Taking a broad approach, Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care relates issues of early childhood to the sociology of childhood, philosophy, ethics, political science and other fields and to an analysis of the world we live in today. It places these issues in a global context and draws on work from Canada, Sweden and Italy, including the world famous nurseries in Reggio Emilia.
Working with postmodern ideas, this book questions the search to define and measure quality in the early childhood field and its tendency to reduce philosophical issues of value to purely technical and managerial issues of expert knowledge and measurement.
With a brand new Preface to this classic text, the authors argue that there are other ways than the 'discourse of quality' for understanding and evaluating early childhood pedagogical work and relate these to alternative ways of understanding early childhood itself and the purposes of early childhood institutions.
Chapter 1: What this Book is About Chapter 2: Theoretical Perspectives: Modernity and Postmodernity, Power and Ethics Chapter 3: Constructing Early Childhood: What Do We Think It Is? Chapter 4: Constructing the Early Childhood Institution: What Do We Think They Are For? Chapter 5: Beyond the Discourse of Quality to the Discourse of Meaning Making Chapter 6: The Stockholm Project: Constructing a Pedagogy that Speaks in the Voice of the Child, the Pedagogue and the Parent Chapter 7: Pedagogical Documentation: A Practice for Reflection and Democracy Chapter 8: Minority Directions in the Majority World: Threats and Possibilities
