Evolving infant agency in serve-and-return interactions: a longitudinal study of well-being and involvement through the lens of Experiential Education (EXE) theory

This study analysis the provision of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in Wolaita Zone, southern Ethiopia. To achieve this objective, the researchers used a mixed methods research design followed by Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory as a conceptual framework. Parents, preschool teachers, and education experts were chosen using systematic and purposeful sampling. Data were collected through interviews, focus group discussion, a standardised observational checklist, and secondary documents. The study demonstrates that the educational backgrounds and qualifications of ECCE teachers and leaders, physical settings, curricular initiatives, and teaching materials are far below national standards. The findings further suggest that ECCE in Wolaita Zone is neither child-friendly nor child-centred and ECCE fails to satisfy minimum health, safety, and educational standards. The paper recommends that, if true educational equity is to be foregrounded, then official Ethiopian ECCE guidelines and frameworks for ECCE should be cascaded to ECCE schools across the nation.

There is consensus about the positive effects of high quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) on children’s development, particularly for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. However, limited knowledge exists on the access to quality in ECEC in a universal context. This study investigates potential socioeconomic selection into ECEC of higher structural quality in the context of a universal, heavily subsidized, and regulated system in Norway, intended to provide equal access to high quality ECEC. Furthermore, we explore the impact of SES and structural quality in ECEC on student-teacher relationship quality. Our conceptual model takes into account how readily accessible information on different quality aspects is for parents. We use data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study linked with teacher-reported ECEC quality for children born in 2006–2009 (N 7,226), supplemented by registry data at ECEC and municipality level. We find that higher parental education, and to a lesser degree income, predict child attendance of ECEC with higher structural quality as rated by ECEC teachers. Further, higher parental SES and structural quality (i.e., developmental material, staff competence and stability) predict better student-teacher relationship quality in terms of higher level of closeness and less conflict. These findings suggest that ambitions of universal equal access to high quality ECEC are not entirely realized and more efforts are needed to ensure higher structural quality in ECEC and enhance relationship quality for children from less advantageous socioeconomic backgrounds.

Background: The education and training experiences of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) practitioners reflect gaps and inequalities in South Africa’s educational system. Most South African ECCE centre practitioners do not have the appropriate qualifications to provide quality education to young learners.Aim: The study aimed to explore how the education and training experiences of ECCE practitioners impact their professional identity in urban and rural settings in KwaZulu-Natal province and to develop a model that would enhance the education and training of ECCE practitioners.Setting: Ten participants were selected for this study: one centre head and four practitioners from a rural setting, and one centre head and four practitioners from an urban area.Methods: Wenger’s social theory of learning was used to obtain an in-depth understanding of ECCE practitioners’ education and training experiences and how they function as professional workers. An interpretative, qualitative case study was adopted. Data was collected through focus group semi-structured interviews and non-participants’ observation and then analysed thematically.Results: The findings revealed that practitioners in rural settings had to contend with unfair working conditions daily, working all day in challenging circumstances whilst earning low incomes. Urban practitioners worked reasonable hours and received living wages, although they also experienced challenges such as a lack of parental involvement, lack of transport for children and high rates of absenteeism.Conclusion: Inequalities between rural and urban practitioners existed concerning resources, salaries, working conditions and further study and professional growth opportunities. Ensuring that practitioners attain proper Early Childhood Care (ECC) qualifications will raise the profession’s esteem amongst wider communities.

This chapter explores the impacts of commodification on children's daily experiences in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings and presents examples of resistance in various contexts and at various levels. It begins by observing how children are represented in ways that furthers ECEC as a commodity: as passive vessels, learning subjects, in need of salvation, as risks to society, and as future tools to improve the economy of their nation. An Australian case study illuminates how children both perform and resist their own positioning in long daycare. Following this, broader socio-historical rationales for ECEC, and their intersections with current processes of commodification, are discussed: ECEC as custodial care for vulnerable children and "troubled" mothers/families; ECEC as a tool for cultural assimilation; ECEC as children's garden; ECEC as a human capital and/or economic investment for nation-states; and ECEC as a site of experimentation and political resistance. These conceptualisations are interspersed with examples of alternative conceptualisations, projects, and concrete examples of resistance movements from Aotearoa (New Zealand), Indonesia, multiple African countries (Ethiopia Lesotho, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Republic of Congo, and Uganda), and Norway.

