This unique book brings together international scholars from around the globe to examine how different feminist theories are being used in early childhood research, policy and pedagogy. The array of feminist discourses captured by the authors offer contextualised possibilities for disrupting dominant patriarchal beliefs and producing change. The authors address and challenge how early childhood experiences, institutions and practices produce gendered effects across and within diverse contexts and demonstrate how feminism(s) in action can be used to reconceptualise research methods, government policy, children’s learning, teaching practice and educational resources. In this way, the book contributes to creating new knowledge connections and community alliances in the global effort to end gender-based inequalities across local and global communities.

Intersections: Feminisms/Early Childhoods presents a continuing dialogue among early childhood educators who name themselves as feminists. Essays by individual contributors are woven together by the coeditors as they interrogate the relationship of feminist theory to early childhood practice. In considering the identity of feminist early childhood educators, the first section of this book reconsiders historical events in early childhood education from a feminist perspective, in many cases renaming the issues and reclaiming the history. The second section of the book reflects on early childhood practice and feminist pedagogy through the narratives of practicing early childhood professionals working in day care, public school, and university settings. The final section of the book examines significant issues facing early childhood from a feminist perspective, including the roles and representations of women and children, the analysis of economic and cross-cultural realities of child care and the consideration of public policy.

This book is an exploration of how children, educators, and things become implicated in gendered caring practices. Drawing on a collaborative research study with early childhood educators and young children, the author examines what an engagement with human-and non-human relationality does to complicate conversations about gender and care. By employing a feminist material analysis of early childhood education, this book rethinks dominant Euro-Western individualist pedagogies in order to reposition them within a relationality framework. The analysis illuminates the political and ethical embeddedness of early childhood education and the understanding that gendering and caring emerge with/in a complex web of many relations.

Teachers commonly talk about loving their students, yet no effort has been made to explore the powerful educational potential inherent in these loving feelings. Teaching with Love breaks new ground by paying careful, scholarly attention to the nature, the scope, the dimensions, and the variety of teacherly love. In a highly readable narrative that builds on the feminist notion of an ethic of care and draws from the fields of psychology and women's studies, this book examines and analyzes the experiences of two primary grade teachers as they set about trying to create and enact a vision of early childhood education centered around loving relationships.

Across the globe the work of early childhood educators, who are predominantly women, is misunderstood, underpaid and undervalued. Perspectives on early childhood educators are highly contentious: are they child development experts, oppressed workers, maternal substitutes, technicians, facilitators of early learning, or something else? This volume features chapter authors from Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the USA and New Zealand, examine a range of contemporary feminist theories in relation to the early childhood educator. The feminist theories covered include materialist feminism, poststructural feminism, decolonizing feminisms, posthumanist feminism, new materialist feminism, feminist ethics of care, womanist feminism, postcolonial feminism, femme theory and feminist queer theory. The editors of the volume offer an introduction and commentaries that explore solidarities and tensions between the feminisms to generate critical conversations about the work, lived experiences, and agency of early childhood educators. The volume contributes to shifting understandings of the early childhood educator in the contexts of culture, practice, policy and politics.

A thought-provoking text which will make practitioners examine their children's behaviour and play in a fresh light'- Christine Marsh, Manchester Metropolitan University 'A major contribution to the international literature on gender in Early Childhood .... Glenda MacNaughton has done a terrific job in making difficult theory accessible for teachers and student teachers. Her consistent use of plentiful examples and explorations of how different theories held by teachers might impact on their practice will be tremendously useful to teachers and teacher educators ' - Debbie Epstein, Centre for Research and Education on Gender, Institute of Education, London `Invaluable for early chil

Adriany explores gender discourses in early childhood education in Indonesia, as well as how teachers and children are engaged in the process of constructing, negotiating, and resisting dominant gender discourses in kindergartens. Using an ethnographic approach, Adriany explores how both the teachers and children are doing and undoing their gender. She adopts feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theories through her research and, in that context, views gender as something fluid and unfixed. The book also investigates the methodological aspect where the authors have both an inside and outside perspective. Each chapter aims to present and complicate the taken-for-granted practices in kindergartens that relate to how gender and power are constructed. The findings of this book show the extent to which early childhood education becomes a space for the teachers and children to construct, negotiate, as well as resist dominant gender discourses in kindergartens. Offering insights into local and global contexts that shape gender values in early years, this book will be a valuable reference for researchers, scholars, and students in early childhood education, gender studies, and comparative 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.

Providing international examples and theoretical discussions on the challenges and rewards of working in the early years, this book seeks to identify, recognise and celebrate those who work in early years education.

This book explores the contexts for gender identity development in early childhood education, examining how early childhood educators’ views on children’s gender identity influence their practice in Australia. The author utilizes feminist post-structuralism, queer theory and performativity as theoretical approaches, and feminist post-structuralist discourse and thematic analyses. The book captures the voices of educators and developers of curriculum documents to explore how gender expansive environments can be created when such environments are socially and politically contentious. It then identifies discourses that enable and constrain the building of pro-diversity spaces and contexts in early childhood education, while considering how to disrupt normative notions of gender and promote the deployment of discursive agency.