1st Edition
Disrupting Early Childhood Education Research Imagining New Possibilities
Recent and increasing efforts to standardize young children’s academic performance have shifted the emphases of education toward normative practices and away from qualitative, substantive intentions. Connection to human experience, compassion for societal ailments, and the joys of learning are straining under the pressure of quantitative research, competition, and test scores, exemplified by federal funding competitions and policymaking.
Disrupting Early Childhood Education Research critically interrogates the traditional foundations of early childhood research practices to disrupt the status quo through imaginative, cutting-edge research in diverse U.S. and international contexts. Its chapters are driven by empirical data derived from unique research projects and a variety of contemporary methodologies that include phenomenological studies, auto-ethnographic writings, action-oriented studies, arts-based methodologies, and other innovative approaches. By giving voice to marginalized social science researchers who are active in learning, school, and early education sectors, this volume explores the meanings of actionable and everyday approaches based on the experiences of young children, their families, and educators.
Series Editor Introduction
Nicola Yelland
Foreword
Peter Moss
Chapter 1: Reaching Toward the Possible
Jeanne Marie Iorio and Will Parnell
Section 1: New Theoretical and Methodological Imaginings
Chapter 2: Research as an ethic of welcome and relationship: Pedagogical documentation in Reggio Emilia, Italy
Stefania Giamminuti
Chapter 3: Theorizing what it means to be pedagogical in (the) early years (of) teaching
Sandy Farquhar and Marek Tesar
Chapter 4: Critiquing traditional colonial practices in teacher education: Interpreting normative practices through visual culture analyses
Richard T. Johnson
Chapter 5: Parents as Producers of Enduring Knowledge Through Inquiry
Paige M. Bray and Erin M. Kenney
Section 2: Democratizing the Research Process
Chapter 6: (Re)imagining Participant Observation with Preschool Children
Allison Sterling Henward
Chapter 7: Words and Bodies: Reimagining Narrative Data in a Toddler Classroom
Emmanuelle N. Fincham
Chapter 8: "I am writing notes too": Rethinking children’s roles in ethnographic research
Ysaaca D. Axelrod
Section 3: Critical Issues in Early Childhood Research from New Perspectives
Chapter 9: Current Playworld Research in Sweden: Rethinking the Role of Young Children and their Teachers in the Design and Execution of Early Childhood Research
Beth Ferholt, Monica Nilsson, Anders Jansson and Karin Alnervik
Chapter 10: Imagining children’s strengths as they start school
Sue Dockett and Bob Perry
Chapter 11: "To Have or not to Have" at School: Action Research on Early Childhood Education in Galicia (Spain).
Concepcion Sánchez-Blanco
Chapter 12: One Test is Not Enough: Getting to Really Know Your Students
Sandra L Osorio
List of Contributors
Index
Biography
Will Parnell is Associate Professor of Education and a pedagogical liaison to the Helen Gordon Child Development Center at Portland State University, USA. He also coordinates the master's in early childhood education for the Graduate School of Education's Curriculum and Instruction Department.
Jeanne Marie Iorio is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.
"A timely collection of conceptual and political importance, Disrupting Early Childhood Education Research reconfigures early childhood education methodologies in exciting, astute, and exceptional ways. Its authors show that it is possible to research differently."
Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Professor, School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Canada
"This is an urgently needed collection of research and possibilities that asks enduring questions, explores new meanings with its findings, gathers and interprets data, and initiates new lines of inquiry. A study in Aotearoa, New Zealand, for example, is framed by both narrative inquiry and philosophy, opening the door for research that embraces identity and sense of place. Another research project, meanwhile, opens the doors and play yards for children to collaborate as active researchers. Imagine!"
Elizabeth P. Quintero, Professor and Coordinator of Early Childhood Studies at California State University Channel Islands, USA
