Drawing upon Ahmed's (2006) analysis of how institutional documents become nonperforming, this article argues that teacher education must create opportunities for emerging educators to grapple with the pedagogical consequences of understanding the fourth edition of "Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs" (2022)…

Adolescents are developmentally distinct from adults in ways that merit a tailored response to juvenile crime. Normative adolescent brain development is associated with increases in risk taking, which may include criminal behavior. Juvenile delinquency peaks during the adolescent years and declines in concert with psychosocial maturation. However,…

The 4th edition of the National Association for the Education of Young Children's (NAEYC) guidelines for developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) had an opportunity to provide the field an inclusive blueprint. While there was an attempt in this edition to respond to decades of critiques (e.g. Bloch [1992]. "Critical Perspectives on the…

The purpose of this article is to examine and expand on how assessment is facilitated by providing three sport specific examples embedded within the curriculums of Tactical Games Model, Sport Education and Play Practice, for how assessment can be thought about, structured, and enacted alongside each sport's developmentally appropriate guidelines.

We propose the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework for citizenship education in contemporary heterogeneous societies. It encourages an anti-essentialist, power-conscious awareness of difference beyond notions of citizenship that have been constitutive of the nation and tend to normalise masculinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality,…

This essay entails a critical review of the origins, discourses and contemporary manifestations of NAEYC's enduring commitment to 'developmentally appropriate practice' (DAP); and proposes a reconceptualisation of DAP as an open question and incentive for place-based collaborative inquiry. Brief discussion of ECE's early history highlights…

Sex education presents a major dilemma for state-minority relations, reflecting a conflict between basic rights to education and religious freedom. In this comparative ethnography of informal sex education among ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) in Israel and England, we frame the critical difference between "age-appropriate" and…

The NAEYC DAP position statement and book are widely used as guides for implementing equitable early learning in settings serving children birth through age 8. Building on the spirit of Sankofa, which in translation from the Akan expresses, 'It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot,' this article documents the revision process for the…

As Annie Jonas witnesses college students experiencing stress, anxiety, and depression at alarming rates, she seeks a more active role as a faculty member to support their well-being; a central role off the sidelines that integrates an investment in her students' well-being in the years they are on campus and beyond. Counseling centers on college…

The term 'worldviews' is employed across disciplinary boundaries, yet with no agreed definition it may actually obscure rather than clarify meaning. The use of the term has grown in frequency, particularly in Religious Education (RE) in England, since the Commission on RE's final report (2018), which recommended changing the name of RE to…

Writing is an important part of learning across all content areas of school (Graham & Harris, 2011). Even very young children experience the symbols of written language all around them. Soon they begin to notice that written symbols stand for people, ideas, things, or events, and attempt their own marks (Aram & Levin, 2011). However,…

School counselors are uniquely qualified to meet the increasing mental health needs of students within the school setting. Play therapy is an evidence-based intervention used by school counselors to address the mental health needs of youth. Job demands require school counselors to provide goal-focused and time-sensitive interventions. Accordingly,…

Contributing to recent work in the critical sociology of childhood, this article presents an ethnographic and discursive analysis of the multitude of cultural meanings associated with "child-centeredness" in US American early childhood education. Specifically, the article focuses on Waldorf education, a private educational alternative…

Spatial ability is a form of intelligence where a person demonstrates the capacity to mentally generate, transform, and rotate a visual image and thus understand and recall spatial relationships between real and imagined objects. The aim of this paper is three-fold: (1) to review related empirical studies on spatial abilities for young children…

This article analyses texts intended for child audiences--picturebooks, a poetry book, and a film--that deal with the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990). The memorialization practices within children's media appear to be modelled on the difficulties of finding a national consensus regarding the events that transpired during the dictatorship and the…