Editorial

Dear Colleagues,

It gives us great pleasure to present to you this special issue of the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal. It has arisen from the EECERA Special Interest Group Working with Parents, Families and Communities, and its members’ cooperation over several years and several EECERA conferences. EECERA reaches well beyond Europe, and this geographical diversity is reflected in the membership of the special interest group. As a result, the contributions in this special issue come from around the world: Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, Hong Kong, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Together, we share an interest in the relationships between educators, children, their families and the wider community. This is not a new field for research, and many valuable theories and insights first published decades ago still inform our thinking (e.g. Epstein and Sanders 2002). Equally, we frequently draw on widely used concepts from sociology, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Bronfenbrenner and Morris 1998; Foucault 1977; Rogers 2004). However, the world does not stand still, and society, cultural expectations and educational guidelines are constantly shifting and changing. In many countries, governments are increasingly concerned about low levels of school results, especially in international comparisons like the PISA study (OECD 2016). These concerns are impacting on the provision of early childhood education in many different ways. For example, a plethora of early testing is being introduced in many countries and even internationally (see, for example, Moss et al. 2016; Pence 2016) with explicit links between early and later assessments so that ‘countries can have an earlier and more specific indication of how to lift the skills and other capabilities of its young people’ (OECD 2016; cited in Pence 2016, p. 54). Curriculum and pedagogical changes in early childhood education which have been designated as further examples of ‘schoolification’ have begun to appear. For example, in the UK, such moves have led to the introduction of a curriculum for children in preschool and nursery settings, assessments and tests for 5-year-olds, and a tick box approach to recording young children's development and learning. Much of this runs counter to well-established and well-considered early childhood education research and practice and seems to be reducing the professionalisation of the early childhood workforce (Moss 2014).

In such an accountability environment where the easily measured gains prominence, the human relationships around the child, in particular the relationship between the educator and the parent and family, can be pushed to the background. Research has shown how influential the engagement of parents and families can be, both directly in their child's current and future learning and development, and in their child's early childhood setting. However, in constantly changing national and social contexts, these relationships need to be re-examined, re-thought and re-visualised on an ongoing basis. For example, in the last few years, migration has been a particular feature affecting many countries. Because of unrest, civil war and famine, a great number of families are leaving their homes to seek a place of safety. At the same time, harsh economic conditions and austerity measures force many families to move to find work in unfamiliar countries, towns and cities. This means that early childhood settings are becoming more diverse with a greater mix of children and families from different cultural backgrounds and with, at times, difficult experiences. These societal shifts, along with the more political changes highlighted earlier, may necessitate new approaches to working with parents and families and the engagement of these parents and families in their children's education and care.

Against the backdrop of societal and economic change as well as increased performativity pressures, there is a danger that the voices of parents and families in their children's early learning and development will not always be seen, heard or fully understood. The papers in this special issue investigate and report on initiatives to listen to the voices of parents and families, to ascertain what families believe and do as they seek to engage collaboratively with educators in the learning and development of their children, and what educators and educational systems might do to facilitate and/or to establish barriers to such collaborative engagement.

The first three articles in this special issue specifically explore parents’ views and contributions to their children's learning. Xunyi Lin's and Hui Li's research into the ways in which Chinese parents support their children's play at home introduces a new Play Beliefs Scale for Parents which could have wide applicability in countries beyond China where it was developed and validated. The study highlights two factors – play for learning and play for fun – parents may hold in regards to their involvement in their children's play. In essence, parents appear to see themselves either as a teacher or as a playmate, using quite different perceptions of the benefits and usefulness of play. Susanne Rogers also considers parents’ interactions with their children at home and reveals the many ways in which parents support their children's learning. Through analysis of interview data, Rogers investigates differences in the perceptions of parents and educators concerning parental roles and abilities to support children's learning in the first year of school. She highlights the importance of the development of respectful relationships among parents and educators and the need for time to be given to the building of these relationships. While Rogers sees this relationship building needing to be a collaborative venture, she notes that because of power differentials, much of the initiative needs to emanate from educators. Both Lin and Li and Rogers emphasise that parents are their children's first and most enduring educators, something that may be forgotten in more education-focused early childhood settings. Katrien Van Laere, Mieke Van Houtte and Michel Vandenbroeck's article exploring the views of immigrant parents in Belgium indicates that parents’ expectations and priorities do not appear to be heard in early childhood settings and concludes that there is a discrepancy between parents’ emphasis on care and educators’ focus on education. The study shows some of the difficulties parents can have in even expressing their eagerness to be involved in their children's care and education and advocates for more democratic approaches to parental engagement with stronger support from early childhood settings.

