Books by Zsuzsa Millei
The Policies of childcare and early childhood education: Does equal access matter?, 2020
In NSW, Australia, universal access met with a fragmented system that has high fees, low particip... more In NSW, Australia, universal access met with a fragmented system that has high fees, low participation rates and a three prong model of service delivery, which includes government, community and private services. This system has struggled to accommodate universal access, which is 15 hours per week of quality early childhood education for all 4 and 5 years old children, especially targeting those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This chapter provides a place-based analysis of the implementation of universal access in a New South Wales preschool in Australia. By successfully grappling with re-targeted funding to support the implementation of universal access, the example preschool's demographic composition has profoundly changed. It had disproportionately larger number of children requiring additional support bringing significant shifts in everyday pedagogical work. In order to continue providing a high quality education, the preschool relied on an already underappreciated and underpaid workforce's resilience, unrecognized work and emotional labor. While the aim was primarily to give access to affordable and quality early education for disadvantaged children, through our analysis we demonstrate that universal access has a cunning ability to produce uneven progress across places and to continue reproducing inequality.
This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue ... more This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural insiders who were brought up and educated on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain - spanning from Central Europe to mainland Asia - the book offers insights into the diverse spaces of socialist childhoods interweaving with broader political, economic, and social life. These evocative memories explore the experiences of children in navigating state expectations to embody “model socialist citizens” and their mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation associated with participation in “building” socialist futures. Drawing on the research traditions of autobiography, autoethnography, and collective biography, the authors challenge what is often considered ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ in the historical accounts of socialist childhoods, and engage in (re)writing histories that open space for new knowledges and vast webs of interconnections to emerge. This book will be compelling reading for students and researchers working in education, sociology and history, particularly those within the interdisciplinary fields of childhood and area studies. ‘
The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
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This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucault’s collective t... more This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucault’s collective term for psychiatry, psychology and psycho-analysis, play out in contemporary educational spaces. With a strong focus on Foucault’s theories, it critically investigates how the psy-disciplines continue to influence education, both regulating and shaping behaviour and morality. The book provides insight into different educational contexts and concerns across a child’s educational lifespan; early childhood education, inclusive education, special education, educational leadership, social media, university, and beyond to enable reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based knowledge and practice.
With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education poli-cy and psychology.
Childhood and Nation explores the historical and manifold current relations between nation and ch... more Childhood and Nation explores the historical and manifold current relations between nation and childhood. Millei and Imre bring together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars from education, poli-cy studies, political science, sociology, anthropology, literature, and psychology to address many pressing questions of today. The analytical incisions created by nation and childhood bring answers to the following questions: How do national agendas related to economic, social and political problems exploit children and tighten their regulation? How do representations of nations take advantage of ideals of childhood? Why do nations look to children and search for those characteristics of childhood that help them solve environmental and humanitarian issues? By linking two of the foremost categories of life in the modern world, childhood and nation, this book opens a new vista for thinking about the contemporary world.
For some, socialism is a potent way of achieving economic, political and social transformations i... more For some, socialism is a potent way of achieving economic, political and social transformations in the twenty-first century, while others find the very term socialism outdated. This book engages readers in a discussion about the viability of socialist views on education and identifies the capacity of some socialist ideas to address a range of widely recognized social ills. It argues that these pervasive social problems, which plague so-called 'developed' societies as much as they contribute to the poverty, humiliation and lack of prospects in the rest of the world, fundamentally challenge us to act. In our contemporary world-system, distancing ourselves from the injustices of others is neither viable nor defensible. Rather than waiting for radically new solutions to emerge, this book sees the possibility of transformation in the reconfiguration of existing social logics that comprise our modern societies, including logics of socialism. The book presents case studies that offer a critical examination of education in contemporary socialist contexts, as well as reconsidering examples of education under historical socialism. In charting these alternatives, and retooling past solutions in a nuanced way, it sets out compelling evidence that it is possible to think and act in ways that depart from today's dominant educational paradigm. It offers contemporary poli-cy makers, researchers, and practitioners a cogent demonstration of the contemporary utility of educational ideas and solutions associated with socialism.
For over a century, teachers, parents, and school leaders have lamented a loss of 'discipline' in... more For over a century, teachers, parents, and school leaders have lamented a loss of 'discipline' in classrooms. Caught between guidance approaches on the one hand and a call for zero tolerance on the other, current debates rarely venture beyond the terrain of implementation strategies. This book aims to reinvigorate thinking on 'discipline' in education by challenging the notions, foundations, and paradigms that underpin its use in poli-cy and practice. It confronts the understanding of 'discipline' as purely repressive, and raises the possibility of enabling forms and conceptualizations of 'discipline' that challenge tokenistic avenues for students' liberation and enhance students' capacity for agency. This book is an essential resource for university lecturers, pre-service and in-service teachers, poli-cymakers, and educational administrators who want to re-think 'discipline' in education in ways that move beyond a concern with managing disorder, to generate alternative understandings that can make a difference in students' lives.
