Play: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis is co-published with the Association for the Study of Play (TASP), an interdisciplinary, international organization of play-research scholars. This volume, the sixth in the Play and Culture TASP series, synthesizes biological, anthropological, educational, and psychological approaches to play. It is a valuable book with chapters from premier researchers such as Robert Fagen and Carolyn Pope Edwards of the United States, Arne Trageton of Norway, Paola de Sanctis Ricciardone of Italy, and Jean Paul Rossie of Morocco. Also included is an interstitial book-within-the-book by Brian Sutton-Smith.

In China, educators have paid more attention to the curriculum reform than to the teacher preparation and professional development. The conflict between traditional values and the urgency of social changes compounded by the lack of understanding about psychological effects of these changes on Chinese teachers complicates the transformation process for education reform in Chinese society. This study investigated how a group of 20 teachers at a Chinese children welfare institution adapted Western educational concepts to transform their Chinese teaching practice. This study followed these teachers for the 12 months after their training to investigate how they addressed cultural and pedagogical conflicts when applying their training in practice and the changes that had occurred in the first year. This study hopes to benefit the educators in the cross-cultural teacher preparation field regarding the professional well-being of teachers working during times of rapid social changes. It is also useful for early childhood educators and professionals who work with the children at high risk as well as the children in Chinese welfare institutions.

Moral Motivation through the Life Span is the fifty-first volume in the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation series, the longest continuously running symposium in the field of psychology. This work focuses on moral development theory and research, an area of academic study that began early in the twentieth century but has never before been addressed by the Symposium. What is morality, such theorists ask, and what exactly makes a moral person? The contributors to this volume are of diverse theoretical orientations and take different stances on a number of major themes: What motivates moral behavior? Are there certain universal moral values, or are such values always subjective? Does an individual's will or an individual's environment play a greater role in determining moral conduct? What influence can we attribute to spirituality? Finally, the contributors explore the practical applications of their research on moral motivation: What implications do such theories have for child-rearing or our educational system? How do we raise the next generation to be empathetic toward their fellow human beings? Nebraska-Lincoln and the recipient of a distinguished research award from the American Psychological Association and the John Templeton Foundation. Carolyn Pope Edwards is Willa Cather Professor and a professor of psychology and of family and consumer sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the coauthor of Ngecha: A Kenyan Community in a Time of Rapid Social Change (Nebraska 2004) and the co-editor of Bambini: The Italian Approach to Infant-Toddler Care.

"Ngecha" is the monumental and intimate study of modernization and nationalization in rural Africa in the early years following Kenyan independence in 1963, as experienced by the people of Ngecha, a village outside Nairobi. From 1968 to 1973 Ngecha was a research site of the Child Development Research Unit, a team that brought together Kenyan and non-Kenyan social scientists under the leadership of John Whiting and Beatrice Blyth Whiting.

The study documents how families adapted to changing opportunities and conditions as their former colony became a modern nation, and the key role that women played as agents of change as they became small-scale cash-crop farmers and entrepreneurs. Mothers modified the culture of their parents to meet the evolving national economy, and they participated in the shift from an agrarian to a wage economy in ways that transformed their workloads and perceptions of isolation and individualism within and between households, thereby challenging traditional family-based morals and obligations. Their children, in turn, experienced evolving educational practices and achievement expectations. The elders faced new situations as well as new modes of treatment. Completing this valuable record of a nation in transition are the long-term reassessments of the observations and conclusions of the research team, and a description of Ngecha today as viewed by Kenyans who participated in the original study.

This is the companion video to the book, Bambini: The Italian Approach to Infant/Toddler Care. Based on the innovative early childhood system of Pistoia, in Tuscany, the video uses the voices of parents, teachers and administrators to go inside two inclusive infant-toddler centres.

Secure attachment between child and parent is one of the most important factors in early learning and development-and for children in infant-toddler programs, teachers are a critical third partner in this relationship dance. That's why child care administrators and educators need this warm and practical program guide. An in-depth blueprint for promoting attachment and relationships in early childhood settings, this book helps professional caregivers and educators develop sensitive, nurturing relationships with young children. In the process, they'll strengthen parent-child attachment and the supportive relationships among the adults who nurture the children. With the clear and detailed model in Extending the Dance, readers will establish relationship-based programs that keep teachers and children together throughout the entire program and encourage strong connections between them develop respectful, mutually beneficial partnerships with parents of diverse cultural backgrounds refine teaching practices by carefully observing, documenting, sharing, and reflecting on what happens during the child care day plan comfortable, engaging physical environments indoors and outdoors that create community and excite children's minds ensure that children's individual needs are met by the program's structure and routines promote children's social skills and peer relationships ease transition times and promote continuity by providing sensitive support to children and parents improve professional communication and support among teachers and administrators in a community of learning To help them establish and maintain a relationship-based early childhood program, administrators and teachers will get concrete guidance on every step of the process, plus inspiration and ideas from successful programs in the United States and around the world. With this innovative program guide, early childhood educators will be full participants in the dance

The culmination of twenty years of research, this book is a cross-cultural exploration of the ways in which age, gender, and culture affect the development of social behavior in children. The authors and their associates observed children between the ages of two and ten going about their daily lives in communities in Africa, India, the Philippines, Okinawa, Mexico, and the United States. This rich fund of data has enabled them to identify the types of social behavior that are universal and those which differ from one cultural environment to another. Whiting and Edwards shed new light on the nature-nurture question: in analyzing the behavior of young children, they focus on the relative contributions of universal physiological maturation and universal social imperatives. They point out cross-cultural similarities, but also note the differences in experience between children who grow up in simple and in complex societies. They show that knowledge of the company children keep, and of the proportion of time they spend with various categories of people, makes it possible to predict important aspects of their interpersonal behavior. An extension and elaboration of the classic Children of Six Cultures (Harvard, 1975), Children of Different Worlds will appeal to the same audience-developmental psychologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and educators-and is sure to be equally influential.