Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and Care—A Reader

“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