university. In the project a variety of methods, qualitative (interviews and focus groups) and quantitative (on-line survey), were used in order to explore the possibilities involved in learning together in innovative ways. The PAL project is connected here to a 'rhizome' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). A rhizome is a form of network; it is multiple; and, it is capable of producing surprises. This is reflected in the findings that support the use of technology to create an effective collaborative space and also show that there are advantages to destabilising conventional student/lecturer positions. Finally, this narrative account contributes to a growing literature that connects Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) philosophical ideas to education.