Editorial

I am not sure about the origins of the saying ‘may you live in interesting times’ (Wikipedia claims it is ‘apocryphal’) but I understand it is meant to be a curse rather than a blessing. As far as early childhood education and care are concerned, on an international scale, the times we live in could hardly be less ‘interesting’. After a long period of largely positive developments in policy, practice and research in our field we are encountering contradictory – and often deeply troubling – developments – in all three areas – on an unprecedented scale. One of the main achievements of the past two decades is certainly the broad consensus on the importance of a child’s first years as ‘a critical period in human life’, as Woodhead (1996) called it in a publication for the Bernard van Leer Foundation. At policy level, this consensus has found its expression in numerous international and national frameworks, strategies and documents that call for increased access to, and participation in early childhood education, care and development services, underpinned by substantially increased investment. The European Union, to give just one example, has come a long way from the realisation that provision of childcare by its Member States can be an effective policy tool that helps realise a much broader macro-economic agenda (Council of the European Communities 1992). Published in 2011, the Council conclusions on early childhood education and care: providing all our children with the best start for the world of tomorrow (Council of the European Union 2011) are, in many respects, a remarkable document. First and foremost, it brings young children firmly into the centre of attention. Rather than framing early childhood provision as services for working parents (which was the main focus of the 1992 recommendations), they are now understood as being beneficial to all children, realising their right to education from birth as enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The recognition that early childhood services are services for children first is reflected in the change of terminology. Childcare (which risks objectifying children, seeing them only in their need of being cared for) has been replaced with Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), a concept that acknowledges that care and education are inseparable. Foregrounding the educational responsibility of early childhood services has implications, many of them positive and welcome: it implies benefits – and participation rights – for all children, regardless of the employment situation of their parents. It implies that the macro-political and economic benefits of ECEC derive from children participating in education from an early age, not just from the fact that more adults (women!) can access the labour market. The case for a focus on the rights and benefits of and for all children regardless of their social, cultural and economic background has been prepared by proponents of progressive universalism, most prominently by John Bennett in the context of the first to OECD Starting Strong reports (Bennett 2003; OECD 2001, 2006).

ECEC also implies a much greater need for a well-educated, highly qualified workforce. Calls and initiatives to professionalise the early childhood workforce are closely linked to a conceptual shift from childcare to ECEC. Linking the debate about the why and how of professionalisation to education, however, has proved to be a dangerous trap as much as an effective strategy to attract political attention and resources for the field as it has, arguably, contributed to maintaining the persistent split between childcare and early education in services and institutions that the introduction of the concept of ECEC has sought to overcome (Bennett 2003; Cameron and Moss 2007; Dalli and Urban 2010; Urban 2008; Urban, Robson, and Scacchi 2017; Van Laere, Peeters, and Vandenbroeck 2012).

The pivotal role of the Starting Strong I and II reports – which have become landmark studies in the field – in shaping national and international early childhood policies has been a force for much needed debate and development, and has been largely welcomed by the early childhood research community. However, it is precisely this democratically unaccounted ‘soft power’ of organisations like OECD, World Bank and other global agents, exercised through ‘epistemic communities of policy analysts, bureaucrats and politicians within the Organisation and in member countries’ (Sellar and Lingard 2013, 712), that has brought about current major counterproductive and outright dangerous developments in our field. They include a global drive towards ‘datafication’ (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes 2018) and standardised testing of young children for purposes of league-table style comparison between countries (Moss et al. 2016; Moss and Urban 2017; Urban 2017; Urban and Swadener 2016). Together with the global push towards imposed standardisation of assessment, the field is currently facing wider substantial threats: first, we experience revisions of curricular frameworks, first introduced to the field in the 1990s, and a narrowing down of their holistic features to aspects that are deemed measurable. Second, as a consequence, we are seeing the beginning of the undoing of two decades of developing an autonomous early childhood profession that goes hand in hand with the reduction of education and care to technical (rather than political and ethical) practice. Teacherless Schools, tablet-, IT- and increasingly AI-based, are already being promoted and rolled out by global corporations. They provide a glimpse of a possible shape of things to come. After all, as one proponent writes on his blog, ‘teacherless education can begin at a very early age’ (https://www.futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/teacherless-education-and-the-competition-that-will-change-everything/). Third, both of the above threats to culturally and ethically responsive early childhood education and care are only possible against the background of a worrying increase of private-for-profit provision amidst ongoing erosion of public education in many countries. All this requires urgent critical interrogation as well as professional and public debate.

International early childhood research (much of it published in this journal) has played, and continues to play an important role in providing the basis for our understanding of young children, of the societies they live in, the institutions we set up to support and serve them, their families and diverse communities, and of the educators who, in their daily interactions with them constantly (re)negotiate and (re)define nothing less than the relationship between the private and the public. The collection of papers in this issue provides a good example of the immense and continuing growth of the body of knowledge in our field, and of the many paradigmatic and disciplinary perspectives that continue to feed into this growth.

Marco Franze and colleagues Käthe Lewicki, Annika Gottschling-Lang and Wolfgang Hoffmann, based at the Institute for Community Medicine at the University of Greifswald, Germany, investigate Developmental differences between preschool boys and girls in Northeastern Germany. The authors take a ‘psychobiological’ perspective on a pertinent question that has been the focus of research from diverse disciplinary angles, including gender studies and sociology of childhood. Their approach reminds us of the critical implications – ethical and political – of methodological choices as they discuss and justify the exclusion of children with disabilities and non-native speakers from their study.

