This accessible and timely book builds upon and contributes to ongoing debates surrounding professionalism in the early years workforce. In a sector where policy is rapidly changing, Jayne Osgood challenges existing assumptions concerning professional identities and questions what broader lessons might be learnt about race, ethnicity, social class

This valuable textbook for advanced students and practitioners helps readers cultivate a deeper knowledge and critical understanding of the contexts in which practice with children and young people takes place, and to develop as critical reflective practitioners.This new edition is substantially updated to reflect the changes in the field since the publication of the first edition. It contains additional chapters discussing new and emerging topics including:• key theoretica...

Thisbook deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play and explores play in the broadest sense.It deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play where the focus is on what play enables children's bodies and brains to do and become. This book includes contributions from academics and practitioners based in Australia, Canada, Finland, South Africa, the USA and the UK and explores play in the broadest sense, making space for the myriad forms...

This book challenges the developmentalist paradigm that dominates research into children and childhood, focusing on observation as a research method. It offers new postdevelopmental ways of conducting childhood observations which are diverse in context and theoretical orientation, and in the process, deconstructs the dominant traditions of childhood research. Written by leading scholars based in Canada, Norway, the UK, and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the ...

Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods charts the evolving nature of feminist theory and research methods in childhood studies and the generative potential this holds for researchers, academics and educators to continue to push ideas and practices. The book traces the threads of affect and effect that feminist theories and methodologies have made over time to thinking more, and differently, about gender in childhood. In the wake of the 'new materialist turn' in feminist researc...

In childhood research, children's art-making has typically been viewed and understood through a lens of developmental psychology and the notion that children's art-making progresses through a linear series of stages continues to dominate how we design and implement art-making experiences for young children. Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art brings together the work of theorists from around the world who have presented postdevelopmental approaches to childhood ...

This collection is focused on the possibilities for unbinding people from gendered expectations in and around educational spaces, and accounts for the ways gender is reconstituted in and through education.This book presents a broad interpretation of gender, of what education might mean, and where educational experiences manifest. It explores more conventional schooling spaces to communally generated inclusive spaces, families and marginalised sites where gender is realised and cont...