Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
This article investigates how integration manifests at the micro level by exploring how four newly arrived migrant children are enabled or restricted in their participation in peer play during free play. Based on in-depth analyses of participant observations and video recordings, the authors illustrate how certain participation patterns have the potential to enable peripheral participation in peer play, while others risk leaving these children more or less disconnected from play conducted in the majority language. The authors discuss these patterns from the perspective of integration and problematize children's free choice during play activities in early childhood education and care. The findings imply a need for preschool practitioners to adopt a more active role during free play in order to facilitate children coming together and learning from each other. The article is innovative in the sense that it makes use of integrative perspectives on education and explores a social phenomenon in the context of early childhood education and care.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
Schooling today is steeped in a material-discursive community of achievement. Its ubiquity has become such that terms to qualify and quantify learning through achievement, for example high performing, average, below grade level, underachieving, lack of growth, and so on, and the technologies for identifying and treating the conditions of its construction have come to dominate the material and lived experiences of those in US schooling institutions. In this paper, I hope to tell the story of achievement as a productive material-discursive system that has been circulated as a scientific “truth” of nature and development and that has produced the subject of “the student” who is simultaneously the object of study and the site of administration and regulation of achievement theory-practice and technologies. The extensive body of work from critical psychologist and poststructural feminist researcher Valerie Walkerdine on developmental psychology, neoliberalism, and the humanist subject will guide my inquiry into the role that power/knowledge has played in the construction of “truths” about children that has produced, regulated, and repeated achievement in schools, and, consequently, theory-practices of teaching and learning. I will also consider how humanist and neoliberal discourses complicate and contribute to the overall apparatus of achievement. I will invite posthuman feminist questions that will serve as a path toward a (re)conceptualization of learning within and beyond achievement-structured confines.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
Despite its pivotal role in young children's development and learning, early childhood care and education (ECCE) remains undervalued and under-resourced, with its professional status and recognition often ambiguous. In South Africa, ECCE professionals experience dislocation and marginality within a fragmented system, hindering their efforts to achieve professionalism and consistency in recognition and status. This article examines workforce professionalism in South Africa's ECCE sector, analysing the interplay between policy ideologies and teachers’ understandings. A dual lens of democratic professionalism and transformative feminist perspectives was employed to analyse the sector's challenges within a highly unequal socio-economic landscape. The study combined document analysis of the Policy on Minimum Requirements for Programmes Leading to Qualifications in Higher Education for Early Childhood Development Educators (MRQECDE), and data collection through an online questionnaire with a purposive sample of 208 ECCE teachers from 73 ECCE centres in the Ekurhuleni district of Gauteng province. Findings reveal tensions between qualification-centric policies and teachers’ experiences, highlighting how systemic constraints and intersectional disadvantages affect workforce professionalism. Whilst teachers internalised policy ideologies on qualifications, they demonstrate agency by reimagining alternative pathways for their professionalism. This study contributes to global debates on ECCE professionalism, particularly to contexts where predominantly feminised workforce experience similar structural challenges. A more inclusive and context-responsive approach to professionalism is essential – one that adopts an empowerment framework and prioritises the recognition of marginalised voices.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
Play has been widely examined and viewed as an effective pedagogy to promote children's literacy development. While current research has identified various benefits associated with play, discrepancies still exist regarding what type of play could be more effective, for example, home play or school play. This could further lead to an outcome-oriented, positivist perception of play as a designed intervention that risks neglecting children's agency in creating, negotiating, and interpreting their play activities. In this conceptual article, we explore the theoretical affordance of the concept of temporal and spatial scales to rethink children's play as a dynamic, multilayered flow of meaning-making and negotiation across time and space. We discuss how using the lens of scales, play can be analyzed as actions, processes, and contexts. The methodological and pedagogical implications of scales are also illustrated for practical applications in research and education on play-based literacy learning. Finally, this article aims to draw researchers and educators’ attention to the complexity and diversity of play, as well as children's agency in (re)constructing playfulness.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