Julie Waddington, Sandra Coto Bernal and Carina Siqués Jofré from the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Girona, Spain, report on their study on Creating and evaluating a foreign language area in an early childhood setting. Their findings underline the importance of holistic approaches to language acquisition, and raises questions about pedagogical choices and their implications for children: e.g. which and whose language(s) are valued or silenced in early childhood settings?

Mary A. Dyer, based at HudCRES, University of Huddersfield, UK, in her contribution Being a professional or practising professionally, reminds us that the broad area of professionalism in early childhood education and care remains an issue of concern, even after two decades of intense international debate. Her paper adds to that debate; it investigates early childhood practice in the context of (UK) government control and regulation.

Rune Giske and co-authors Ingunn Berrefjord Ugelstad, Aud Torill Meland, Elsa Helen Kaltvedt, Synnøve Eikeland, Finn Egil Tønnessen and Elin Kirsti Lie Reikerås, all from the Department of Education and Sport Science, University of Stavanger, Norway, present Toddlers’ social competence, play, movement skills and well-being: An analysis of their relationship based on authentic assessment in kindergarten. The article is yet another contribution to a discussion that has gained prominence in the field in recent years: it argues for children’s well-being as the defining frame of reference for holistic early childhood experiences.

Elisabeth Brekke Stangeland, Kjersti Lundetræ and Elin Reikerås, from the National Centre for Reading Education and Research, University of Stavanger, Norway, take up the theme of young children’s language acquisition, seen through the lens of gender. While differences between girls and boys clearly are important the question remains what other factors that intersect with gender influence children’s language and communication – e.g. class and culture.

Helen Breathnach, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, draws attention to the complex interactions that unfold between children and researcher. Her ethnographic study Becoming a member of the classroom: Supporting children’s participation as informants in research shows how children exercise agency in the research process in an ‘interactional space’.

Christian Eidevald, Helena Bergström and Anna Westberg Broström, from the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden, return to a topic that has been at the centre of attention in the highly gendered early childhood workforce for many years, and has dominated the discussion about gender imbalance and the lack of male educators. Their paper Maneuvering suspicions of being a potential paedophile [sic]: experiences of male ECEC-workers in Sweden explores and documents coping strategies of male practitioners and the implications for their professional identities.

Marja Syrjämäki, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland, and co-authors Päivi Pihlaja, Department of Education, University of Turku, and Nina Sajaniemi, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, in their paper Enhancing peer interaction during guided play in Finnish integrated special groups, argue for a more proactive engagement of adults in children’s play activities, which offer, among others, an opportunity for scaffolding their learning and shaping ‘zones of proximal development’.

Martin Needham, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, Daurenbek Kuleimenov and Arailym Soltanbekova, both from Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, establish a critical connection between the global and the local in their article Sticking and tipping points: a case study of preschool education policy and practice in Astana, Kazakhstan. The paper provides valuable insights into the workings of neo-colonialism and cultural borrowing in early childhood policy and practice.

The final paper in this issue –What do pedagogues in daycare do? Empirical analyses of the occupational activities of pedagogues in children’s daycare centres in Germany – is a contribution by Thilo Schmidt, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, Wilfried Smidt, University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Susanna Roux, University of Education, Weingarten, Germany. It provides a welcome grounding of a sometimes theory-heavy debate – a reality check of who does what in day-to-day early childhood practice. The findings raise some questions about the self-concept of educators as well as about the implementation of national professionalisation strategies.

Seen as part of a bigger picture, I suggest the articles compiled in this issue provide an interestin insight into the current state of early childhood research. They clearly show the continued interest that our field receives from a wide range of academic disciplines, some of them more detached than others from the histories, ethics and philosophies that underpin professional practice with children, the youngest citizens in our societies. Early childhood education and care has clearly been accepted as an area to be taken seriously by academic research. The dilemma we find ourselves in is that a considerable part of that interest still comes from outside the field, is generated by ‘neighbouring’ (and sometimes dominant) disciplines, thus perpetuating the potential objectification of young children, educators and early childhood services. Despite a history of more than 200 years (in the west), early childhood as a profession and discipline still sometimes appears to struggle to ‘think and speak for itself’ (Urban and Dalli 2012). Seen from the inside, the struggle also materialises in the paradigmatic and onto-epistemological tensions within our field. As I have discussed elsewhere (Urban 2016), the persistent dichotomy between ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ research has perpetuated the overall weakness of our field. The former has (successfully, to some extent) aligned itself with dominant political agendas in the hope of influencing them; the latter has largely (my reading) favoured critical policy analysis over attempts to engage with policy in order to change it. Considering the perilous state of holistic, rights-based, social justice oriented, democratic, inventive and investigate early childhood education and care we should urgently seek to overcome the divide. We can only do this from within and we should move now; there is no time for complacency. The dialectic counterpart of the threats to early childhood education and care lies in a (re)new(ed) recognition of systemic views on children, education and its institutions. Bridging the divide between paradigms and established ways of ‘doing research’ might yet bring about a Competent System (Urban 2012) in and of early childhood research. After all, as Paulo Freire reminds us,

apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed)