This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author's multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the book highlights Indigenous presences and land relations within ongoing settler colonialism as necessary, yet often ignored, aspects of environmental education. Chapters discuss topics such as: geotheorizing in a capitalist society, absences of Black place relations, and unsettling unquestioned Western assumptions about nature education. Rather than offer prescriptive solutions, this book works to broaden possibilities and bolster the conversation among teachers and scholars concerned with early years environmental education.

This powerful edited collection disrupts the deficit-oriented discourses that currently frame the field of early childhood education (ECE) and illuminates avenues for critique and opportunities for change. Researchers from across the globe offer their insight and expertise in challenging the logic within ECE that often frames children and their families through gaps, risks, and deficits across such issues as poverty, language, developmental psychology, teaching, and learning. Chapters propose practical responses to these manufactured crises and advocate for democratic practices and policies that enable ECE programs to build on the wealth of cultural and personal knowledge children and families bring to the early learning process. Moving beyond a dependence on deficits, this book offers opportunities for scholars, researchers, and students to consider their practices in early education and develop their understanding of what it means to be an educator who seeks to support all children.

This powerful edited collection disrupts the deficit-oriented discourses that currently frame the field of early childhood education (ECE) and illuminates avenues for critique and opportunities for change. Researchers from across the globe offer their insight and expertise in challenging the logic within ECE that often frames children and their families through gaps, risks, and deficits across such issues as poverty, language, developmental psychology, teaching, and learning. Chapters propose practical responses to these manufactured crises and advocate for democratic practices and policies that enable ECE programs to build on the wealth of cultural and personal knowledge children and families bring to the early learning process. Moving beyond a dependence on deficits, this book offers opportunities for scholars, researchers, and students to consider their practices in early education and develop their understanding of what it means to be an educator who seeks to support all children.

This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author's multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the book highlights Indigenous presences and land relations within ongoing settler colonialism as necessary, yet often ignored, aspects of environmental education. Chapters discuss topics such as: geotheorizing in a capitalist society, absences of Black place relations, and unsettling unquestioned Western assumptions about nature education. Rather than offer prescriptive solutions, this book works to broaden possibilities and bolster the conversation among teachers and scholars concerned with early years environmental education.

Pedagogical narration is a way of recording ordinary moments of children's play through photos, video, or transcription. Inspired by Reggio Emilia's call to look at documentation as a valuable tool for making learning more visible, pedagogical narration offers an opportunity to move beyond checklists and quick answers to a more complex understanding of how children learn through play, and how teachers might facilitate and support that learning in innovative ways.

Many early childhood educators are familiar with pedagogical narration, but are less clear on how to integrate it into their teaching or practice. This book is designed to help instructors do just that, and to inspire them and their students with new ideas. The book includes both a rationale for the need to critically reflect on early-years education and an outline of the process for doing pedagogical narration in the classroom. It includes stories the authors have collected and discussions of how to use these stories to render a more complex understanding of how children learn. The goal of this cutting-edge work is to create possibilities for alternative childhood pedagogies and to revitalize early childhood education and practice.