Editorial

I am very happy to say that EECERA, to which I have belonged since the early 1990s, has allowed me a dense learning journey, a space for academic and civic development. I remember the cooperation and sharing around the possible meanings of quality and quality development, paradigms for early year’s education and research, multicultural education and intercultural pedagogy, transformative pedagogic evaluation, pedagogic documentation and praxeological research. Among many other things, these themes have been central for my understanding and reconstruction of childhood pedagogy, its nature and origins, its praxis, its dialogues and research.

I have deepened my understanding of the constant struggle of the educational field in general and of childhood pedagogy in particular to assert itself as an autonomous field – meaning a specific field with its own concepts, methodologies and research that undertakes dialogue with a plurality of other areas of knowledge, without losing its identity. I hear voices that speak of the dangers of setting up a research tradition in education living on loans (Contreras and Lara 2010; Van Manen 2003), borrowing research methodologies from other areas of knowledge. But methodology can colonize far beyond the method and create an artificial nature of the educational field, leading to the import of theories and concepts, and furthermore, problems and solutions, questions and answers.

Quite long ago, Dewey (1929) wrote an essay about The Sources of the Science of Education that is timeless, mainly because the problems he examines are as relevant today as almost 90 years ago (Persson 2002). According to Dewey (1929), concrete educational experience is the primary source of all inquiry because it sets the problems, and tests, modifies, confirms or refutes the conclusions of scientific investigation. Dewey acknowledges the pressure for immediate results, for demonstration of a quick, short-time span of usefulness in school, which leads to a tendency to convert the results of statistical inquiries and laboratory experiments into directions and rules for the conduct of school administration and instruction (17–18).

Dewey militates against the the transformation of scientific findings into rules of action (19). As Dewey argues, all these transferences ignore completely the role of teachers and for him teachers are not mere channels of reception and transmission of knowledge, they are investigators.

Teachers should subject scientific findings to the criteria of reflexive experience (Dewey 1929, 30–32) not as a scientific validation process but as a judgement of (in)adequacy to contexts, processes, children, and learning communities.

EECERA is a learning community that encompasses many research communities (SIG groups, international research networks, informal groups) that hold plural expectations about the research published in the journal. I anticipate stimulating dialogues about the included articles.

Communication skills and language competencies have been object of great interest in early childhood research and education. Several studies presented in this volume address in diverse ways these issues.

In the article Time in ECEC and Language Competence in Norwegian four-year-old Girls and Boys, Imac M. Zambrana, Eric Dearing, Ane Nærde and Henrik D. Zachrisson (Norway), based on existent evidence that high-quality Early Childhood Education and Care is associated with children’s language competence, show that degree of exposure to high-quality ECEC is related not only to cognitive gains, but also to language benefits. If the globally increasing gap between boys and girls in educational achievements begins with early language effects, high quality Early Childhood Education and Care might be factor in closing that gap. The article ends with directions for future research.

Also addressing gender differences, Femke van der Wilt, Claudia van Kruistum, Chiel van der Veen and Bert van Oers (Netherlands) study the relationships between oral communicative competence and peer rejection in Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Oral Communicative Competence and Peer Rejection: An Explorative Study in Early Childhood Education. It was hypothesized that children with poorer oral communicative competence would be more often rejected by their peers and that the strength of this relationship would differ for boys and girls, but no relationship was found between oral communicative competence and peer rejection. The present study and others provide strong evidence for an association between boys’ language abilities and their acceptance by peers. The article ends with directions for future research.

Fabio Dovigo (Italy) assumes that one of the most relevant learning strategies is discursive interaction in the classroom leading to shared and critical thinking, which can greatly contribute to the learning development. This article – Argumentation in Preschool: A Common Ground for Collaborative Learning in Early Childhood – confirms that also in preschool, like in primary and secondary education, argumentation provides a strong opportunity for improving children’s ability to promote learning through the development of processes that are both social and cognitive. The article includes information about the role of teachers (both experienced and less experienced teachers) and asserts that teachers’ guidance can greatly contribute to helping children to develop sustained argumentations, provided that they would be able to adopt a shared leadership style in managing argumentation with children, as the most skilled teachers did.

