European Early Childhood Education Research Journal | 2021
Editorial
Abstract
The first job of any Journal editorial ought to be to celebrate the accomplishment of the contributors included here. As you read the ten articles in this present collection, I invite you to think of the degree of scholarship involved, all directed at thinking about our relations with young children. What a tribute to the young children and practitioners who are thought about in these papers and to the wider community of early childhood and how much it matters. Every collection of papers is fascinating in its own way and this collection is no exception. There are papers from countries as diverse as Australia, China, Germany, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. The topics reflect new issues that demand attention for example the role of artificial intelligence and digital learning, whilst including issues that are on-going themes of inquiry and understanding – risk and freedom in play; documentation, forms of assessment and quality rating scales; beliefs, values and differing models of pedagogic relationship; and the development of inclusive practice. As an editorial hors o’euvre, to the papers themselves, let me give you a taster by grouping the papers in what I see as the five themes listed above. Sarika Kewalramani, offers a fascinating illustration of the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to foster inquiry literacy, including, interestingly, attention to emotion. The data suggests the capacity of fourand five-year olds to express anxiety about the wellbeing of the robots. The paper makes a fascinating contribution to the debate, itself imbued with emotion, about the potential contribution of robots in early childhood pedagogy. The paper by Helen Knauf andMarion Lepold offers a counterpose to that of Sarika Kewalramani. Their research warns us of the limitations of technologies and the indispensable role of human relationship and sensitivity in ‘hearing’ what it is that a child wishes to communicate about their experience. A third valuable paper in this theme, by Katrin Schulz-Heidorf and her colleagues, compares books and apps as media for shared reading in Norwegian ECEC-institutions. In a second theme on risk and freedom in play, Helen Lynch and her colleagues offer a fascinating study of the outdoor play of sixto eight-year olds in rural Ireland. They show children’s strong desire to engage in risky play despite adults’ anxiety and efforts to restrict risk. Pleasingly, the children also took the risk of incurring adult disapproval in their activity risks! One can sympathise with the adults who, in a risk averse context, and where punitive responses are likely if a child is even mildly hurt, seek to limit their own risks. One wonders though how much the level of restrictions, and the possibility of injury, have been openly discussed between practitioners themselves and between practitioners and parents. Is it fair to expect practitioners to be more responsive to children’s desire to engage in risk if they have not had the opportunity to engage in possibly contentious discussions about what is acceptable? Two papers fall into a third theme concerned with assessment and quality rating. Josefine Jahreie offers a comparative study of Danish and Norwegian teachers’ views on the language assessment of minority language children. The teachers all expressed degrees of ambivalance towards the notion of school readiness, teacher autonomy and discretion, and to official objectives of integration of children and what this may mean in practice. The data shows how carefully the teachers struggled with these particular ambivalences and the