The book demonstrates the hopeful stance the young take in response to ordinary suffering and significant trauma when adults talk with them about their losses. Its underlying themes convey the truth that loss and recovery are normal in the process of growing to maturity. It examines the strength of the child's capacity for resilience through partnerships with adults who allow children to focus on the loss and tell the story of its meaning to someone who really hears it. The authors agree that adults need to perceive their own losses so that their attentiveness to the young is informed by wisdom that comes through self-understanding, but also agree that many adults do not offer that help to children because they believe it will make matters worse. The book reveals this fear as a false notion by dealing with childhood traumas such as acquired disability, warfare, HIV/AIDS, death of one's parents and cultural dislocation. The authors are experienced practitioners who provide practical and theoretical insight into the dynamics of loss and recovery. The book offers hope for those who live and work with children and youth through its studied approach to addressing loss by describing young people's potential to work towards wholeness even in the face of fundamental losses to their security. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Children's Spirituality.

Jean Piaget was one of the most significant contributors to our current understanding of how children think and learn, from birth through to adolescence. In this comprehensive and accessible new book, Ann Marie Halpenny and Jan Pettersen capture the key concepts and principles of Piaget's fascinating work on children's thinking, and explore how thinking evolves and develops from infancy through the early years and beyond. Areas covered in Introducing Piaget include: key milestones and achievements in children's thinking; understanding the physical world through senses and movement in infancy; supporting the emergence of symbolic thought and language in the early years; understanding object permanence; implications of egocentric thinking in early childhood learning and development. Throughout the book, the consequences of these developments for children's social, emotional and intellectual development are discussed. Updates on Piaget's theory are also outlined with reference to more recent work on cognitive development in childhood. Each chapter provides a concise summary of material presented through a consideration of the implications for practice in working with children. A glossary of key Piagetian terms is also included. With a particular focus on how Piaget's principles and concepts can be applied to children in early childhood, this exciting new book is an invaluable resource for teachers, practitioners and students with an interest in learning and development in the early years.

What is research and who is a researcher? Why engage in research and what can be its value? How do we come to know what lies beyond our horizons? Paradigms of Research for the 21st Century opens the door for wondering about these and other questions pertaining to the nature and process of educational research. It offers an insightful and detailed account of Western and non-Western philosophical traditions and perspectives on reality, knowledge, and values that have been responsive to past and present developments of educational research in North America. These accounts form a paradigm - a system of inquiry, a model, or a way of knowing. Empirical-analytic, pragmatic, interpretive, critical, poststructuralist, and transcendental paradigms are distinguished as an alternative to a quantitative-qualitative typology of paradigms in educational research. This book can be used for introductory and advanced research methods courses at the master's and doctoral levels.

"What do early childhood educators really need to know, do, and understand in order to work effectively and compassionately with the very young?" This is the focus of Mary Renck Jalongo's approach to this new edition of her widely popular Early Childhood Language Arts. In it she helps teachers become well informed about young children's language development, strategies to use to support language growth, and the essential elements for a novice teacher to mature into a master teacher. Distinctive from many other early literacy books in that it includes oral language rather than concentrating on literacy in print, the approach is to integrate language arts and other subject areas, including the fine arts.

Through its unique integration of curriculum and learning principles, Early Childhood Curriculum: A Constructivist Perspective, 2nd Edition fosters authentic, developmentally appropriate practice for both preschool and early elementary classrooms. The constructivist format of this book encourages active involvement on the part of readers by asking them to observe, question, reflect, research, and analyze, thus allowing readers to create their own knowledge through their responses and actions.

Early Childhood Curriculum examines curricular goals such as autonomy, development, and problem solving and links those goals with constructivist principles of learning. It explores ways teachers can create meaningful learning environments and choose curriculum tasks appropriately in all content areas that are linked to the learning and development needs of young children. The text provides a wealth of practical detail about implementing constructivist curriculum as the authors discuss classroom climate and management, room design, play, and cooperative learning, among other topics. The book also includes information about how teachers can meet required mandates and national and state standards in appropriate ways as they plan their curriculum, and examines the early childhood educator's role with community agencies, reform and legal mandates, and public relations.

