The debates about what are the most effective ways to teach young children to learn to read have been described as 'the reading wars'. In 2022 the research published in a paper by Wyse and Bradbury (2022) stimulated widespread attention including in the media. Wyse and Bradbury concluded on the basis of four major research analyses that although…

This article bewilders dominant discourses about child-animal relations by acknowledging and challenging the work of Gail Melson who positions animals as providing emotional, social and pedagogical support for children. Melson's psychological approach rests upon implicit assumptions that shape and support anthropocentrism whilst also critiquing a…

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…

To engage young children meaningfully in educational research requires careful scrutiny of ethics and of methodological choices [Vandenbroeck, M. and B. de-Bouverne. 2006. "Children's Agency and Educational Norms: A Tensed Negotiation." "Childhood" (13): 127-143; Dockett, S., J. Einarsdottir, and B. Perry. 2009.…

In its discussion of the three levels of teaching and learning -- whole school philosophy, classroom policy and specific teaching frameworks -- "Educating Young Children," originally published in 1992, addresses the twin themes of teacher ethics and pedagogic theory. In developing their argument the writers draw on both empirical…

It is widely documented that young children participating in research should be protected from harm and that ethical considerations should be applied throughout a research project. What this paper strives to assert, however, is that protecting these participants is insufficient. A research project into children's speech and language development,…

In this article, the author focuses on spatial research in early childhood visual art education as a way to parse out the value of spatiality in research as an "ethics of participation." There are two specific ways that spatiality is explored in this paper. First, spatiality as material provides a way to highlight one's interconnected…

This article contests the emphasis that is frequently placed upon child-friendly methods in research with young children. Focusing upon a series of research encounters from a doctoral study of play in an early years classroom, I examine my interactions with the children and their social and material worlds and draw upon these encounters to…

How often do you tell white lies? When the "New York Times" ran an article linking children's lying with their cognitive abilities (Stone, 2018), the authors decided to examine this phenomenon through the lens of Montessori philosophy. Consequently, the authors delved into the related research on lying, executive function, and prosocial…

This paper brings together sociocultural theorising about language and literacy learning, as well as work which explores ethical issues associated with young children's participation in research in order to interrogate unplanned discussions between researchers and young children about research writing. The data discussed were derived from two…

While the importance of inclusive approaches to research has been identified, much childhood research is still done 'to' not 'with' young children, with research focusing on the experiences of children who experience disability commonly involving data from parents/families/practitioners, rather than from children themselves. In this article, we…

Care and education have deep historical divisions in the Canadian policy landscape: care is traditionally situated as a private, gendered, and a welfare problem, whereas education is seen as a universal public good. Since the early 2000s, the entrenched divide between private care and public education has been challenged by academic, applied and…

This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically…

Through the multiple languages of the arts, many ideas about sustainability can be explored with young children. This paper discusses the ethical issues involved in the implementation of a research study that uses artist Chris Jordan's confronting images about sustainability. Jordan's images typically depict tens of thousands of objects such as…

This paper examines how early childhood policy initiatives in the United Kingdom and internationally currently reflect neoliberal concerns with school readiness in the development of human capital and what diverse theoretical perspectives might offer. The focus is a project involving a group of early childhood academics from one university and a…