Peter Moss

Carlina Rinaldi

Vea Vecchi

Claudia Giudici

Paola Cagliari

Marina Castagnetti

Loris Malaguzzi was one of the most important figures in 20th century early childhood education, achieving world-wide recognition for his educational ideas and his role in the creation of municipal schools for young children in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia, the most successful example ever of progressive, democratic and public education. Despite Malaguzzi’s reputation, very little of what he wrote or said about early childhood education has been available in English. This book helps fill the gap, presenting for the first time in English, writings and speeches spanning 1945 to 1993, selected by a group of his colleagues from an archive established in Reggio Emilia. They range from short poems, letters and newspaper articles to extended pieces about Malaguzzi’s early life, the origins of the municipal schools and his ideas about children, pedagogy and schools. This material is organised into five chronological chapters, starting at the end of World War Two and ending just before his death, with introductions to each chapter providing background, including the historical context, the main events in Malaguzzi’s life and the rationale for the selection of documents. The book provides a unique insight into the background, thinking and work of Malaguzzi, revealing, in his own words, how his thinking developed, how he moved between theory and practice, how he border-crossed many disciplines and subjects, and how he combined many roles ranging from administrator and campaigner to researcher and pedagogue. Academics, students and practitioners alike will find this landmark publication provides rich insights into his life and work.

A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945-1993

Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia

Linda Mitchell

Written by two leading international experts, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere offers a unique comparison of early childhood education and care services, and parenting leave, across seven high-income Anglophone countries. Peter Moss and Linda Mitchell explore what these systems have in common, including the dominance of ‘childcare’ services, widespread privatisation and marketisation, and weak parenting leave. They highlight the substantial failings of these systems, and the causes and consequences of these failings. But this book is ultimately about hope, about how these failings might be made good through major changes. In other words, it is about transformation: why transformation is both necessary and possible at this particular time, what transformation might look like, and how it might happen. Part of that transformation concerns the need for new policies and structures, but even more it is about how the Anglosphere thinks about early childhood. The authors call for turning away from conceptualising early childhood services as `childcare' and marketised businesses selling commodities to parent-consumers; and for reconceptualising them as education imbued with an ethics of care, a public good available as a right to all children and families, and complemented by well-paid, individual entitlements to parenting leave. Using examples from the Anglosphere and beyond, and in a context of converging crises, the book argues that transformation of thinking, policies and structures is desirable and doable.

Systemic failings and transformative possibilities

Early Childhood in the Anglosphere

Early childhood education and care is a major policy issue for national governments and international organisations. This book contests two stories, both infused by neoliberal thinking, that dominate early childhood policy making today - ‘the story of quality and high returns’ and ‘the story of markets’, stories that promise high returns on investment if only the right technologies are applied to children and the perfection of a system based on competition and individual choice. But there are alternative stories and this book tells one: a ‘story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality’ in which early childhood centres are public spaces and public resources, places where democracy and experimentation are fundamental values, community workshops for realising the potentiality of citizens. This story calls for transformative change but offers a real utopia, both viable and achievable. The book discusses some of the conditions needed for the story’s enactment and shows what it means in practice in a chapter about project work contributed by a Swedish preschool teacher. Critical but hopeful, this book is an important contribution to resisting the dictatorship of no alternative and renewing a democratic politics of early childhood education. It is essential reading for students and teachers, researchers and other academics, and for all other concerned citizens.

A story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality

Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education

Hermit's Hoard

Jane Perry

Jack Tizard

Pre-school Services in a Changing Society

All Our Children

Alan Pence

`Not only does this book offer a great deal of insight into evaluating early childhood services, it also provides a focal point for those interested in establishing goals, objectives and evaluation criteria for their own early childhood programmes′ - Early Years `Quality′ has become a priority issue for all concerned with early childhood care and education services. Starting from the premise that `quality′ is a relative and dynamic concept based on values and beliefs, Valuing Quality in Early Childhood Services examines how the definitions of quality are established and who is involved in their establishment. The book advocates that the process should involve a range of stakeholder groups, including children, parents, staff, care providers, researchers, employers and the community. A key issue that emerges is the need for new and creative approaches to the development of an inclusionary process in the definitions and attainment of quality care.

New Approaches to Defining Quality

Valuing Quality in Early Childhood Services

Claire Cameron

Charlie Owen

Hightly Commended ( Third prize) in the Standing Conference on Studies in Education book prize for books published in 1999. `It was a breath of fresh air to see 'contentious' issues dealt with in an enlightened and informative way. We are certain it will move the debate on years!' - Chrissie Meleady, Sheffield Childrens' Centre `Looks most interesting and will certainly be very useful' - Bronwen Cohen, Director, Children in Scotland `It's a challenging and exciting book and I hope it is widely used' - Margy Whalley, Director, Pen Green Research, Development and Training Base, Pen Green Centre for Under 5's and Their Families

Gender and Caring Work

Men in the Nursery

Thriller: Ghosts of the Dark Sky Bogs and Barrens

Oxford History for Pakistan

"One City, Many Children recounts the story of the birth and development of Reggio Emilia's early years services, the nido and Scuola d'infanzia, a research project bringing together the voices and thoughts of many &‘protagonists' and which refers to many sources...The narrative builds on the One City, Many Children exhibition on permanent display at the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre in Reggio Emilia, and is developed through a number of broad themes: city and family participation, the active role of women and women's movements, the politics of education in the city's municipal administration, the ties between pedagogy and politics, the originality of the pedagogical thinking of Loris Malaguzzi and the Reggio Emilia education project, and the strongly international identity of what is a local experience."--Back cover.