Special Features:
Curriculum Strategies highlight models for developing curriculum, including projects, curricular alignment, integration of various subject matter areas, and types of knowledge.
Constructions promote problem solving by allowing students to explore, revisit, examine, and learn from first-hand experience.
Multiple Perspectives from the Field provide interviews with teachers and other early childhood professionals, offering students a realistic look at the profession from a diverse group of educators.
Teacher Dialogues explore a wide range of student concerns, including curriculum, learning environments, assessment, and documentation, representing a collaborative support group for pre-service teachers and readers.
Companion Website with an instructor s guide, additional readings and links, activities, and templates for downloads offer a wealth of resources for both the instructor and student.

Teaching Young Children Mathematics provides a comprehensive overview of mathematics instruction in the early childhood classroom. Taking into account family differences, language barriers, and the presence of special needs students in many classrooms throughout the U.S., this textbook situates best practices for mathematics instruction within the larger frameworks of federal and state standards as well as contemporary understandings of child development. Key topics covered include: developmental information of conceptual understanding in mathematics from birth through 3rd grade, use of national and state standards in math, including the new Common Core State Standards, information for adapting ideas to meet special needs and English Language Learners, literacy connections in each chapter, 'real-world' connections to the content, and information for family connections to the content.

This book on teaching through story is the first to highlight the rich storytelling cultures of Australia and Asia. It presents insights from practicing storytelling educators from Black and White Australia, China, India, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam, who share their art of storytelling as pedagogy. Designed for early childhood and primary teachers, teacher educators and student teachers across Australia and Asia, Storytelling Pedagogy in Australia & Asia provides inspiration to teach through storytelling to promote intercultural understanding, imagination, active citizenship and language and literacy learning. Each chapter includes told stories, and teaching and learning ideas to guide and encourage those who are new to the art of storytelling pedagogy and those wishing to expand their understanding of storytelling in Australia and Asia.

This highly popular and accessible text contains a wealth of information about how early years staff can work effectively with professionals and parents to help identify and meet a range of special educational needs. This book aims to explore the most effective ways of supporting the child and implementing that support across the child's day to day life. Now in its third edition Special Needs in the Early Years is fully updated to reflect current policy, and topics covered include: Early identification Effective communication with parents and carers An exploration of the legal context How to implement joint planning for identified needs A consideration of the issues affecting collaboration With case-studies, checklists, suggestions for good practice and cartoons to illustrate and enrich the text throughout, this book is structured to be easily accessible and invaluable for those who are in training to work in the early years sector. It will also be of interest to students on foundation and undergraduate students on Early Childhood Education and childcare courses as well as more experienced practitioners.

Religious events and cultural celebrations form an important part of societies throughout the world. They are key to social development and understanding, for celebrating diversity, as well as finding common ground. Covering a wide range of festivals from around the world, this book shows practitioners and teachers how they can introduce young children to some of the ideas behind these events and encourage them to have fun, get creative and work together. Aimed at those working with children aged 3 - 7, Using Festivals to Inspire and Engage Young Children covers a range of cultural celebration by each calendar month, explaining the background to these events and provides fun and imaginative activities and stories based around each one. Features include: a basic outline of each festival; a wide range of activities to suit children at different stages in their development; development and learning aims at the end of each chapter; suggestions for working with parents and links with home; top tips for creating your own activities relating to celebrations; story models that can be adapted and used to suit different events. Highly practical with an emphasis on fun and hands on learning, this book is a fantastic resource for Early Years practitioners, Primary School teachers and those that want to inspire young children and celebrate the world we live in.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric condition of childhood worldwide, yet the medical and psychological perspectives that dominate our understandings of ADHD present problems in their reductive understanding of the condition. Exploring ADHD incorporates Michel Foucault's notions of discourse and power into a critical ethnographic framework in order to analyse ADHD in terms of both the historical conditions that have shaped understandings of the disorder, and also the social conditions which build individual diagnostic cases in today's schools and families. In this ground-breaking text, Simon Bailey also: acknowledges the necessary work of classrooms, schools and families in contributing to a social order; examines the problem of teacher autonomy and the constraints placed on schools to 'perform'; describes the role of nurture groups in governing the emotional conduct of children; presents a unique gender analysis of ADHD. This fascinating new book will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of early childhood education, special and inclusive education, and will illuminate and spark new debate in the arena of ADHD.

