Editorial

The articles included in this issue of the journal cover a wide range of topics that are important for all of us who are committed to the care and education of young children. The wide range of topics are related to our roles as their caretakers, teachers as well as their parents. The contributions included here are offered by our colleagues from eight countries and remind us all again of the extent to which the issues we must address in our work are just about universal.

Taggart, of the University of Reading in the UK, offers us an examination of the ethical complexities inevitably involved as part of our professional responsibilities. This article takes up major – though often overlooked – relationship issues in our professional roles. Ethical issues that arise in our work with young children and their families cannot simply be addressed by referring to research or our accumulated knowledge of children's development, or by simply conforming to local rules and regulations. As I suggested long ago in addressing ethical issues in working with young children, codes of ethics serve ‘as one of the methods by which groups of practitioners cope with temptations that arise in the course of our work’ that cannot be addressed just by applying accumulated knowledge and data (Katz 1994). Taggart's discussion is aimed at helping us to reflect on the ethical complexities in our work as we strive to generate strong attachments to the young and treat them with compassion. At the same time, while we must constantly acknowledge the vulnerability of the very young we also must take into account the importance of their strengths in the context of the complex cultural diversity most of us – and many of today's young children – must cope with. Taggart raises complex issues concerning the quality of care while at the same time emphasising the importance as well as complexity of always being understanding.

Giménez-Dasí of Spain et al. report the findings of research that examined a fairly frequently observed phenomenon in the behaviour of four- to six-year-old children: namely their adoption of imaginary companions. The results of this study indicate that four- to six-year-old children who do adopt imaginary companions seem to have a better understanding of the nature of the mind. Furthermore, this research indicates there are important gender differences in this and related phenomena.

Räisänen of Finland et al. report findings based on observing how a teacher implemented the basic principles upon which the current Finnish core curriculum for first-graders is designed. This report focuses on two particular aspects of the curriculum: a community-oriented conception of language as seen from a cultural perspective, and a broad view of what is meant by the term ‘text.' This article examines many important aspects of classroom events frequently using the term habitus – a term rarely used in the English language research literature. Evidently the term habitus includes reference to diverse aspects of the local culture and its socialised norms or tendencies which guide the development of children's dispositions and propensities to think and act, rather than traditional elements of textbook instruction. It is also somewhat unusual to observe a reading curriculum that is deliberately inclusive of social, cultural and community issues in the interest building a strong foundation in youngsters for a life of involvement in such issues. This Finnish commitment to the early development of social and community matters and the well-being of their own country should provoke strong discussion among the teachers and parents and other adults involved in early education around the world.

The article by Delacour about the core curriculum of Sweden presents a provocative discussion that explores the potential benefits to four- and five-year-old children when the teacher uses an outdoor situation as a context for problem-solving by introducing and applying mathematical concepts outdoors. The article refers to such diverse concepts as quantity, order space, shapes, numbers and many more concepts related to mathematics. This study introduces the concept of the ‘didactic triangle' which takes up the complex nature of knowledge – especially in teaching situations, and the roles of both learners and teachers in pedagogical contexts.

As the Snel et al. paper from the Netherlands reports in a study of the early detection of reading problems, there are strategies to employ to help minimise the long term effects they might later cause. A sample of 178 first graders helps us to appreciate the complexities of the nature of word recognition in many languages, including theirs. The authors urge us to identify potential reading difficulties early in order to be able to provide support for the development of understanding of the connections between graphemes and their corresponding phonemes.

Hoel of Norway alerts us to the variety of competencies in children between six- and seven-years-old that are involved in and that also support their story-telling abilities. The notion that the ability to produce a coherent narrative is a complex linguistic as well as intellectual skills is well illustrated in this report. The research findings in this report are based on experimental situations that involved the children in being provoked to invent a narrative when ‘reading' a book that presented only illustrations concerning where a frog might be and included no verbal narrative. The children were encouraged to narrate a possible story represented by the illustrations that are offered to ‘readers'. This research certainly helps us to appreciate there are many different kinds of skills as well as experiences that are related to children's abilities to invent plots and make up stories and other aspects of what the author refers to as ‘narrative competence.' The variety of abilities and aptitudes revealed by this research report are provocative and hopefully will encourage further similar studies by our colleagues in other countries using a variety of languages.

