Early Childhood Research October 2022

By clicking the research titles below, you can access our round up of early years pedagogical research papers covering:

• Race and racism

• Children's voice in disagreements

• Digital documenting of children's learning

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Make sense of what you read by asking yourself these 5 takeaway questions:

What is the main message I am supposed to take from this?

What reasons have the author(s) offered to support their point of view?

Did anything surprise me as I read the article?

Does what I read match with my understanding and/or experience of the subject? How?

In which ways may reading the article influence or change my perspective of the subject?

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01. Shaddai Tembo (2021) ‘Hang on, she just used that word like it’s totally easy’: Encountering ordinary racial affects in early childhood education and care. Ethnicities, 21(5), 875–892.

"At a time when racism remains prevalent in educational spaces, this paper addresses what else we can know about the ways in which race and racism manifest and are experienced in practice.

[Tembo] provides new knowledges on experiences of race and racism, introduces affect and what it does for our understanding of the ways in which power relations operate in respect of race"

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02. Kate Cowan & Rosie Flewitt (2021) Moving from paper-based to digital documentation in Early Childhood Education: democratic potentials and challenges, International Journal of Early Years Education, DOI: 10.1080/09669760.2021.2013171

"Recent years have seen a growing shift in Early Childhood Education from paper-based observation and documentation practices to digital documentation systems such as ‘e-portfolios’ and ‘online learning journeys’. Here, we bring a multimodal lens to these new practices and consider the potential of digital documentation for democratic assessment practices that recognise and value all children’s learning, particularly children who are living with disadvantage or in the early stages of learning English."

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03. Eija Salonen, Emma Koitto, Marianne Notko, Maria Lahtinen & Eija Sevón (2022) Child–educator disagreements in Finnish early childhood education and care: young children’s possibilities for influence, Early Years, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2022.2051167

"Children’s influence was rather limited in most disagreements, as these involved the established institutional order as manifested in the rules and norms of daily activities and educators’ control over children’s bodies and material resources.

However, disagreements over social rules and the ongoing social situation often allowed children to negotiate and contribute to the outcomes. By identifying the difficulties young children may face in resisting the institutional order, the study highlights the importance of developing practices that enable discussion of the settled rules of ECEC and thus regard young children’s right to have their views heard and considered in matters affecting them."

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