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This paper reports on the importance of the stories and perspectives of early childhood education Associate Teachers (ATs) at a time when there is considerable flux being experienced in the Aotearoa New Zealand early childhood sector, due in particular to the ongoing impact of changes in government funding policy, ongoing debates about pathways into the teaching profession, and an updated curriculum framework. The paper developed out of a research project that asked Associate Teachers (AT) about their views on the impact of recent national education policy changes. The views of ATs provide an influential voice for the sector, and particularly for teacher education providers through the student teacher practicum experience. Evidence and analysis of AT views provides insight into how the triadic of student, lecturer and practitioner can work together to support student teachers with their practicum experience in relation to the recent policy changes. A very small return rate for online questionnaires left the research team with the challenge of talking about the meaning of such silence, while at the same time acknowledging and valuing the views of those who did complete the questions. The paper presents a shift in the researchers’ perspectives on the subject of their research, and raises awareness of the problem of working with, and being committed to, the silent voices. The paper concludes with foundations for future research, focusing on ATs as active participants in teacher education policymaking and involving them both as researchers and participants.

This collection examines why urban environments are key sites for reimagining and reconfiguring human-nature encounters in times and spaces of planetary crisis. Cities constitute powerful and troubling spaces for human-nature intersections. They typically represent the effects of human dominance over nature: humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of ‘nature’ by domesticating it. Children existing in these mostly adult designed and orchestrated creations are often ignored as city dwellers, along with animals who increasingly migrate into urban areas. Yet cities are also sites of innovation and ‘greening’, of critical democracy and renewal, with the most innovative cities including those where children co-create urban environments, and where animals and plants are valued as co-city dwellers. As this collection shows, troubling and reimagining these sites for diverse forms and ways of living, including of encounter with the other, and thus what can be learnt and taught through urban natu...

Despite the ubiquity of reflective practice in education, mandating reflective processes within sanctioned frameworks is inherently problematic, as it may lead to reproduction, standardization, and forced universalities, rather than the critical and innovative pedagogy they intend. This article engages with reflection through both the metaphor and method of diffraction, applying a diffractive analytical mode across three international contexts. By examining onto-epistemological openings afforded by a diffractive approach, we attend to what is being (re)produced through various mandates for preservice and in-service teacher practices of reflection and the various effects of those (re)productions, as well as posit different ways of approaching mandated reflection as a practice for educating and assessing teachers.

Re-positioning ways in which we see children’s entangled realities with and in the world, this chapter places a posthuman lens on children’s lives and their affective relationships with human and non-human entities and things. Throughout the chapter, we provoke the posthuman thinking which we have built up throughout the book by conceptualising how not only language, discourse and culture matter, but how matter itself matters. We rethink children’s performance of their lives as, and intra-relating with, beings and worlds, using scenarios and theorisations as illustrations of the shifts provoked throughout the book. Exploring various ways for moving beyond the discursive, beyond our linguistic thought, this chapter considers the question of whether or not language has been granted too much power. It offers ways of thinking of children and their childhoods that bypass the dominance of language, which continues to illustrate the strong reliance on social constructivist views. The chapter offers a posthuman performance of social, cultural, humanly inhabited and experienced community, built, natural and human reality, and world.

The glossary outlines some of the ways in which we have used key concepts throughout this book. Its intention is to be a useful guide, and by no means a conclusive or complete representation of the meanings of any of the terms listed. The glossary gives insights into particular meanings as they relate to the topics of this book and to our collective approach to conceptualising children and childhoods through a posthuman and new materialist lens. Where relevant, we allude to contemporary thinkers who inspire us in a particular use of the concepts in the ongoing evolution of our thinking on and treatment of children and childhoods.

In this interview, Marek Tesar turns our attention to the concept of data in childhood studies. As childhood researchers, we know that “data”—in whatever shape or form, is a necessary part of empirical research. Marek engages this topic by bringing his philosophical and methodological insights to ideas not only about what data are but what data can do for our understanding of children in our research. As Marek suggests, “thinking about ‘data’ means thinking about children and their childhoods being part of a larger global conceptual and ontological movement in research.” Marek also poses important questions about researchers’ desires for data, and how this mining of data may actually not always be beneficial to the children in our research.