This qualitative case study investigates how a series of aesthetic interventions on philosophically complex themes, such as death and fear as life experiences, offered to first graders at a multicultural urban school in Norway, stimulate their agency and positioning as subjects. Drawing on video-recorded observations and artefacts produced by the children during the project, we show that their responses were enacted in multiple ways. This included nonverbal mirroring of the adults’ actions with and without further interactional extensions but also responses beyond mirroring where the children drew on multiple semiotic resources such as dialogue, writing, drawn images, and the body, to share their experiences with others. We argue that the interventions can be seen as platforms for both individual and communal enactments of the children's agency through joint, multimodal explorations of complex concepts and what it means for the children to be subject in the world.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
This article explores critical understanding and alternative narratives within early childhood education (ECE) by drawing on Paulo Freire's ideas. Building on existing literature on how Freire's work has been interpreted in ECE, we continue the critical discussion on the possibilities and contextualization of Freire's ideas, particularly in the early childhood profession and workforce. We offer a reinterpretation of the pedagogy of hope and its crucial role in supporting a just and sustainable ECE workforce, emphasizing the potential for transformative changes in the field. Through a multi-year, cross-cultural ethnographic study in the US and China, we analyze teachers’ internal voices, counter-narratives, and intersectional dynamics through a Freirean lens, focusing on the well-being of early childhood professionals in culturally diverse communities.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
‘Readiness’ and transition are topics of ongoing debate in relation to early childhood education. Critiques of schoolification and the impact of a ‘school-readiness’ agenda on policy and practice point to a tendency for increased formalisation of learning as children progress through their early years of schooling. In England, these first years of school-based education involve a transition between different and distinct educational frameworks, from the Early Years Foundation Stage to the National Curriculum in Key Stage 1. This transition can be problematic as tensions emerge between different pedagogical traditions, thus creating a potentially challenging experience for children as they progress from one educational context to the next. In this paper I argue that post-humanism can offer a useful theoretical framing to explore and critique this transition, opening space to question the role of matter in shaping experiences of transition in early years educational spaces. The paper is inspired by diffractive approaches to scholarship that encourage creativity and experimentation, making space for the researchers own co-constituted experiences in the production of new ideas and theories. The theoretically based discussion considers the notion of a ‘problem space’ in relation to early years transitions, before exploring post-human perspectives and asking the question ‘can matter, matter differently’ in transitional experiences. The paper concludes by posing a series of questions designed to prompt further discussion and debate about ‘readiness’ and transition, putting the focus on child–matter intra-actions and their potential for supporting a more complex and nuanced understanding of transition in the early years.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
This paper explores and renegotiates the shapes of teaching in preschool education. Therefore, I engage in storytelling drawing from Haraway and create encounters together and with preschool practices and practitioners in connection to a policy change that introduced teaching into the Swedish preschool curriculum. This multiple inquiry complexifies teaching, starting with the preschool practitioners’ questions and concerns about teaching in preschool. Through stories, teaching takes both place and space in preschool education, challenging and confirming ideas and traditions on how to do preschool. Teaching takes multiple shapes and becomes a practice that extends beyond a specific event, encompassing both preparatory planning and subsequent reflections, as well as the continued process, intertwined with global trends of formalising early childhood education. Resisting a simplified story of the purpose of preschool education, I propose storytelling as a way to acknowledge teaching in preschool practices.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we introduce a relational approach to toy pedagogy. A narrative and three photographs from field studies in kindergartens function as sticky knots. By following Haraway and her philosophical explorations of string figures, we discuss the stickiness of the photos and how they contribute to understanding a concept like toy pedagogy. By interrupting the traditional understanding of toys in pedagogical practice, we suggest that toy pedagogy evolves between children, toys and the environment. Multiple connections appear when examining the photographs in light of kinship, which leads to creations of the environment as a place where companion species engage in processes of becoming-with the world. Finally, we discuss how toys affect networks of meaning and worlding, take part in producing dreams and give hope to the lives of children.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Ahead of Print.
This paper examines the role early childhood education has as an institution that potentially provides for children from differing cultural and language backgrounds and instils respect and tolerance for difference. The particular focus is an emphasis in the Australian early childhood national curriculum that presents a strengthened importance on First Nation Australians. As a country Australia has had a history of racism since European occupation. This attitude has had a detrimental impact on First Australians and many migrants. The context of the paper is the recent national referendum where the Australian populace denied a voice to parliament for Indigenous Australians. In this paper we explore initiatives introduced to support the idea of reconciliation by introducing Aboriginal perspectives into the early childhood curriculum. The research is project-based and we examine the role of early education in supporting long-term equity and social justice in a country that still suffers from a colonial/settler outlook.