The empirical study about Sign making, Coordination of Perspectives, and Conceptual Development, by Maria Magnusson and Niklas Pramling (Sweden), analyses how children (aged four- to six-years-old), through communicative engagement with their teachers around their own drawings, are supported in developing representational insight, that is, go from indicative sign-making to symbolic understanding. Providing support for children to develop symbolic understanding can be premised on the importance of the teacher gaining access to and building on the child’s perspective in order to challenge them to further discern and generalize critical features. These principles are also highly relevant and functional as guiding principles for teachers in early childhood education practice.

Mesut Saçkes, Sonnur Işıtan and Kerem Avci (Turkey) study Parents’ Perceptions of Children’s Literacy Motivation and their Home-literacy Practices: What’s the Connection? shows that parents who believed that their children are interested in storybook reading and are cognitively active during storybook reading are more likely to read, tell stories, and sing songs to their children. Results also indicated that parents perceive girls to demonstrate a higher level of interest in storybook reading than boys. The findings of the present study suggest that parental beliefs about their children’s interests in reading are associated with extent to which children will be exposed to literacy activities in the home environment. The article ends with some suggestions for teachers to work with parents.

In The Reliability and Structure of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System in German Preschools Andrea Stuck, Gisela Kammermeyer and Susanna Roux (Germany) examine the reliability and structure of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) and the quality of interactional processes in a German preschool settings. The study includes a representative sample with 57 language promotion teachers and 390 children, from which 45% have a native language other than German. The analysis revealed that reliable assessments of the quality of classroom interactional processes could be achieved and that the three-factor structure could be modelled in a German preschool setting. The examination of the quality of classroom interactional processes in these language promotion groups indicated that Emotional Support and Classroom Organization are excellent but that the quality of Instructional Support is very low. The article ends with some recommendations for teacher training and continuing education of preschool teachers.

Asiye Ivrendi (Turkey) in the article Choice-driven Peer Play, Self-regulation and Number Sense shows that children’s engagement in peer play significantly improved their chances of having higher number sense and self-regulatory skills, in particular, interactive play. This study aimed at examining whether children’s engagement in solitary low-level play, interactive play and competent play influences their self-regulatory and number sense skills.

Maria Kambouri (University of Roehampton, UK) explores, in Investigating Early Years Teachers’ Understanding and Response to Children’s Preconceptions, the teachers’ response to children’s preconceptions about science topics at a very young age, when children first come into contact with formal educational settings (previous research has mainly focused on older children’s concepts). All the teachers agree with the importance of being aware of children’s preconceptions about a science topic that they plan to teach, but only one teacher started the lesson with an activity aiming to identify the children’s preconceptions and only two teachers dedicated time to work on the children’s preconceptions, even though preconceptions were expressed by children during all observations. The article ends with reflexive comments for teachers, teacher educators and policymakers.

Chung-IL Kim (South Korea) researched the The Relationship between Fundamental Movement Skills and Body Mass Index in Korean Preschool Children, since early childhood obesity is a serious problem and fundamental movement skills (FMS) are very important factors in human movement. The findings did not show a relationship between FMS and Body Mass Index; this suggests that to decrease obesity we must consider other factors in physical education and physical activity program for preschooler, such as exercise intensity and nutrition.

It is important to promote research with children, not just on children or about children, meaning that children must be given the opportunity to express their perspectives. Exploring the Foundations of Visual Methods Used in Research With Children, by Lasse Lipponen, Antti Rajala, Jaakko Hilppö and Maiju Paananen (Finland), under this paradigm, address the growing interest in researching and documenting young children’s experiences by means of visual methods, such as photos and videos, as they offer an opportunity to see things in a new and different way. Studies to date have not revealed the differences between the functions of visual artefacts in the research process, and their functions in children’s lives more broadly.

The EECERA journal has been very productive in research with children, studying their educational experience at various levels (Special Issue Children' Perspectives and Participation in Research, vol. 19, Issue 3; September 2011) and championing praxeological research as a means to make real the struggle for children and teachers agency in research (Special Issue Praxeological Research in Early Childhood: A contribution to a social science of the social, vol. 20, number 4, December 2012).