Negotiating Adult-Child Relationships in Early Childhood Research presents a substantive critique of technicist and neoliberal approaches to ethics through an exploration of the complicated and often 'messy' situations faced in negotiating relationships in research with children. Despite growing acknowledgement of their centrality, relationships between adult researchers and very young participants have been neglected and under-theorised, and in response, this book offers a comprehensive conceptualisation of adult-child research relationships through examination of questions, including: How do power and inequity impact on adult-child research relationships? What does it mean for relationships when researchers 'intervene' in the field? How do bodies matter in research relationships? What does an emphasis on relationships with young children mean for the research process? Drawing on data from their own research, the authors contend that relationships are part of a wider web of social relations and space-time configurations. They propose and develop a relational ethics of answerability and social justice, inspired by the work of Bakhtin and, in addition, explore the way material bodies come to matter, the ambiguity of consent in educator-research, and the risks and possibilities of research relationships. Chapters include innovative formulations of reciprocity, 'sensing practices', and political-ethical responsibility. This book contributes to current debates about research with young children, offering an incisive and thorough exploration of the importance of relationships to the research process. Relevant for international audiences, this book is essential reading for early childhood students and educators, researchers, and lecturers with an interest in research with children.

Through its unique integration of curriculum and learning principles, Early Childhood Curriculum: A Constructivist Perspective, 2nd Edition fosters authentic, developmentally appropriate practice for both preschool and early elementary classrooms. The constructivist format of this book encourages active involvement on the part of readers by asking them to observe, question, reflect, research, and analyze, thus allowing readers to create their own knowledge through their responses and actions.

Early Childhood Curriculum examines curricular goals such as autonomy, development, and problem solving and links those goals with constructivist principles of learning. It explores ways teachers can create meaningful learning environments and choose curriculum tasks appropriately in all content areas that are linked to the learning and development needs of young children. The text provides a wealth of practical detail about implementing constructivist curriculum as the authors discuss classroom climate and management, room design, play, and cooperative learning, among other topics. The book also includes information about how teachers can meet required mandates and national and state standards in appropriate ways as they plan their curriculum, and examines the early childhood educator's role with community agencies, reform and legal mandates, and public relations.

Special Features:
Curriculum Strategies highlight models for developing curriculum, including projects, curricular alignment, integration of various subject matter areas, and types of knowledge.
Constructions promote problem solving by allowing students to explore, revisit, examine, and learn from first-hand experience.
Multiple Perspectives from the Field provide interviews with teachers and other early childhood professionals, offering students a realistic look at the profession from a diverse group of educators.
Teacher Dialogues explore a wide range of student concerns, including curriculum, learning environments, assessment, and documentation, representing a collaborative support group for pre-service teachers and readers.
Companion Website with an instructor s guide, additional readings and links, activities, and templates for downloads offer a wealth of resources for both the instructor and student.

Language Acquisition: The Basics is an accessible introduction to the must-know issues in child language development. Covering key topics drawn from contemporary psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, readers are introduced to fundamental concepts, methods, controversies, and discoveries. It follows the remarkable journey children take; from becoming sensitive to language before birth, to the time they string their first words together; from when they use language playfully, to when they tell stories, hold conversations, and share complex ideas. Using examples from 73 different languages, Ibbotson sets this development in a diverse cross-cultural context, as well as describing the universal psychological foundations that allow language to happen. This book, which includes further reading suggestions in each chapter and a glossary of key terms, is the perfect easy-to-understand introductory text for students, teachers, clinicians or anyone with an interest in language development. Drawing together the latest research on typical, atypical and multilingual development, it is the concise beginner's guide to the field.

