Contextual approaches to high quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) seek to capture the complexity of children's lives, developing pedagogical approaches that are responsive to children's needs and interests. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a complex layer to the question of what constitutes quality ECEC. A mixed methods…

Teacher-family partnerships are crucial elements of high-quality early childhood education. The factors influencing these partnerships, particularly for children under age 3, are not well known. This study compares teachers' and mothers' perspectives on their partnership and the ideal practices they would like to see implemented. Additionally, it…

Although many studies make important contributions to understanding the process and outcomes of school-based parent involvement initiatives, more work needs to be done to measure parent perceptions of parent involvement practices, policies, and barriers in low SES schools serving minority students. This qualitative case study looked to identify…

Consistent, sensitive caregiving across home and childcare contexts supports optimal development. In this paper, we share the story of the development of Hearts and Minds on Babies (HMB) for Early Head Start (EHS) administrators, teachers, and parents. HMB was designed to support caregiver reflective functioning and sensitivity and reduce…

This article describes the professional development program, Baby Playspace Learning (BPL), and evaluates its capacity to build close relationships between educators, parents, their infants and infant peers during the morning transitions in ECEC settings. Using a pre-post design, video recordings of 20 (10 pre and 10 post) morning transitions were…

In the summer of 2020, it became clear to growing numbers of families and community organizations that COVID-19's unprecedented disruptions to public education would not subside in time for the coming school year. Facing the prospect of continued school closures and uncertain public health safeguards, families were forced to make new childcare…

Interdisciplinary research collaborations are often encouraged within higher education while the practicalities of such collaborations are glossed over. This project specifically addresses the praxis of research collaborations, exploring how feminist academics within different countries and disciplines came together to explore their mutual concern…

This study compares teachers' perspectives on three assessment instruments for socioemotional development in early childhood, which differ in their emphasis on strengths and difficulties in this domain: the Caregiver-Teacher Report Form (C-TRF), the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, Teacher version (SDQ-T), and the Social Emotional…

The purpose of this review is to understand what has been learned over the past 20 years of research on preschool and childcare expulsions in the United States. Our literature search identified 16 research studies on this topic. An extensive review of the identified studies was conducted to critically examine the methods used to measure expulsion,…

Research Findings: Teaching is a highly stressful profession due to many stressors that teachers experience. To understand how early childhood teachers internally handle work climate-related stressors, we examined associations between teacher-perceived work climate, teachers' use of emotion regulation strategies, and the degree of stress that…

Research Findings: The "Early Education Essentials" surveys use teacher and parent perceptions to measure 6 organizational conditions of early childhood education programs, extending and complementing existing measures of early childhood care and education (ECE) quality constructs. This study tests the reliability and concurrent validity…

This study investigates Spolsky's conception of language policy as the amalgam of language beliefs, language practices and language management. To the best of our knowledge, no quantitative evidence has ever been produced for his theoretical model. The current paper addressed this void, albeit specifically in the domain of Early Childhood Care and…

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services are vital in the establishment of optimal infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices and long-term health. This qualitative study, informed by Social Cognitive Theory, aimed to describe ECEC infant feeding environments. Nineteen formal long day care and family day care ECEC services and 124…

This article uses the concept of 'superdiversity' as a lens through which various conceptualisations of diversity in Norwegian early childhood education and care policies and professionals' understandings are made visible. Although Norwegian early childhood education and care is expected to highlight, value, and promote diversity and mutual…

The advantage of pedagogical documentation has been widely documented in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). However, little research points out how and why professionals are using pedagogical documentation from the staff's perspective itself. Therefore, this research aimed to examine how pedagogical documentation is employed…