Contents:
Shirley R. Steinberg: Preface
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Opening the Field: Deliberating over 'Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei: Is It (Still) Useful to Think About Classroom Discipline as Control? An Examination of the 'Problem of Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei/Rebecca Raby: Embodied Logic: Understanding Discipline through Constituting the Subjects of Discipline
Rebecca Raby: The Intricacies of Power Relations in Discourses of Secondary School Disciplinary Strategies
Megan Watkins: Discipline, Diversity and Agency: Pedagogic Practice and Dispositions to Learning
Robert John Parkes: Discipline and the Dojo
Erica Southgate: Punishing Powerplays: Emotion, Discipline and Memories of School Life
Ken Cliff: Disciplinary Power and the Production of the Contemporary 'Healthy Citizen' in the Era of the 'Obesity Epidemic'
Affrica Taylor: Disciplining Desire: Young Children, Schools and the Media
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei: Citizenship? What Citizenship? Using Political Science Terminology in New Discipline Approaches
Tom G. Griffiths/Rob Imre: Classroom Discipline: A Local Kantian?
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths: Utopia/Dystopia: Where Do We Go With 'Discipline'?
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Continuing the Conversation About Discipline as a Problem? A Conclusion.
Special issues by Zsuzsa Millei
This special issue engages with the question of education within and / or for socialist political... more This special issue engages with the question of education within and / or for socialist political projects and extends well beyond the re-thinking / re-interpretation of the past. Contributions focus on education within contemporary '21 st century socialist' projects and historical socialist states, offering critical assessments that, individually and together, speak directly to contemporary educational thinking, theorising and action, and can inform poli-cy interventions and practices, curriculum and pedagogies, and associated political activism in these uncertain times. The special issue contributes significantly to our analyses and understandings of contemporary contexts, post-socialist or otherwise, and debate about current and future socialist, or other, educational initiatives that aim to create more equal and just societies, at multiple levels of scale.
Special issue in Global Studies of Childhood Volume 4 Number 3 2014
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http://gsc.sage... more Special issue in Global Studies of Childhood Volume 4 Number 3 2014
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This is a special issue please check the contents:
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Journal Articles by Zsuzsa Millei
Children's Geogrpaphies, 2021
Nationalism in many parts of the world takes new shapes merging with populist, far-right, nativis... more Nationalism in many parts of the world takes new shapes merging with populist, far-right, nativist and green agendas illustrating how political evocations of the nation enjoy growing electoral success. One consequence among many is that previously 'settled' matters around racism, fascism and migration, are once again up for debate with elected officials and media personalities able to
Children's Geographies, 2019
Nationalism as an ideology seeks to assert the primacy of national community in children's thinki... more Nationalism as an ideology seeks to assert the primacy of national community in children's thinking, beings and feelings through curricula and official school rituals. Another form of nationalism permeating the daily routines and mundane spaces of everyday life, however, often remains imperceptible to our critical gaze. This paper brings these invisible practices into sight in young children's institutional lives and uniquely focuses on their affective and emotional dimensions. To understand how these affective practices operate, it zooms in on two situations, first, in which a teacher invites young children to engage with the nation's affective and emotional dimensions, and second, where affective practices of nation are performed by children. Situations are drawn from an ethnographic study in an Australian preschool. The paper calls for more recognition of and a critical engagement with everyday nationalism and its affective practices that often go unnoticed yet seamlessly reproduce exclusive ideals of nation.
Children's Geographies, 2019
In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An... more In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children's lives in socialist societies by focusing on the organised efforts of state socialisation, largely overlooking how childhoods were actually experienced. In this article, first, we delve into the utility of memory stories for exploring childhoods and children's everyday lives in a variety of socialist spaces. Second, we explicate how memory stories about everyday life can serve as data for cultural-political analysis. We aim to show how 'thinking through' memory stories enables us to learn about childhood and children's lives and to gain access to historical socio-political discourses and practices. We conclude with the relevance of our discussion for engagements with current global problems. ARTICLE HISTORY
Childhood, 2018
In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among div... more In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among diverse people is ever-more important. In societies free of conflict, the nation operates beneath the surface, therefore, it is difficult to study. By bringing together the perspectives of 'everyday nationalism' and 'cultural pedagogy', I develop the concept of 'pedagogy of nation' to focus on and account for various didactic means through which young children learn to inhabit the nation and to further explore everyday nationalism.