How children acquire language and literacy knowledge in many different contexts-and how teachers can effectively promote the development of oral and written language-is the focus of this highly regarded resource. Readers get an authoritative look at how children acquire language and literacy in a variety of contexts and how teachers can effectively promote development in oral and written language. Teaching Language and Literacy integrates a constructivist/emergent literacy perspective with scientifically-based instructional practices that are successful in supporting children's reading, writing, listening and speaking development. This new edition features the work of a new author, Kathleen Roskos, and includes numerous up to date references, examples, and hands-on activities for putting theory into practice in today's classrooms.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric condition of childhood worldwide, yet the medical and psychological perspectives that dominate our understandings of ADHD present problems in their reductive understanding of the condition. Exploring ADHD incorporates Michel Foucault's notions of discourse and power into a critical ethnographic framework in order to analyse ADHD in terms of both the historical conditions that have shaped understandings of the disorder, and also the social conditions which build individual diagnostic cases in today's schools and families. In this ground-breaking text, Simon Bailey also: acknowledges the necessary work of classrooms, schools and families in contributing to a social order; examines the problem of teacher autonomy and the constraints placed on schools to 'perform'; describes the role of nurture groups in governing the emotional conduct of children; presents a unique gender analysis of ADHD. This fascinating new book will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of early childhood education, special and inclusive education, and will illuminate and spark new debate in the arena of ADHD.

-Offers an interdisciplinary, three-lesson module using project- and problem-based learning to help kindergarten students investigate and reduce human impact on the environment, designed to infuse real-world learning into K-12 classrooms. -Written and developed for kindergarten teachers, the book offers lesson plans guiding students to investigate various types of pollution, participate in a classroom recycling program, and share their scientific findings in a publication. -Anchored in the Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core State Standards, and the Framework for 21st Century Learning, which can be used in full or in part to meet the needs of districts, schools and teachers charting a course toward an integrated STEM approach.

This book offers a radical new reading of William James's work on the idea of 'religion.' Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James's work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James's father and Calvinism, on the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot's novels, and Herbert Spencer's 'unknown,' revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James's work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of 'religion.'

This is a key text for all those undertaking placements or work-based learning (WBL) in early years settings. Taking a practical approach underpinned by theory and research, it guides student practitioners through their WBL to help them achieve an outstanding experience. There is a focus on the variety of child, parent and practitioner perspectives plus case studies involving the full range of ages from across the early years. While it is invaluable in answering key questions about placements it also encourages a reflective and critical approach throughout that develops and promotes professionalism. It is completely up to date with the latest Early Years Foundation Stage and includes reference to the Early Years Teachers' Standards.

Media across the Asia-Pacific region are at once social, locative and mobile. Social in that these media facilitate public and interpersonal interaction, locative in that this social communication is geographically placed, and mobile in so much as the media is ever-present. The Asia Pacific region has been pivotal in the production, shaping and consumption of personal new media technologies and through social and mobile media we can see emerging certain types of personal politics that are inflected by the local.

The six case studies that inform this book Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila, Singapore and Melbourne offer a range of economic, socio-cultural, and linguistic differences, enabling the authors to provide new insights into specific issues pertaining to mobile media in each city. These include social, mobile and locative media as a form of crisis management in post 3/11 Tokyo; generational shifts in Shanghai; political discussion and the shifting social fabric in Singapore; and the erosion of public and private, and work and leisure paradigms in Melbourne. Through its striking case studies, this book sheds new light on how the region and its contested and multiple identities are evolving, and concludes by revealing the impact of mobile media on how place is shaped, as well as shaping, practices of mobility, intimacy and a sense of belonging.

