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The article focuses on the challenges of providing early childhood education for all children globally, emphasizing its fundamental right. Despite consistent advocacy by educators, the struggle persists to adequately fund and provide access to affordable early learning and care programs, particularly for children in precarious contexts and the anniversary edition of Childhood Education reflects on the evolution of early childhood education, featuring a posthumous interview with Katie-Jay Scott.

This article details a two-year small pilot project investigating possibilities for enacting slow scholarship reading practices with first-year undergraduate early childhood studies students. We follow the emerging push to think with “slow” practices as an antidote to the consumptive, reproductive, fast-paced knowledge politics of the neoliberal university. To begin, we review the literature on slow scholarship in the early childhood studies and education context, before sharing the structure and content of the course that housed this slow-reading experiment. Then, we analyse student responses to an optional online questionnaire that gathered insights into their reflective experience of slow reading. We argue that slow reading disrupts quotidian student subjectivities and opens space for reconfiguring our relations with knowledge, which stretches beyond the post-secondary context into work with young children and families. To conclude, we offer provocations for cultivating slow-reading practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]