This is the essential handbook to support you as you work towards Early Years Professional Status.
Taking a standard-by-standard approach, this text uses a balance of leadership and personal practice examples to guide you through achieving EYPS. Examining each of the 39 standards in turn, the book deconstructs their meaning and considers and offers advice on the best approaches to evidence them.

Key features:

• Each standard is 'unpicked', with difficult terminology explained and examples given of how the standards might translate into practice
• Interactive Reflection Points within chapters allow you to reflect on and improve your practice
• Provides a wealth of leadership and personal practice examples

This accessible text will be invaluable to all EYPS candidates in examining early years practice and support them in collating evidence for the EYPS assessment process.

Autoethnography is generating increasing levels of interest in research circles, gaining popularity as an innovative and inciting qualitative approach. Drawing on the vast diversity of researchers’ opinions on autoethnographic praxes, this book presents a cogent analysis of the ongoing debates in the field before moving on to the discussion of a new approach to both theorizing about and ‘doing’ autoethnography: a ‘symbiotic autoethnography’. This approach synthesizes central aspects from the diversity of existing arguments into one adaptable ‘framework’ that combines key characteristic features of autoethnographic research. The author uses the concept of ‘symbiosis’ in its broader sense to denote close interdependence and interrelation between its suggested seven attributes, including temporality, researcher’s omnipresence, evocative storytelling, interpretative analysis, political (transformative) focus, reflexivity and polyvocality. The book offers both experienced and novice researchers a theoretically informed multi-functional and multi-disciplinary methodological tool that can accommodate the dynamics of diverse personal experiences within a topography of specific professional, cultural and socio-political contexts.