Exploring possibilities and potentialities arising out of the comprehensive, all-encompassing movements of life and matter in and through children’s learning environments is the focus of this chapter. It brings together the theoretical shifts outlined in Chaps. 1, 2 and 3 with the focus on people, places and things in the curriculum from Chap. 6, into the everyday entanglements of children’s learning environments. The idea of place and what it means in terms of children’s learning environments is central to this engagement as we explore through scenarios and possibilities offered by a posthuman conceptualisation. The examination frames hopeful, ethical ways to live in environmentally, economically and politically challenging times, among, with and as species, places and energies. In this chapter, we unpack some of what such intra-relationships might mean and look like, as they are intra-actively and ongoingly created and recreated by humans and other things and forces.

This chapter explores posthuman pedagogies as relational ontologies in childhoodnature. It situates the reconceptualization of children and childhoods in the Anthropocene, as with nature rather than outside of nature, to present a range of ways to think about humans, and particularly children and their encounters, relations and response-ability with the nonhuman world. The chapter engages with definitions of childhoods and childhood studies as a field to illustrate the blurring of the boundaries between children and nature, to acknowledge that children are nature, that we human/animals are always part of the ecosystem in which we are entangled. This chapter maps out the philosophical and pedagogical notions that underlie these ideas and their implications for a new lens on childhood studies. Using children’s images, texts and relations the chapter illustrates a pedagogical framing of child/nature by children that moves beyond human exceptionalism as a further response to the Anthropocene, and to living childhoods differently in the world.

Rethinking constructions of childhoods, and what it means to be a child, this chapter builds on the foundations developed in the first three chapters of the book. While those chapters challenged the rational, naturalising, social, universal or oppositional, binary constructs of childhood and addressed the concept of childhoods as plural, this chapter begins to resituate childhoods in contemporary times. In this chapter, we debate how children share agency as one among many agentic actors in the ecological collective of human and nonhuman worlds. The chapter further introduces and applies the posthuman and new materialist thinking introduced in Chap. 3, through a focus on agency and childhoods in children’s entangled posthuman worlds. This chapter examines the idea of agency, discussed in earlier chapters and expands this in order to explore what agency might look like when it is shared with a range of human and nonhuman entities and beings.

Considering the entanglement of materials and objects in children’s lives through a posthuman reading of curricula, this chapter follows on closely from Chap. 5 to investigate children’s relationships with materials and nonhuman objects. Its focus is on how children’s lives are shaped by regulatory documents, and as our first example, we examine Aotearoa New Zealand’s internationally acclaimed early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki. As a national curriculum this document moves away from a developmental approach to adopt a holistic, relational and bicultural focus, that is closely aligned with potential posthuman pedagogies. The chapter illustrates how the curriculum might be read through a posthuman lens, and how such a reading could support pedagogies built on insights into the critical relationships that children have with materials and objects. Two further case studies then illustrate how rules, regulations and policy can shape conceptions of childhood, to postulate what this might look like through a posthuman lens. Throughout, our focus is on children’s intra-relationships with the people, places and things in their lives.

This chapter focuses on the multiplicities of theoretical thinking and the means for pursuing new ways of being and knowing about children and about childhoods. To do so we utilise theories, think with theories and with contemporary scholarship and conceptual thinking. We recognise the development of thought over the past two decades that has been labelled by different scholars and in various publications as posthumanism, new materialism, new empiricism and other scholarly thought as part of the cartographies of materialism. These theories have emerged and shaped our thinking about the way children learn, grow up and play, as we examine in this chapter. As cartographies of materialism, these theories illustrate how the evolution of our scholarly and childhood study traditions provide a solid basis for an approach that addresses the implications and challenges of living with and beyond the Anthropocene.