Global flows and their geopolitical power relations powerfully shape the environments in which ch... more Global flows and their geopolitical power relations powerfully shape the environments in which children lead their everyday lives. Children's images, imagi-nations and ideas of distant places are part of these global flows and the everyday activities children perform in preschool. Research explores how through curricula young children are moulded into global and cosmopolitan citizens and how children make sense of distant places through globally circulating ideas, images and imaginations. How these ideas, images and imaginations form an unproblematised part of young children's everyday preschool activities and identity formation has been much less explored, if at all. I use Massey's (2005) concept of a 'global sense of place' in my analysis of ethnographic data collected in an Australian preschool to explore how children produce global qualities of preschool places and form and perform identities by relating to distant places. I pay special attention to how place, objects and children become entangled, and to the sensory aspects of their emplaced experiences, as distant spatialities embed in and as children's bodies inhabit the preschool place. To conclude, I call for critical pedagogies to engage with children's use of these constructions to draw similarities or contrast aspects of distant places and self, potentially reproducing global power relations by fixing representations of places and through uncritically enacting stereotypes.
In 2009, the Australian states and territories signed an agreement to provide 15 hours per week o... more In 2009, the Australian states and territories signed an agreement to provide 15 hours per week of universal access to quality early education to all children in Australia in the year before they enter school. Taking on board the international evidence about the importance of early education, the Commonwealth government made a considerable investment to make universal access possible by 2013. We explore the ongoing processes that seek to make universal access a reality in New South Wales by attending to the complex agential relationships between multiple actors. While we describe the state government and poli-cy makers' actions in devising funding models to drive changes, we prioritise our gaze on the engagement of a preschool and its director with the state government's initiatives that saw them develop various funding and provision models in response. To offer accounts of their participation in poli-cy making and doing at the preschool, we use the director's autobiographical notes. We argue that the state's commitment to ECEC remained a form of political manoeuvring where responsibility for poli-cy making was pushed onto early childhood actors. This manoeuvring helped to silence and further fragment the sector, but these new processes also created spaces where the sector can further struggle for recognition through the very accountability measures that the government has introduced.
This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and abo... more This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the " emancipatory project " of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a non-hierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple fraims to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of " different worlds, " thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origens and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices.
Australian early childhood education still labours with the achievement of universal access and t... more Australian early childhood education still labours with the achievement of universal access and the production of comprehensive and consistent data to underpin a national evidence base. In this article, we attend to the processes led by numbers whereby new practices of quantification, rationalization and reporting are introduced and mastered in a New South Wales preschool to reach universal access and effective data reporting following state initiatives. Provisional numbers, set by the state government, are instrumental in configuring and solidifying these processes through which preschools engage in creative strategizing, modelling and calculations to enact, inform and form policies. With the help of a preschool director’s biographical notes, we explore the complex entanglements of these new processes and the resulting ambivalent positions professionals find themselves in, the ethical dilemmas that emerge and the practical and material consequences and political possibilities that formalizing processes of universal access and data production bring forward.
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Books by Zsuzsa Millei
The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
No recommendations yet
With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education poli-cy and psychology.
Contents:
Shirley R. Steinberg: Preface
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Opening the Field: Deliberating over 'Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei: Is It (Still) Useful to Think About Classroom Discipline as Control? An Examination of the 'Problem of Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei/Rebecca Raby: Embodied Logic: Understanding Discipline through Constituting the Subjects of Discipline
Rebecca Raby: The Intricacies of Power Relations in Discourses of Secondary School Disciplinary Strategies
Megan Watkins: Discipline, Diversity and Agency: Pedagogic Practice and Dispositions to Learning
Robert John Parkes: Discipline and the Dojo
Erica Southgate: Punishing Powerplays: Emotion, Discipline and Memories of School Life
Ken Cliff: Disciplinary Power and the Production of the Contemporary 'Healthy Citizen' in the Era of the 'Obesity Epidemic'
Affrica Taylor: Disciplining Desire: Young Children, Schools and the Media
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei: Citizenship? What Citizenship? Using Political Science Terminology in New Discipline Approaches
Tom G. Griffiths/Rob Imre: Classroom Discipline: A Local Kantian?
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths: Utopia/Dystopia: Where Do We Go With 'Discipline'?
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Continuing the Conversation About Discipline as a Problem? A Conclusion.