Relaxation is framed as a key component of children's well-being in Australia’s legislation for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services, yet there is little elaboration on what supporting children’s relaxation entails and likewise a dearth of research on children’s lived experiences of relaxation. The data on which this thesis draws are from the study Choosing Rest, conducted in partnership with the Queensland Government, Department of Education. The thesis contributes qualitative analyses of drawing-prompted interviews with 46 three- to five- year-old children attending ECEC, and interviews with seven ECEC educators, to build understanding of children’s experiences and, thereby, inform policy and practice actions in ECEC.This thesis includes four published works. The first two inquire: How do children experience relaxation in ECEC? I investigate children’s accounts (paper one), and policy and educators’ discourses (paper two). Findings from these two papers inform a second inquiry: How can I research and write about children in a way that disrupts dominant early childhood discourse that undermines children’s agency? I experiment with ‘Departing Radically in Academic Writing’ (DRAWing) to better represent children’s playful voices (paper three) and follow children’s lead to change my focus on relaxation to unrest, with corresponding adaptation to research methodology and writing genre (paper four). This thesis embodies a dendritic crystallization methodology, whereby each of the four papers have distinct epistemological underpinnings, methodologies, and genres of writing; yet, linked together they provide multifaceted insights into children’s relaxation and unrestful experiences in ECEC.Paper one investigates how children attending ECEC experience relaxation. In the literature, relaxation is framed as the physiological and psychological counterpart to stress and thereby constructed as a health issue. I argue that the prevalence of relaxation being conceptualised as a ‘treatment’ for stress, in absence of consultation with children, contributes to the medicalisation of children’s relaxation. Informed by the sociology of childhood, I seek to understand children’s lived experiences of relaxation. Children competently describe their understandings and diverse preferences for relaxation, which centre on sensory-rich experiences grounded in specific social and environmental contexts. Children’s conceptualisation of relaxation as enjoyable everyday experiences contrast from the dominant stress-centric and medicalised research literatures. These largely portray children as passive intervention ‘recipients’ – rather than competent subjects with agency – and underpin common ECEC practices that focus on standard, and often mandated, ‘rest-times’ as a remedy for ‘stress’.Paper two examines two dominant ECEC discourses – ‘investment and outcomes’ and ‘children’s rights’ – and how these discourses shape policy pertaining to, and educators’ accounts of, children’s relaxation. Existing literature on ECEC discourses focuses more on policy than educators’ accounts. This is the first study to explore how dominant ECEC discourses shape policy and educator discourses of children’s relaxation. Discourses are influential because they directly inform pedagogical and care practices. I find both dominant discourses are present in Australian ECEC policy; however, policy pertaining to children’s relaxation only reflects investment-outcomes discourse – implying children are passive and incompetent. Some educators reproduce the discursive tensions found in policy, vacillating between two competing discourses, while other educators push beyond these tensions. The latter group of educators provide consistent descriptions of children’s competence and agency, aligning with children’s rights discourse.In paper three I critically reflect on how the tensions in dominant ECEC discourses that I critique are infused in my writing style (conventional academic prose). Drawing upon my autoethnographic responses to an experiment: Massive and Microscopic Sense-Making in the Time of COVID, I play with DRAWing. Feminist and comical theorists guide my inquiry. I creatively and critically ‘make fun’ of qualitative research conventions, including the: ‘omnipotent narrator’; clear and predictable writing structures; gender dynamics in research and writing; promotion of children’s rights in writing that is the antithesis of childlike; and quick dismissal of ‘nonsensical’ data. I posit that writing playfully about research with children allows researchers to ‘show’, rather than just ‘tell’, children’s agency. When we show children’s agency, we can disrupt the discursive tensions in ECEC discourses, and impact readers both intellectually and emotionally.In paper four I question research conventions and begin my inquiry by being affected by children rather than with a predefined knowledge gap. Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed guides my engagement with unsaturated, unrestful, and discarded data from the study Choosing Rest: children’s gendered accounts of violence that unexpectedly arose during interviews. I write with evocative representation to show what it feels like to be affected by ‘data’, and the nonlinear and zig-zagged shape of ensuing sense-making processes. Ahmed’s concept of power as directionality is applied to critique, firstly, how qualitative research conventions have power over directing researchers’ attention and, secondly, how children’s experiences in ECEC have the power to direct them towards gendered futures. I turn over: violence in block areas; love as an explanation for hitting; gender policing; and discrepancies between boys’ and girls’ feelings, and sense of agency, towards violence.