Following the contribution from Belgium with its consideration of children and their parents in the context of early childhood settings, the next two papers develop the themes of remote parenting and cocaring. Tuula Vuorinen explores how parents understand their collaboration with educators. In such collaborations, parents wish to retain their overall responsibility for their children and are keen to influence and shape their children's experiences while they are in the care of others. The Swedish parents interviewed for this research saw their parenting role as involving remote parenting – parenting that continues even when they were not with their child. The paper from Elly Maras, Sarah Lang and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan builds on previous work in cocaring through an observational study of mother/educator interactions in the specific scenarios of drop-off and pick-up times in the USA. An observational tool is developed that shows strong validity and reliability characteristics and allows discussion of both supporting and undermining features of cocaring interactions. The contributions from Sweden and the USA are followed by a cross-cultural study of educators’ and parents’ understanding of learning at play. Shu-Chen Wu, Stefan Faas and Steffen Geiger's multivocal ethnography uses video material and focus group discussions to compare perspectives, professional practice and curricular policy in Germany and Hong Kong. The authors note the different views formed by individualist and collectivist approaches to pedagogy and education while also highlighting some dissonance in the views of educators and parents in the same cultural context. In the light of the societal shifts and changes mentioned above, this cross-cultural study seems particularly salient and may support educators to understand differences among their own perspectives and those of parents.

The next three papers in the special issue – those from Janine Hostettler Schärer in Canada, Sevcan Hakyemez-Paul, Paivi Pihlaja and Heikki Silvennoinen in Finland, and Ute Ward in the UK – consider what early childhood educators see as their roles in developing parental involvement with them. Schärer reports on case studies of four childcare educators about their professional roles, with specific data on building relationships with parents as their children move into the educators’ care. The findings provide more examples of educators seeing themselves ‘as experts and not partners of parents’, a perception which seems to impact on the closeness of relationships that are developed with parents. The questionnaire-based methods used in the study by Hakyemez-Paul and colleagues provide similar results to those of Schärer. While the Finnish early childhood educators are positively disposed towards parents’ involvement, they see that the parents are often barriers to such involvement, as is the ‘lack of time’ for both educators and parents. Ward presents interview-based research exploring English early childhood educators’ conceptualisations of professionalism in the work with parents. This paper points to the broad range of views different educators hold on their roles and responsibilities in relation to parents. One of the relational dimensions discussed focuses on the degrees of educators’ closeness to the parent or the child, which echoes the earlier discussion about care and caring in early childhood settings. Some of the English educators see themselves as experts and explain that too much emotional closeness to the child or her parents is unprofessional, which seems to echo Schärer's findings in Canada.

The final paper uses positioning analysis to explore written communication with families as their children start school in Quebec, Canada. The impact of written communication is sometimes overlooked even though its prevalence seems to be increasing. Joanne Lehrer illustrates the importance of written communication in constructing images of all stakeholders in the transition to school. The images constructed may vary across early childhood and school settings. For example, while parents are constructed as ‘consumers of information about children’ in childcare, they are encouraged to take a more active, collaborative role when their children start school. As has been shown in other papers in this special issue, however, teachers’ expertise is seen to be superior to that of parents.

It is well known that parental engagement in their children's learning and development has positive benefits (Ahtola et al. 2011; Sylva et al. 2010). However, in the current environments of accountability and performativity which are pervading early childhood education in many countries, the opportunities for parents and other family members to be part of the development of respectful, collaborative engagement with their children's early childhood educators are becoming more and more restricted. Many educators, under a great deal of pressure to ‘perform’, seem to be forced to choose between curriculum outcomes and parental engagement as both involve the educators’ time. Placed in this position, educators do not really have a choice, and this will impact on collaboration with parents and, we would suggest, be detrimental to the ongoing education and development of the children.