In this chapter, we examine the new sociological ways of thinking about children and childhoods introduced in critique of the dominant developmental theories in the later part of the twentieth century. The chapter seeks to clarify some of the rethinking of childhoods beyond developmental frameworks and towards the posthuman, new materialist perspectives that are further unpacked throughout the book. Foregrounding the book’s aim, which is not to negate biological or developmental views of childhoods altogether, the chapter seeks to acknowledge the important contributions of prior theoretical perspectives on contemporary views of childhoods in the twenty-first century. Although these paradigms in isolation no longer dominate ways of theorising childhoods, tracings of past views remain visible and have helped to shape the focus of this book. They are an unmissable link in framing new theorisations of childhoods.

This chapter presents a collective response to the propositions and provocations raised in Michael Peters’ 2019 essay ‘Knowledge socialism: The rise of peer production—collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence’. For Peters, knowledge socialism pushes back against, deconstructs, or otherwise critically engages with, the individualization and proprietization of knowledge. As such, there’s something important to explore regarding the role of scholars, academics and their individual contributions towards a collective project. This chapter emerges within a wider project, on the road to knowledge socialism, of peer review, peer production, academic publishing and the life of the scholar. Peters regards this wider project as a movement aimed at amplifying collegiality, collaboration and collective intelligence, in which knowledge socialism is explored and enacted philosophically. In this chapter, the movement is explored in themes of liberating social knowledges, criminal relationships with the university, the professionalization of knowledge and the burden of openness. The chapter concludes with a response from Michael A. Peters.

Outlining the complex relationship between childhood studies, philosophy and education, this chapter maps the story of the child and childhood, from a non-biological and non-medical perspective tracing philosophical perspectives over time. In the chapter, we interweave conceptions of the child subject with the philosophy and history of education, acknowledging the instrumental and important role these disciplines play and perform in shaping views on the child, childhoods and children’s educational futures. While illustrating how particular historical views on children and childhoods can help us to understand their lives and realities, the chapter foregrounds philosophical and theoretical perspectives. It considers how they are useful foundations to challenge and elevate contemporary understandings of children as subjects, and their relationships with both discursive and material aspects of this world. This chapter serves as a theoretical foundation for the concepts and shifting positions in childhood studies towards a posthuman lens.

The final chapter of the book outlines some of the potential implications of the posthuman and new materialist framings of this book on researching the child and contemporary childhoods. It explores how using philosophy as a method of inquiry supports engaging with the complications of posthuman research paradigms and offers a range of perspectives on what this may mean. Throughout the chapter philosophical methods of inquiry are interspersed with a mapping of historical and then contemporary conceptions of researching the child, to illustrate some of the shifts from researching on, to researching with and then by the child.

This article argues that the denial of development can be a productive space and a liberating time for children in the current outcomes-driven times. The author offers an alternative reading of childhood, considering children’s development differently through various philosophical theorizations of events, which emerge through utilizing philosophy and theory as a method. This approach allows a merging of analyses of childhood, philosophical concepts of time and temporality, place, space and popular culture, in order to outline how the development of a child may be resisted through the notion of ‘time and temporality’. The idea of working with the temporality of ‘timing childhoods’ can mimic the notion of a ticking clock. Positioned against the background of the story of Peter Pan, this article challenges established ways of thinking of/about childhood and development, arguing that they perpetuate inequalities, homogenize children and essentialize childhoods. It thinks divergently with theories and philosophies about how childhoods are conceptualized and dissected, distinguished and ‘timed’. The denial of development could be a very power-disrupting, and therefore liberating and exhilarating, experience for children and their childhoods, as the different theoretical and philosophical frameworks analysed in this article point out, through time, temporality and space.

This article reports on a focus group study of newly qualified early childhood teachers’ experiences during their first year of teaching. It argues that focus groups have the potential to invite dialogical engagement in ways that support teachers’ exploration of their own identities, and it emphasises the significant role group context plays in their professional support and development. A feature of the study was the way in which participants interacted with one another, with the researchers and with imagined others, resulting in a production of unique narratives that revealed both affiliation and difference. With a focus on the associational and interactional elements of the teachers’ responses, rather than the content of their responses, this article examines the use of focus groups as a method for exploring social interactions and group processes. In this study, focus groups are seen as temporal ecosystems, engendering new understandings from existing and ongoing encounters within the group. The authors argue that the resonance and cohesion of the interactions within the group are productive in responding to new teachers’ feelings of isolation, and that there is a need for more attention to the vitality of group processes in the lives of early childhood teachers.