This qualitative research focused on exploring Muslim immigrant parents’ early childhood education and care (ECEC) experiences, including the challenges they face before, during, and after they enroll their children in childcare settings. For the purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 5 Muslim immigrant families including both parents. Using inductive thematic analysis, 5 themes were identified: pursuing ECEC, considerations while selecting the ECEC setting, experiences with ECEC settings, value of ECEC, and religious dilemmas and discrepancies. Results are as follows. First, the first theme was identified as pursuing ECEC which focused on difficulties in the process of deciding the proper type of institution. Second, the theme is related to the consideration in selecting the appropriate ECEC setting for their children. Third, the theme is about the experiences while using ECEC services, indicating the difficulties in communication and interaction between parents and teachers. Fourth, the theme was identified as relating to the value of ECEC including positive and negative aspects. The specific contents were classified into the beneficial factors to the child, negative effects, and the parent participation. The fifth them was about cultural and religious dilemmas and discrepancies which parents experienced while using the ECEC services. Based on the results, implications were discussed for future research related to the provision of appropriate early childhood and care service for the Muslim families and their children. Recommendations were also suggested to practitioners who are associated to the multicultural education including teachers, administrators, and educators to support children with diverse religious and cultural background.

BackgroundIn Australia, 61.5 % of children aged 3–4 attend Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programs. Children’s experiences within these programs vary widely and impact directly on educational wellbeing and social development. Research has shown that higher quality programs enhance children’s learning and developmental outcomes, foster social participation and have long-lasting effects on their productivity as adults. Quality matters, yet we do not know what components of ECEC result in a quality program.Effective Early Educational Experiences (E4Kids) is a 5-year longitudinal study designed to identify and assess the impact of mainstream ECEC programs and program components on children’s learning, development, social inclusion and well-being. E4Kids sets out to measure quality ECEC; identify components that add value and positively impact children’s outcomes; evaluate the effects of child, family, community and environment characteristics on programs; and provide evidence on how best to invest in ECEC.Methods/designE4Kids follows a sample of 2,494 children who have experienced a variety of approved care programs (long day care, kindergarten, family day care and occasional care), as well as 157 children who have not accessed such programs. Children are tracked to the first point of National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing at Year 3. The study presents a multi-level design in which ECEC programs were sampled from two states – Queensland and Victoria – then randomly sampled from two greater metropolitan regions and two regional and remote locations.Parents, centre directors, educators and carers complete questionnaires to provide information on demographics and children’s progress. Data collected also include the make-up and organisation of ECEC programs and schools children attended. The quality of adult-child interactions is directly assessed using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) and direct testing of children’s cognitive abilities and achievements is undertaken over 3 years and linked with NAPLAN scores.DiscussionFindings from the E4Kids study have the potential to influence the quality of ECEC available in Australia by providing up-to-date evidence on the impact of ECEC programs and program components to inform future policy decisions and research.

In this paper we present a survey-based study on multilingual practices in 47 ECEC (early childhood education and care) centres, mainly in eastern Norway. Our main concern was to investigate the languages known by staff and children and to explore the extent to which these languages are in active use in day-to-day activities. Our data showed that both staff and children in the selected ECEC groups spoke several languages in addition to Norwegian. Even so, a considerable proportion of the languages known by staff and children were never or rarely in use, and in many ECECs the use of languages other than Norwegian mainly took place when parents were present or when children played without staff interference. We discuss our findings considering theories of multilingual education, asking how ECEC staff can work in order to allow for languages other than Norwegian to be more explicitly considered part of the ECEC language learning environment.