Employing comprehensive, cross-disciplinary frameworks from theoretical approaches such as media sociology, ethnography, cultural studies and media and communication studies, "Online@AsiaPacific" will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian culture and society, cybercultures, new media studies, communication studies and internet studies.

The Hidden History of Early Childhood Education provides an understandable and manageable exploration of the history of early childhood education in the United States. Covering historical, philosophical, and sociological underpinnings that reach from the 1800s to today, contributors explore groups and topics that have traditionally been marginalized or ignored in early childhood education literature. Chapters include topics such as home-schooling, early childhood education in Japanese-American internment camps, James "Jimmy" Hymes, the Eisenhower legacy, Constance Kamii, and African-American leaders of the field. This engaging book examines a range of new primary sources to be shared with the field for the first time, including personal narratives, interviews, and letters. The Hidden History of Early Childhood Education is a valuable resource for every early childhood education scholar, student, and practitioner.

Originally published in 1972.This book considers the actual development of infant schools and education in Britain against the background of industrialization and social change, making clear how this development was influenced by the ideas of particular theorists from both the Continent and England.

This book presents research exploring the potential for postfoundational theories to revitalize discussions in early childhood education. In the past two decades, postfoundation theories (e.g., postmodern, poststructural, feminist, postcolonial, etc.) have revolutionized the field of early childhood education, but at the same time, little has been written about the value and potential of this movement within the context of Canada. Postfoundational theories have the potential to disrupt normalizing early childhood education discourses that create and maintain social inequities, and to respect differences and diversities. Given the importance of diversity in Canada, it seems relevant to explore further how postfoundational theories might transform early childhood education.

The Family Context of Parenting in Children's Adaptation to Elementary School is a result of a longitudinal prevention study of 100 families begun the year before their first children entered kindergarten. Each family went through an assessment and then a subset was randomly chosen for group intervention. The children in both groups were then studied as they progressed through kindergarten and first grade to assess the quality of their adaptation to the school environment. The text focuses on how parent-child relationships are only one determinant of a child's academic competence, social competence, and behavior. Rather, these relationships must be understood in the context of the role they play within the family as a system. It also addresses the recent challenges to claims about the impact of parents on their children's development. The book sheds additional light on family influences within the larger social environment as a key determinant of the quality of children's adjustment to schooling. It appeals to scientists, professionals, and parents alike.

In this fascinating new book, Affrica Taylor encourages an exciting paradigmatic shift in the ways in which childhood and nature are conceived and pedagogically deployed, and invites readers to critically reassess the naturalist childhood discourses that are rife within popular culture and early years education.

Through adopting a common worlds framework, "Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood" generates a number of complex and inclusive ways of seeing and representing the early years. It recasts childhood as:

• messy and implicated rather than pure and innocent;
• situated and differentiated rather than decontextualized and universal;
• entangled within real world relations rather than protected in a separate space.

Throughout the book, the author follows an intelligent and innovative line of thought which challenges many pre-existing ideas about childhood. Drawing upon cross-disciplinary perspectives, and with international relevance, this book makes an important contribution to the field of childhood studies and early childhood education, and will be a valuable resource for scholars, postgraduate students and higher education teachers.

Young Children, Pedagogy and the Arts is an innovative text that describes practices and research that cross all five strands of the arts-visual, drama, music, dance, and media-and illuminates ways of understanding children and their arts practices that go beyond the common traditions. The book: - Offers practical and rich illustrations of teachers' and children's work based on international research that integrates theory with practice; - Brings a critical lens to arts education; - Includes summaries, reflective questions, and recommended further readings with every chapter. Young Children, Pedagogy and the Arts provides a more nuanced understanding of the arts through an exploration of specific instances in which committed teachers and researchers are discovering what contemporary multimodal tools offer to young children. Chapters contain examples of 'doing' the arts in the early years, new ways of teaching, and how to use emerging technologies to develop multiliteracies, equity, agency, social and cultural capital, and enhance the learning and engagement of marginalized children.