For the past 20 years, a range of scholars, educators, and cultural workers have examined dominant discourses of "childhood" using critical, feminist, and other postmodern perspectives. Located in a variety of disciplines, these poststructural, deconstructive, and even postcolonial critiques have challenged everything from notions of the universal child, to adult/child dualisms, to deterministic developmental theory. The purpose of this volume is to acknowledge the profound contributions of that large body of literature, while demonstrating the ways that critical analyses can be used to generate avenues/actions that increase possibilities for social justice for those who are younger while, at the same time, avoiding determinism. In this time of globalization, hyper-capitalism, and discourses that would control and disqualify through constructions like accountability, we believe that projects such as this are of utmost importance. The volume is divided into four major sections to reflect the multiplicity of human voices and perspectives (section I), contemporary circumstances and dominant discourses within which we all attempt to function (sections II and III), and the generation of new possibilities for constructing relationships together (section IV). Finally, a voice from the "heart" within a "reconceptualist" social science agenda for early childhood studies is presented.

Childhoods - A Handbook

Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Care and Education is a foundational text, which presents contemporary theories and debates about early education and child care in many nations. The authors selected are leading contributors in discussions about critical early childhood studies over the past twenty years ; the editors are long-time scholars in the reconceptualizing early childhood movement. Audiences include students in graduate courses focused on early childhood and primary education, critical cultural studies of childhood, critical curriculum studies and critical theories that have been contested and debated and drawn from over the course of two decades. The book is filled with recent scholarship by leading authors in the reconceptualization and rethinking of childhood studies and early childhood fields, who discuss foundational debates, new imaginaries in theory and practice and activist scholarship. A must-read for graduate students and professionals interested in beginning or continuing critical interrogations of current early childhood policy and reforms globally.

Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Care and Education - Critical Questions, New Imaginaries and Social Activism: A Reader

Quality rating systems discourses and practices are increasingly dominating early childhood care and education around the globe. These rating systems are constructed with the assumption that universally appropriate environments can be constructed for all those who are younger. This deterministic, ratings, and measurement oriented perspective is consistent with neoliberal discourses that privilege competition, accountability, consumer materialism, and notions such as human capital ; this contemporary neoliberal condition does not support concern for the common good, democracy, equity, justice, or diversity (unless the support can facilitate new forms of capitalist gains). Ultimately, this is not a positive situation for those who are younger. The chapters in this book have two goals : (1) to provide the reader with an opportunity to engage with some of the specific problems that result from putting forward ‘quality' as a dominant construct, and (2) to generate conversations and locations from diverse knowledges and multiple ways of being that could lead to the rethinking of quality, understandings of quality as a narrowing construct/practice, and/or going beyond (and outside of) notions of quality.

Critical Examinations of Quality in Early Education and Care - Regulation, Disqualification, and Erasure

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012. This volume of transformed research utilizes an activist approach to examine the notion that nothing is apolitical. Research projects themselves are critically examined for power orientations, even as they are used to address curricular problems and educational or societal issues. Philosophical perspectives that have facilitated an understanding of issues of power are used to conceptualize research problems as well as determine methodologies. These life-experience perspectives include, but are not limited to, postcolonial and subaltern studies, feminisms, poststructuralism, cultural studies, and critical race theory. The book also examines the use of language, discourse practices, and power relations that prevent more socially just transformations. The Critical Qualitative Research Reader is an invaluable text for undergraduate and graduate classrooms as well as an important volume for researchers.

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