Philosophy and Pedagogy of Early Childhood

This book offers exciting scholarship on a range of philosophical perspectives about early childhood education, particularly those related to pedagogy and related concepts of care and education. In this era of pedagogical certainty, the book comprises a unique set of challenges to standards-based agendas. Increased attention is granted to the subjective, sometimes mysterious, approaches to learning that call for ontological orientations to pedagogy as a relationship rather than a response or intervention. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

In recent years, new discourses have emerged to inform the philosophy and pedagogy of early childhood. This collection brings together contributions from leading scholars in early childhood education, and each chapter engages with the critical task of reformulating early childhood education and the philosophy of the child with a specific focus on pedagogy.

The contributors to Philosophy and Pedagogy of Early Childhood explore pedagogy through a philosophical lens, and discuss themes including intersubjectivity, alterity, ethics, and creative experience. Although these themes are addressed in very different ways, each invokes a call to teachers to consider their own position in the dialogical process of learning, and suggests that pedagogy is necessarily situated, provisional, compositional, and discursive. Such critical and philosophical inquiry is a welcome antidote in an era of pedagogical certainty and standards-based agendas. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.