Picturebooks play a vital role in the lives and learning of young children. These complex, multimodal texts offer unique opportunities for meaning-making as readers engage with the interplay between text and illustrations. Picturebooks offer children stepping stones into the literary arts, providing information and storylines that illuminate…

The ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly Article 12 on children's right to participate in matters affecting them, provides a rationale for including the voices of young children when seeking to better understand their lives. Early childhood educators collaborate and converse with young children in their daily…

Exchanges of help between children are common and often have positive consequences. But not all help is equally beneficial, for example because some help does not provide an opportunity to practice and develop skills. Here I examine whether young children might perpetuate competence-based inequality by providing incompetent peers with less…

This article looks at a specific intervention carried out with forty young children over the course of an academic year. The aim of the intervention was to give opportunities for creative thinking, with the ultimate goal of promoting learning free from preconceptions and judgements of ability. The intervention resulted in learning through…

In recent years, art museums have been putting more effort into creating e-learning resources (ELR) to encourage young children to learn about art off-site. However, research on art museum ELR from the perspective of educational content is scarce. Using the ELR offered to children by Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Australia (QAGOMA…

To foster children and young people's skills, dispositions and understanding that underpin a voice agenda, practices need to be developed that support this from the earliest age. This article explores issues relating to this complex, challenging and under-researched area from the perspective of practitioners working with children aged from birth…

This paper takes a 'networking of theories' approach to understand the complexity of the phenomenon of agency. We examine an episode, where a kindergarten teacher and nine children work on an addition problem, from three different perspectives: Valsiner's zone theory; Radford's theory of objectification; and Pickering's dance of agency. Our…

One of the central ways to teach young children how to take care of each other is through classroom management, says University of Michigan's Carla Shalaby. Here, she invites educators to: (1) understand classroom management as a curriculum; (2) understand care as political work; and (3) understand young children as already powerful.

For children to know how to fully participate in and most effectively lead the world they will inherit, they must learn how to critically engage with it and be knowledgeable about foundational rights and instruments that support such engagement. Together, critical literacy, which encourages the examination and interrogation of the underlying…

For 10 weeks, an online writing club was a place where seven children, ages 5 to 8, came together to co-construct a space for sharing favorite texts and composing practices. This study documents the ways that the writing club offered a space for children to construct shared literacy practices that allowed for new meaning-making, social…

This article explores single-mothers' experiences regarding the schooling of their children. Because most research on home-school relations has been derived from samples of two-parent families, little is known about single parents' perspectives on their children's education. Drawing on in-depth interviews with eight single mothers in Hong Kong…

Early childhood inclusion for disabled children is a priority area as jointly stated by United Nations' and European Commission's policies. Educators have a crucial role in supporting all children's learning by working cooperatively with parents. However, their internalized ableist/disablist beliefs and misconceptions can inhibit the process of…

In this article, I adopt a practice theory consideration of student agency, that is, I consider students' power to act on their interests and intentions, on their own inclinations; this will-to-act-on-the-world is central to becoming an active, adaptive participant across the life span. As practice theorist Shery Ortner has explained, none of us…

Younger children in urban settings are predisposed to numerous risks, yet their 'voices' remain underrepresented in research making them unheard and invisible. The paucity of methods that encourage children's direct participation in studies from such settings, in effect, limits exploration of their ability to engage meaningfully in voicing their…

Priority-setting is a collective responsibility centred around inclusive engagement and alignment with the needs and desired outcomes of the community. In this study, we leveraged the collective expertise of stakeholders from the child and family service system, to identify priorities for supporting the health, education and wellbeing of children…