Due to an increasing number of children under the age of three attending early childhood education and care (ECEC), there is an increasing need for high-quality care settings. In addition to primary caregivers, ECEC teachers are important socializers of children’s emotional development and may become children’s attachment figures. Early preventive interventions bear the potential to reduce the risk for later maladaptive development in the social-emotional domain. The first objective of the present article is to introduce the Papilio-U3 program, a universal preventive intervention program to foster positive and sensitive teacher-child interactions, to foster children’s early social-emotional competence and secure child-teacher attachment relationships in ECEC, and to prevent children’s emotional and behavioral problems. Furthermore, we report the design and first results of the formative evaluation derived from the pilot evaluation study. The program was developed according to the Intervention Mapping Approach, and the present article describes the planning process comprising a needs assessment and description of the intervention context, the derivation of the logic model of change, a detailed account of the program design, production, implementation, and an overview of the program evaluation study (multi-centric, randomized-controlled trial). The total sample of the evaluation study comprised 125 teachers (age M= 34.0, SD = 10.1, 98.4 % female) from 55 ECEC centers. For the formative evaluation, teachers of the intervention group (n = 61) reported on training content, methods, material, organizational conditions, and potential challenges in the course of program implementation. Finally,we provide directions to revise the program and to guide future implementation of preventive intervention programs in the ECEC context.

The education theory ‘Threshold Concepts’ has become popular as a way to examine significant learning experiences for higher-education students across a range of academic disciplines and professional training programmes. This article presents findings from a small-scale qualitative study in north-west Ireland, which used the theory as a way to examine the nature of key learning experiences for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) undergraduate students during practice placements. The paper proposes that their critical learning experience necessitates them successfully planning, implementing and reviewing an intervention with young children in preschool settings. The paper should be of interest to ECEC undergraduate students, practice placement agencies and college lecturers: the stories of the ups and downs of students’ learning experiences during ECEC practice placements are depicted.

This study analyses international experiences in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) from various countries, namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore, which can serve as lessons for Malaysia. The discussion focuses on comparing the policies and practices of these countries in enhancing the quality of ECCE, particularly in terms of legal frameworks and regulations. Using a qualitative research method through document analysis and doctrinal study, the experiences of these countries are examined to draw insights from the policies they have implemented. The study finds that the quality of ECCE can be improved through the reform of legal frameworks by enhancing existing policies and regulations. The establishment of specialized bodies to oversee ECCE also contributes to ensuring the quality of ECCE services is maintained at a high standard. Viewing ECCE from an international perspective can assist Malaysia in improving and developing a more robust ECCE system, particularly from the aspects of legislation and regulation. This is crucial in ensuring the well-being and healthy development of children from an early age.

Social and emotional learning in early childhood education and care: a public health perspective

This study employed a qualitative case study approach, guided by Ecological Systems Theory, to investigate the practices of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in selected preschools within the Central Ethiopia Regional State. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and document analysis. The findings revealed that the ECCE practice in the country is characterised by inadequately trained teachers and caregivers, developmentally inappropriate curricula, inadequate resources, and poor working conditions. Additionally, the study identified numerous challenges hindering ECCE practice including limited supervision and programme evaluation, low parental and community involvement, ineffective school leadership, unbalanced staff-to-child ratios, and inadequate healthcare and hygiene system. This implies that Ethiopia continues to encounter substantial obstacles in fulfilling Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), which seeks to ensure that all children receive high-quality ECCE services that address their varied needs and equip them for enduring academic and personal success.

International recognition of the early years as a crucial foundational period has led to the design and implementation of quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS) that define, communicate, and monitor the components of quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The aim of these policies is to achieve effective quality assurance and improvement through a system-oriented approach to assessment and evaluation. Informed by ecological systems theory, this paper outlines a three-phase, mixed-methods design for researching a national sample of child care centres that showed overall improvement on the Australian National Quality Standard (NQS) assessment and rating (A&R) criteria. The study samples are drawn from a national dataset of centre-based child care services with two or more A&R rounds and an initial rating of Working Towards NQS (N = 1,935). The results of this study will provide insights into the macro-, exo-, meso- and micro-systems level factors and strategies that support quality in ECEC services.

The transition from family to early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a critical phase for families. This mixed methods exploratory study investigates how communication between parents and ECEC professionals is related to parental satisfaction during the familiarisation process. In the first qualitative phase, 13 semi-structured interviews were analysed using content analysis. Communication emerged as a central theme that influenced how parents experienced transitions. The findings were incorporated into a standardised questionnaire completed by 276 parents in Austria and Germany. The results show that parents who experienced regular, trusting and transparent communication through planned or informal interactions reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction. By contrast, digital formats, such as messenger groups or apps, had little impact. The study highlights the importance of communicating with parents to foster orientation, trust and emotional security, especially during the transition period.