Reggio Emilia, a History of the Present

One City, Many Children

Secondary Social Studies for Pakistan

What should be the relationship between early childhood and compulsory education? What can they learn from one another and by working together? The rapid expansion of early childhood education and care means that most children in affluent countries now have several years at pre-school before compulsory education. This raises an important question about the relationship between the two. Whilst it's widely assumed that the former should prepare children for the latter, there are alternatives. This book contests the 'readying for school' relationship as neither self-evident nor unproblematic; and explores some alternative relationships, including a strong and equal partnership and the vision of a meeting place. In this ground-breaking book, Professor Peter Moss discusses the issue with leading early childhood figures - from Belgium, France, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United States -who bring very different perspectives to this contentious relationship. The book starts with an extended essay by Peter Moss, to which the other contributors are invited to respond critically, as well as offering their own thinking about the relationship between early childhood and compulsory education, both their current understandings and suggestions on future directions. Students, researchers and academics in the field of early childhood education will find this an insightful and timely text. But so too will their peers in compulsory education, since the book time and again raises searching questions about pedagogical purpose and practice in this sector.

Reconceptualising the Relationship

Early Childhood and Compulsory Education

Sheila B. Kamerman

The politics of parental leave policies addresses how and why, and by whom, particular policies are created and subsequently developed in particular countries. It examines the factors that bring about variations in leave policy, covering fifteen countries in Europe and beyond, and the European Union.

Children, Parenting, Gender and the Labour Market

The Politics of Parental Leave Policies

Care Work in Europe provides a cross-national and cross-sectoral study of care work in Europe today, covering policy, provision and practice, as well as exploring how care work is conceptualized and understood. Drawing on a study which looks at care work across the life course in a number of European countries, this book: explores the context and emerging policy agendas provides an analysis of how different countries and sectors understand and structure care work examines key issues, such as the extreme gendering of the workforce, increasing problems of recruitment and turnover, what kinds of knowledge and education the work requires and what conditions are needed to ensure good quality employment considers possible future directions, including the option of a generic professional worker, educated to work across the life course and whether ‘care’ will, or should, remain a distinct field of policy and employment. This groundbreaking comparative study provokes much-needed new thinking about the current situation and future direction of care work, an area essential to the social and economic well-being of Europe.

Current Understandings and Future Directions

Care Work in Europe

Janet Boddy

Care work and care workers past, present and future are examined in this edited collection which guides readers through an introduction to care work towards a critical understanding of potential futures for the field.

Present and Future

Care Work

Early childhood education and care has been a political priority in England since 1997, when government finally turned its attention to this long-neglected area. Public funding has increased, policy initiatives have proliferated and at each general election political parties aim to outbid each other in their offer to families. Transforming Early Childhood in England: Towards a Democratic Education argues that, despite this attention, the system of early childhood services remains flawed and dysfunctional. National discourse is dominated by the cost and availability of childcare at the expense of holistic education, while a hotchpotch of fragmented provision staffed by a devalued workforce struggles with a culture of targets and measurement. With such deep-rooted problems, early childhood education and care in England is beyond minor improvements. In the context of austerity measures affecting many young families, transformative change is urgent.

Towards a Democratic Education

Transforming Early Childhood in England:

Gunilla Dahlberg

This book challenges received wisdom and the tendency to reduce philosophical issues of value to purely technical issues of measurement and management.

Languages of Evaluation

Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care

The filaments that enmeshed them in Durbar Court were the stories they wove. Leila, who never contributed any herself, claimed that without them the resident behemoths would fall permanently asleep. It was a soporific summer. An extraordinary summer, as if the mechanism of the seasons had broken down, stranding them in a time locked vault of cloudless blue. The garden parasols were giant sundials around which carousels of shadow clocked the intervals from breakfast to supper. Only the bearers punctuated the hours, padding out to them with trays of lemon cordial and iced tea. This second novel by Peter Moss, whose first, The Singing Tree, was described by the New York Times as a little gem, draws heavily upon his memories of an Indian childhood to populate a recreated cameo of imperial India, set on the south coast of England. Here relics of the British Raj, living out their sequestered lives immersed in nostalgia for a long lost world, lead a casual visitor to confront memories he has desperately endeavoured to erase. A graceful, elaborate tale of innocents yearning for home. Moss has been a firsthand witness to the fading glory of the British diaspora in exotic locales like India, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Here, he draws heavily on a childhood spent in India to recreate the experiences of expatriates repatriated against their will, caught between a glorious spiritual home and the draw of Queen and country. Moss fosters a charming colonial memory that will speak clearly to anyone who's been away from home a long time. A romanticized, tragic remembrance of well-loved experiences. -Kirkus Discoveries"

Peter Moss

Books

Your next favorite book is out there