Early years education in Europe and elsewhere around the world is currently in the spotlight due to political and economical changes and subsequent promises of effective investment into its provision. In this article we analyse everyday preschool practices in Slovakia in terms of tensions between policies, the teachers workforce and the concept of professionalism. Through bureaucratic scientisation, teachers become subjects with bureaucratic subjectivities, and they are expected to devote increasing amounts of time to planning, reporting and administrative tasks. Teachers are decreasingly focused on the actual work on the ground with the children, and are concerned instead with notions of accountability and reporting, which supposedly raises their professional status. Slovakia’s experience of the bureaucratic subjectivities of early years teachers has complex ramifications for European and overseas countries as it problematises and unmasks the global issues of complex tensions between the teachers and policy documents.

This mixed-method study looked at perceptions of induction and mentoring among New Zealand early childhood educators. Specifically, 213 respondents drawn from five regions representing urban, rural and differing socioeconomic levels, school organizations, and professional roles completed a 19-item psychometrically sound survey. There were significant differences in responses for leaders/mentors in contrast to mentees or teaching staff. Based on quantitative outcomes, two focus groups of school leaders/mentors and mentees were convened. Qualitative analysis of the transcripts revealed several important themes that served to amplify or extended the survey results. Implications of the quantitative and qualitative results are overviewed.

Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods.

Childhood, youth and adolescence are contested notions and constructs. These constructs are tainted with ontological and epistemological histories and ideas about ‘real children’ and childhoods. In this Special Issue, we argue that the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence need to be rethought as concepts, and that philosophy, sociology and anthropology are some of the disciplines that can allow us to do so. There are a number of concerns that need to be considered: what these constructs do and how they perform, what they represent and how these categories and brackets are perceived by all actors, both those that are inside and those who are outside of them. These disciplines allow scholars and thinkers to theorize these troubled categories in unexpected, innovative and cutting edge ways, in relation to the complicated globalized contexts of local experiences and lives. We cannot really consider these terms outside of the realm of the current world of politics and policy. The questions of ‘what do we mean by these terms and how do we employ them’ and ‘how do/did we come to know these categories’ are pertinent in the contemporary conditions where there is a growing pressure to both managerialize and marginalize childhood, youth and adolescence in order to demarcate, govern and police these categories. What we argue is that perhaps philosophy as a discipline can rupture established settings, binaries, categories, terms and brackets, by challenging the boundaries of these established constructs. Philosophy presents a disciplinary possibility for theorizing and disrupting categories of the child/childhood, youth and adolescence at ontological, epistemological and ethical levels. The terms child, childhood, youth and adolescence are not only contested and challenged through philosophy but also undone and unworked, undeveloped and de-demarcated and importantly reified through a philosophical lens. As Matthews (1994) argues, to understand philosophy of childhood is perhaps to understand philosophy itself.

In this article, we explore the “vibrancy of matter” and “things” in early childhood education. We use Bennett’s and others’ ideas on the political ecology of place in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things,” “thing-hoods,” and childhoods. We work with Bennett’s challenge to shift from thinking solely about “think-power” to also consider “thing-power” and “thing-hood” to take the call for-of things seriously within young children’s place. Matter has agency that behaves in non-predictable ways, in assemblages, aggregates of powers, and forces and things impacting, shaping, and molding other matter and things. Children’s daily connectedness with this vibrancy of matter plays out in the territory of their early years settings as we illustrate through the well-loved stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik. We examine these dead-alive, wooden-thing-materialities as vibrant thing-hoods with agency and power in a theoretical re-reading of Foucauldian thought through new materialist philosophies. This article offers an alternative reading of conceptions of power, discourse, and matter. It provokes further openings and becomings in fresh entanglements, relationships, and responses by conceptualizing them through particular materialities of childhood stories.