Kutnick et al.'s report of a comparison of practitioner- and child-oriented cognitive/learning activities in Hong Kong, Italy and the UK focuses on four-year-olds in these countries as they become involved in what the authors refer to as cognitive/learning tasks in contexts that vary in many ways. Based on the virtually universally accepted idea that preschool experience can enhance children's cognitive as well as social development that will, in turn, facilitate their adjustment to later entrance into elementary school settings. A wide variety of cognitive and socially related aspects of the children's preschool experiences are examined in this article. This report offers a wide variety of suggestions and provocations for readers about what further kinds of research are needed to clarify the effects of the way various preschool contexts influence both social and cognitive development and many aspects of these two important categories. Among the social aspects of development that frequently show relationships to cognitive development are gender differences. Current evidence seems to imply that the extent and types of gender differences observed in the early years are related to their national cultural contexts and traditions.

Maagerø and Sunde share with us here their studies of young children expressing themselves in drawings both in Norway and in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. The similarities and differences between young children growing in such vastly different environments and cultures deepen our awareness not only of the distinctions between the environments in which they are growing, but also help to raise our awareness of the similarities of the universal needs and emotions of all young children. The interesting questions that the investigators pose to the children are: A. ‘What makes you happy?’ and, B. ‘What makes you scared?’ The authors urge us to keep in mind that ‘human beings are human beings all over the world with the same needs and the same emotions'. Indeed, the findings of their study suggests that what the children asserted made them happy was fairly similar in both cultural contexts, but differed significantly among different cultures in terms of on what made them scared.

Another contribution from Australia by Feiyan Chen and Marilyn Fleer is the report of a study of the important and complex issues related to how families use play as a tool to support the development of three-year-old children's emotion regulation. Chen and Fleer make the provocative point that the development of emotion regulation – one of the most important aspects of development in the early years – is related to the interaction of very young children and their parents and other important adults early in their daily lives. This is another one of the research studies included in this issue of the journal that reminds us that we, as the professionals, should focus and consider the most effective ways to convey the implications of this research for basic aspects of parenting.

Among the many valuable reports in this volume is the one from Australia that reports the potentially complex implications of young children's drawing – an activity long accepted as an important part of early childhood provision. Knight et al. pose the question: ‘Can drawing perform effectively as a method for early childhood researchers on the basis of which they can take into account effectiveness of the provision of daily activities?’ A significant element of this research is the study of what the authors refer to as collaborative drawing, which involves children drawing alongside the researchers who are also drawing with them. Knight et al. propose that collaborative drawing provides a context for addressing complex questions and issues of early childhood such as, for example, identity, belonging, well-being and other important aspects of early development. This research project makes a strong case for the potential benefits of intergenerational collaborative drawing as a research method and as a potential source of rich insights into young children's perceptions of the world around them.

In sum, I would like to suggest that it would be helpful for those of us who fulfill many different professional roles in the field of early education to adopt the habit of making a clear distinction between academic and intellectual aspects of development (Katz 2015) rather than the more general term ‘cognitive aspects of behaviour.' I suggest that almost all behaviour in the early years has cognitive elements, e.g. giving a peer a toy to play with, complaining about not getting a turn with something, etc., etc. On the other hand, the academic goals of education – at all ages – are concerned with the mastery of relatively small discrete elements of abstract or disembodied information (e.g. the alphabet, the names of the days of the week, etc., etc.). On the other hand, the intellectual goals are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense, e.g. reasoning, predicting, analysing, questioning and a wide range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. There is really very little in our daily lives that does not involve some level of thinking, i.e. cognitive processes. But our focus on providing young children with intellectual challenges and opportunities to question, predict, and analyse phenomena within and around them worthy of their attention would likely serve as a way of building a foundational habit of using our intellects to address and to solve the wide range of problems we are always encountering.