Description
Book SynopsisThis second edition of Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and CareA Reader: Critical Questions, New Imaginaries & Social Activism is a foundational text that presents contemporary theories, debates and political concerns regarding early education and child care around the globe. Chapter authors are leading contributors in discussions about critical early childhood studies over the past twenty-five years. The volume editors of Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and Care are long-time scholars in the reconceptualizing early childhood movement. Audiences include students in graduate courses focused on early childhood, early years, and primary education, critical childhood studies, critical curriculum studies and critical theories/perspectives.
Trade Review“Weaving together as well as juxtaposing theoretical perspectives, conceptual concerns and activist-oriented commitments, the editors and authors of this reader compel educators not only to ponder but also to enact new imaginaries of early childhood and child care pedagogies, research, theories, policies and curricula. Representing cross-generational, transnational and theoretically rich and yet diverse perspectives, this text is a must-read for educators concerned with the care and education of all children, especially within current education climates dominated by the rage for accountability, ‘normalization’ and standardization. Reconceptualizing early childhood care and education is an on-going commitment, one that these contributors perform in challenging and inspiring ways.”—Janet L. Miller, Professor, Department of Arts & Humanities, Teachers College, Columbia University
“The authors draw on twenty-five years of research and scholarship on reconceptualizing early childhood education to push us to intensify our struggles for equity, justice, inclusion, redistributive economics and social politics. With stories and voices that are both discomfiting and inspirational, they ask hard questions about how it could be and how we can use our imaginations and our activisms to make it better for all children.”—Mara Sapon-Shevin, Professor of Inclusive Education, Faculty Member, Disabilities Studies, Women’s Studies, Programs in the Analysis & Resolution of Conflicts, Syracuse University
“Today when the disenchantment with the dominant discourses within the field of early childhood education is pervasive, this is a timely and important book. The editors, as the leading-edge of the reconceptualizing early childhood education movement since the early 1990s, have here assembled researchers who have been influential in contesting the normalizing and universalizing processes of the mainstream discourses within the field, as well as in creating a space for new critical theories and paradigmatic positions that welcome complexity, diversity, uncertainty as well as wonder.”—Gunilla Dahlberg, Professor Emerita, Stockholm University, Sweden
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements – Marianne N. Bloch/Beth Blue Swadener/Gaile S. Cannella: Introduction: Reconceptualist Histories and Possibilities – Marianne N. Bloch: Interrogating Reconceptualizing Early Care and Education (RECE)—25 Years Along – Shirley A. Kessler: Reconceptualizing the Early Childhood Curriculum: An Unaddressed Topic – Joseph Tobin: Anxiety, Theory, and the Challenges of Doing Early Childhood Research – Jonathan Silin: Through a Queer Lens: Recuperative Longings and the Reconceptualizing Past – Michael O’Loughlin: Still Waiting for the Revolution – Susan Grieshaber/Felicity McArdle: Social Justice, Risk, and Imaginaries – Gunilla Dahlberg/Peter Moss: Reconceptualising Evaluation in Early Childhood Education – Marek Tesar/Sonja Arndt: Posthuman Childhoods: Questions Concerning ‘Quality’ – Michelle Salazar Pèrez/Cinthya M. Saavedra: Black and Chicana Feminisms: Journeys Toward Spirituality and Reconnection – Liselott Mariett Olsson/Ebba Theorell: Affective/Effective Reading and Writing Through Real Virtualities in a Digitized Society – Gail Boldt/Joseph Michael Valente: Bring Back the Asylum: Reimagining Inclusion in the Presence of Others – Chelsea Bailey: Radical Theories of Presence in Early Childhood Imaginaries – Denise Proud/Cynthia à Beckett: Our Story of Early Childhood Collaboration: Imagining Love and Grace – Cheryl Rau/Jenny Ritchie: Ki te Whai ao, ki te ao Marama: Early Childhood Understandings in Pursuit of Social, Cultural, and Ecological Justice – Affrica Taylor: Situated and Entangled Childhoods: Imagining and Materializing Children’s Common World Relations – Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw/Fikile Nxumalo: Posthumanist Imaginaries for Decolonizing Early Childhood Praxis – Mariana Souto-Manning/Maisha T. Winn/Nicole McGowan/Jessica Martell: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and the (Im)Possibility of Racial Justice – Valerie Polakow: None for You: Children’s Capabilities and Rights in Profoundly Unequal Times – Mark Nagasawa/Lacey Peters/Beth Blue Swadener: The Costs of Putting Quality First: Neoliberalism, (Ine)quality, (Un)affordability, and (In)accessibility? – Mathias Urban: Learning From the Margins: Early Childhood Imaginaries, "Normal Science," and the Case for a Radical Reconceptualization of Research and Practice – Janette Habashi: [Im]possibilities of Reinvention of Palestinian Early Childhood Education – Jeanne Marie Iorio/Will Parnell/Elizabeth P. Quintero/Catherine Hamm: Early Childhood Teacher Educator as Public Intellectual – Kylie Smith/Sheralyn Campbell: Social Activism: The Risky Business of Early Childhood Educators in Neoliberal Australian Classrooms – I-Fang Lee/Nicola Yelland: The Global Childhoods Project: Complexities of Learning and Living With a Biliterate and Trilingual Literacy Policy – Gaile S. Cannella: Critical Qualitative Research and Rethinking Academic Activism in Childhood Studies – About the Authors.
