Forest School in England is the practice of young children playing outside, rooted in the outdoor kindergartens of Scandinavia and more especially Denmark. Using observation and semi-structured interviews with children and adults in two settings, this case study approach allowed an in-depth look at where, how and what children played in a Forest…

This article offers new insights into our understanding of the formation, textual mediation, and reproduction of perceptions of children's 'school readiness' in kindergarten and its consequences for teachers' assessment of minority-language children's 'readiness'. Building on Danish Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers' accounts of…

Transition to school is recurrently pointed out as key to children's immediate well-being at school start, as well as to their long-term educational endeavors. Aspirations towards continuity during transition is a common denominator across research, policy, and practice, in Denmark as well as internationally. This theoretical-conceptual paper…

In Denmark there is an ongoing trend towards a more ambitious literacy instruction in the first school year (Kindergarten). This calls for a clarification of present-day reading levels, and for a profile of the students who become readers while attending the semi-formal literacy program. The present study examined the extent to which a group of…

This article contributes to the knowledge about artist-teacher collaboration by focusing on aesthetic processes in a partnership between pedagogues and artists in two Danish kindergartens over a period of 18 months. The research is within the framework of action research and links to the development project, "European Children of…

This article examines aesthetically sensitive pathways to knowledge in and through action research with artists and pedagogues in Danish kindergartens. The action research process took place from January 2016 through June 2017 and involved collaboration between artists and pedagogues ("paedagoger" in Danish). Artists and pedagogues…

The aim of this paper was to understand whether and to what extent parenting behaviors mediated the association between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and 8-year old children's reading performance. The study used video recordings of parent-child interactions in Danish public schools while the child was assigned a difficult reading task (N =…

While education is often talked about as a standalone system, most people experience education as just one part of their broader lives. Schools do not exist in siloes, but serve as a place where people and policy overlap and intersect. The implication of this is that while what happens inside of school buildings is incredibly important, such as…

This study examines the perspectives of a group of 10 UK undergraduate students and one Master's student on a residential field trip to four Danish forest kindergartens. Two dimensions are examined: the impact of collaborative reflection and co-construction of knowledge on student learning; and the influence of cultural assumptions on…

In this article, the author presents the challenges faced by early childhood education in 29 countries, according to the World Forum National Representatives and Global Leaders for Young Children. The countries represented in these responses include: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Fiji, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan,…

Beginning with Lev Vygotsky's long-established assertion that the play of children always involves both imaginary play and rules of behavior, this article argues for a theoretical framework that connects such play with the construction of social identities in kindergarten peer groups. It begins with a discussion of Ivy Schousboe's model of the…