This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the post-human. The argument traces the intricate web of ‘qualities’ woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as ‘the early years sector’. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the ‘problem’ of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva’s semiotic subject-in-process and Havel’s subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts ‘non-human-being’ and ‘multiple beings-times’ into the ‘problem with quality’. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.

In this chapter we reposition our thinking on our own pedagogies in ECE teacher education, by arguing for a reimagination of pedagogy and practice in the field of higher education. Positioned in the neoliberal, culturally diverse landscape of our two Aotearoa New Zealand universities, nuanced insights throughout our chapter reveal an already tangled inter- and intra-dependent web with and beyond human actors in higher education. Arguing through Kristeva and Braidotti, we (re)imagine thing/energy/nature/culture connections between human and posthuman conceptions in their messy, multidirectional, unpredictable performances of ECE student teachers’ histories, politics and realities. The meanings and energy inherent in these philosophical analsyses expose unexpected onto-epistemological connections of human and posthuman relationships with multiple wider worlds and theorisations. Exposing these cracks is not a comfort then, of sameness, smoothness or familiarity, but an enlivening elevation into further possible ECE pedagogical realities and uncertainties.

This article examines the effects of edu-capitalism and neoliberal education policies across Australia, New Zealand and United States to disrupt hegemonic policy logic based on neutral human capital. Current frameworks, standards and assessment tools govern and control how early childhood educators see and assess children and in turn develop and implement pedagogy. Issues of gender, class and ethnicity are invisible with the assumption that all children who are offered high-quality early childhood programmes have equal opportunities to be productive and therefore successful citizens. Success can be understood through universal outcomes for children and markers of what quality teaching looks like for educators. This epistemological shutter renders race-, class- and gender-based privilege as invisible or non-existent. In doing so, dominant White Western understandings of the world drive what and who is marked as ‘success(ful)’, while non-Western knowledge continues to be seen as primitive, insignificant and in need of intervention. Through analysing policy text supported by the work of post-thinkers, the rethinking, re/imagining, and remapping of early childhood that this article performs do not offer consensus but make room for both problematizations of and possibilities within the contemporary concerns of different theoretical and geographical perspectives from Australia, New Zealand and United States.

Childhoods in contemporary Kenya are entangled with discourses of care in a post-colonial landscape. Such imaginaries of childhoods through discourses of ‘care’ and ‘charity’ are well established through Western lenses. Another lens that is often enacted is the lens of de-commercialised, un-spoilt, pure and innocent childhoods in the Kenyan landscape. In this study, the authors utilize Nel Nodding’s concept of an ethics of care, and a feminist lens, to explore this binary of Western views through real experiences of childhoods. This paper provides an analysis of childhoods as lived experiences in Kenya, and challenges constructions of children/childhoods as vulnerable, based upon observations and interviews conducted in Kenya in the remote area of Kwale County.

This special issue focuses on histories, pedagogies, policies, philosophies and alternative perspectives in early childhood education. Te Whāriki is heralded as the first bicultural curriculum not only in New Zealand, but in the world. Its importance is reflected in national and international research and early childhood discourses. Despite this, there is simultaneous critique of neoliberal policy, globalised practices and public and private investment in early childhood education in this region. Some lessons from New Zealand, of curriculum building, policy implementation, philosophies and sociologies of children and childhood are explored by New Zealand scholars, and focus on these broad New Zealand perspectives of ECE, to address the diverse interests of an international audience.

This paper engages with assessment practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. Te Whāriki, the internationally recognized early childhood curriculum framework, lies at the root of contemporary narrative assessment practices, and the concept of learning stories. We outline historical and societal underpinnings of these practices, and elevate the essence of assessment through learning stories and their particular ontological and epistemological aims and purposes. The paper emphasizes early childhood teaching and learning as a complex relational, inter-subjective, material, moral and political practice. It adopts a critical lens and begins from the premise that early childhood teachers are in the best position to make decisions about teaching and learning in their localized, contextualized settings, with and for the children with whom they share it. We examine the notion of effectiveness and ‘what works’ in assessment, with an emphasis on the importance of allowing for uncertainty, and for the invisible elements in children’s learning. Te Whāriki and learning stories are positioned as strong underpinnings of culturally and morally open, rich and complex assessment, to be constantly renegotiated within each local context, in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond.

