Negotiations of Gender in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

Guest Editors: Anette Hellman and Mia Heikkila Gender research has long focused on arguments that gender is constructed through discursive and overlapping social processes. However, there is still a minimal body of research concerned with how young children learn gender through social interaction in educational settings. This point has been made by a number of authors (Arlemalm-Hagser and Pramling Samuelsson 2009; Davies 2003; Martin 2011; Paecher 2007; Thorne 1993). Taking this as the starting point for this issue, we present new research and analyses that investigate negotiations in which young children from different parts of the world ‘engage’ with different aspects of gender. All papers focus on early childhood settings where children themselves in different ways negotiate and react to gender. Questions raised include: How can negotiations of gender be described and analyzed within early childhood education? When, where and by whom are gender relations produced? Influential global discourses about children in research and policy documents discuss concepts such as competent children, children’s rights, and children’s influence. Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence (2007) noted that ideas about children and childhood are often constructed and negotiated through conflicting discourses. Children can be categorized as ‘competent’ while in another global discourse children are seen as ‘not yets’ and viewed, in the early childhood years, as only