Imagining Childhood

The images of children that abound in Western art do not simply mirror reality; they are imaginative constructs, representing childhood as a special stage of human life, or emblematic of the human condition itself. In a compelling book ranging widely across time, national boundaries, and genres from ancient Egyptian amulets to Picasso's Guernica, Erika Langmuir demonstrates that no historic period has a monopoly on the 'discovery of childhood'. Famous pictures by great artists, as well as barely known anonymous artefacts, illustrate not only Western society's perennially ambivalent attitudes to children, but also the many and varied functions that works of art have played throughout its history.

Recent and increasing efforts to standardize young children’s academic performance have shifted the emphases of education toward normative practices and away from qualitative, substantive intentions. Connection to human experience, compassion for societal ailments, and the joys of learning are straining under the pressure of quantitative research, competition, and test scores, exemplified by federal funding competitions and policymaking. Disrupting Early Childhood Education Research critically interrogates the traditional foundations of early childhood research practices to disrupt the status quo through imaginative, cutting-edge research in diverse U.S. and international contexts. Its chapters are driven by empirical data derived from unique research projects and a variety of contemporary methodologies that include phenomenological studies, auto-ethnographic writings, action-oriented studies, arts-based methodologies, and other innovative approaches. By giving voice to marginalized social science researchers who are active in learning, school, and early education sectors, this volume explores the meanings of actionable and everyday approaches based on the experiences of young children, their families, and educators.

This collection of articles is a sociolinguistic response to the recent explosion of scholarly interest in issues of identity. Identity is central to all human beings as we are all concerned with how to conceive of ourselves, present ourselves and comprehend our relationships with others. The book tackles the problem of how personal identity is made visible and intelligible to others through language, and how this may be constrained. Part One, Emblematic identities, focuses on the construction of self-definitions based on various forms of group identities, including national and ethnic ones. Part Two, Multicultural Identities, looks at negotiation of identities in multicultural contexts involving relations of power, drawing on examples from Europe and the Americas. Finally, Part Three, Emergent Identities, collects empirical studies based on a close reading of texts in which identities are being articulated and negotiated.

This book challenges the current child protection culture and calls for family-minded humane practice where children are understood as relational beings, parents are recognized as people with needs and hopes and families as carrying extraordinary capacities for care and protection.

In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children’s books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid’s independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children. While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children—girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together.

This book offers a rich collection of international research narratives that reveal the qualities and value of peer play. It presents new understandings of peer play and relationships in chapters drawn from richly varied contexts that involve sibling play, collaborative peer play, and joint play with adults. The book explores social strategies such as cooperation, negotiation, playing with rules, expressing empathy, and sharing imaginary emotional peer play experiences. Its reconceptualization of peer play and relationships promotes new thinking on children's development in contemporary worlds. It shows how new knowledge generated about young children's play with peers illuminates how they learn and develop within and across communities, families, and educational settings in diverse cultural contexts. The book addresses issues that are relevant for parents, early years' professionals and academics, including the role of play in learning at school, the role of adults in self-initiated play, and the long-term impact of early friendships. The book makes clear how recent cultural differences involve digital, engineering and imaginary peer play. The book follows a clear line of argument highlighting the importance of play-based learning and stress the importance of further knowledge of children's interaction in their context. This book aims to highlight the narration of peer play, mostly leaning on a sociocultural theoretical perspective, where many chapters have a cultural-historical theoretical frame and highlight children's social situation of development. Polly Björk-Willén, Linköping University, Sweden

What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. However, the meaning of childhood is always being negotiated, not only by the imaginations of adults, but also by nations, markets, history and children themselves. Yet, as much as the question is considered by the social world, the contributions in this book remind readers that children are also active, embodied, and inquiring agents engaged in figuring a relationship with that the world they inherit. This book’s unifying theme, "The child in question," emerges from an assertation that childhood has boundaries far more elastic than can be held by the familiar notion of the innocent child developing toward a heteronormative future. The title pays homage to the work of sociologist, Diana Gittins, who, over twenty years ago, asked how the shifting meanings of children and childhood impact the lives of children. The contributions of this book examine contemporary educational policy and practice, curriculum material, literary and visual representations, and teacher narratives to further probe how and why it matters that childhood, as a concept and experience, remains as multiple and elusive as ever. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Curriculum Inquiry.