It is a very humbling and exciting experience for any scholar to become Editor-in-Chief of a journal that has reached its 14th volume and boasts eight published issues per year, and to be part of and supported by the major publishing house – SAGE. In the past 13 volumes, this journal has flourished and gone from strength to strength under the editorship of Michael A. Peters. It is our sincere hope that with the continuous support of the editorial board and associate editors, Policy Futures in Education will continue to challenge contemporary conditions in education and academia, and make an important contribution to policy research. What has become clear in the past 13 volumes of this journal is that policies govern our being in this world. They remain a defining set of agreed principles by governing bodies that guide our decision-making to achieve particular outcomes that are supposed to better our existence and conditions in this world. In the education sector these policies fulfil particular intentions, and are performed by the governing bodies at local, national and international levels. Striving for change and the greater good, policies also attract much criticism and interest from various parties. In other words, policies are important to public institutions, to the private sector, as well as to individuals. The education sector is permeated with policies that govern both institutions and subjects. There is a strong connection, perhaps stronger than just in an etymological sense, between policy and the words polis, police and politics. Regulations and surveillance have impacted the way that they are resisted by different groups, as well as how they allow for performances in productive spaces, and grant particular rights or programmes. Policies guide us to particular desired outcomes. In this sense, in this editorial I would like to argue the point of multiple ways of thinking and interrogating the concerns around policy through the notion of power in relation to policy, from both the well-known work of Foucault, and the less well-known work of Havel. Foucault’s (1980) work on power and its relationship with institutions are well used in policy studies. The Foucauldian question of ‘how’ can lead research and critique of the contemporary conditions, and it could guide the examination of techniques and instruments that are indispensable to the way government agencies conduct themselves in policy developments. Foucault has gifted us the idea that the traditional model of a juridical power construct claims that power belongs to someone, as it can be possessed by a class

Peer review is central to academic publishing. Yet for many it is a mysterious and contentious practice, which can cause distress for both reviewers, and those whose work is reviewed. This paper, produced by the Editors’ Collective, examines the past and future of peer review in academic publishing. The first sections consider how peer review has been defined and practised in changing academic contexts, and its educational significance in the development of scholarship. The paper then explores major historical and contemporary issues around identity, diversity, anonymity, and the review process, and the related power of editors versus reviewers in academic publishing. Finally, the paper discusses the case of new scholars as reviewers engaging in neoliberal labour, before concluding with some brief recommendations based on our analysis.

Examining our own pasts, and particularly childhoods, is not an easy task. For academics, to conduct a substantial reflection and analysis of the ideologies and complexities of their own childhoods, should perhaps come more easily because of our training and the nature of our profession—to think, speak, read, and write. However, perhaps this is not true at all—perhaps it is much harder to bare ourselves in front of our academic colleagues and friends, in a competitive, and sometimes very judgmental, environment. Writing ourselves is a brave step that leaves an articulated part of ourselves on paper, on a screen, in a certain sense and form, ‘forever.’ We cannot reclaim our private narrative once it has been published. It does not belong just to us anymore. Rereading in print what we once wrote about our own childhoods is a very bold, very courageous exercise, one that can leave a mark on our minds and bodies, perhaps in the same way as these narratives from bygone times once did, as our very own ‘lived experiences.’

scape. 1 a brief ‘escape or means of escape’ 2 ‘a scenic view, whether of sea, land, or sky’ 3 ‘in its various senses’ 4 ‘a long flower-stalk rising directly from the root or rhizome’ 5 a theoretical approach to writing

Found in Translation: Connecting Reconceptualist Thinking with Early Childhood Education Practices highlights the relationships between reconceptualist theory and classroom practice. Each chapter in this edited collection considers a contemporary issue and explores its potential to disrupt the status quo and be meaningful in the lives of young children. The book pairs reconceptualist academics and practitioners to discuss how theories can be relevant in everyday educational contexts, working with children who are from a wide range of cultural, ethnic, gender, language, and social orientations to enable previously unimagined ways of being, thinking, and doing in contemporary times.