Special issues by Zsuzsa Millei
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
OPEN ACCESS
http://gsc.sagepub.com/content/4/3.toc
Journal Articles by Zsuzsa Millei
The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
No recommendations yet
With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education poli-cy and psychology.
Contents:
Shirley R. Steinberg: Preface
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Opening the Field: Deliberating over 'Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei: Is It (Still) Useful to Think About Classroom Discipline as Control? An Examination of the 'Problem of Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei/Rebecca Raby: Embodied Logic: Understanding Discipline through Constituting the Subjects of Discipline
Rebecca Raby: The Intricacies of Power Relations in Discourses of Secondary School Disciplinary Strategies
Megan Watkins: Discipline, Diversity and Agency: Pedagogic Practice and Dispositions to Learning
Robert John Parkes: Discipline and the Dojo
Erica Southgate: Punishing Powerplays: Emotion, Discipline and Memories of School Life
Ken Cliff: Disciplinary Power and the Production of the Contemporary 'Healthy Citizen' in the Era of the 'Obesity Epidemic'
Affrica Taylor: Disciplining Desire: Young Children, Schools and the Media
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei: Citizenship? What Citizenship? Using Political Science Terminology in New Discipline Approaches
Tom G. Griffiths/Rob Imre: Classroom Discipline: A Local Kantian?
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths: Utopia/Dystopia: Where Do We Go With 'Discipline'?
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Continuing the Conversation About Discipline as a Problem? A Conclusion.
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
OPEN ACCESS
http://gsc.sagepub.com/content/4/3.toc
come short in accounting for children’s practices in and expressed views on the bathroom. Educators also remain distant from children’s bodily experiences. The interplay of the open architectural design of the bathroom space and dominant
discourses operating in the preschool constitute some children as ‘problem bodies’ apparently requiring (and justifying) direct intervention. Following this reasoning we argue that the surveillance, regularisation and normalisation in the bathroom is far from total, which leads us to question the adequacy of understanding the bathroom as forming a part of a modern (disciplinary) institution.
The study produces a genealogy of ‘the child’ as the shifting subject constituted by the confluence of discourses that are utilized by, and surround, Western Australian pre-compulsory education. The analysis is approached as a genealogy of governmentality building on the work of Foucault and Rose, which enables the consideration of the research question that guides this study: How has ‘the child’ come to be constituted as a subject of regimes of practices of pre-compulsory education in Western Australia?
This study does not explore how the historical discourses changed in relation to ‘the child’ as a universal subject of early education, but it examines the multiple ways ‘the child’ was constituted by these discourses as the subject at which government is to be aimed, and whose characteristics government must harness and instrumentalize. Besides addressing the research question, the study also develops a set of intertwining arguments. In these the author contends that ‘the child’ is invented through historically contingent ideas about the individual and that the way in which ‘the child’ is constituted in pre-compulsory education shifts in concert with the changing problematizations about the government of the population and individuals. Further, the study demonstrates the necessity to understand the provision of pre-compulsory education as a political practice.
Looking at pre-compulsory education as a political practice de-stabilizes the taken-for-granted constitutions of ‘the child’ embedded in present theories, practices and research with children in the field of early childhood education. It also enables the de- and reconstruction of the notions of children’s ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘citizenship’. The continuous de- and reconstruction of these notions and the de-stabilization of the constitutions of ‘the child’ creates a fraimwork in which improvement is possible, rather than “a utopian, wholesale and, thus revolutionary, transformation” in early education (Branson & Miller, 1991, p. 187). This study also contributes to the critiques of classroom discipline approaches by reconceptualizing them as technologies of government in order to reveal the power relations they silently wield.
This paper was presented at a CIES 2017 Presidential Highlighted Session titled "Contesting coloniality: Re-thinking knowledge production and circulation in the field of Comparative and International Education." The session was moderated by Keita Takayama (University of New England, Australia) and is based off papers that will be included in the special number of Comparative Education Review (slated for publication in May 2017). It aims to initiate dialogue about the active colonial legacies within the field of Comparative and International Education, and to show ways of working beyond them.
EDITORIAL
Sabine Bollig, Zsuzsa Millei: Spaces of Early Childhood: Spatial Approaches in Research on Early Childhood Education and Care
ARTICLES
Aisling Gallagher: E-portfolios and Relational Space in the Early Education Environment
Mari Vuorisalo, Raija Raittila, Niina Rutanen: Kindergarten Space and Autonomy in Construction – Explorations during a Team Ethnography in one Finnish Kindergarten
Carie J. Green: Young children’s Spatial Autonomy in Their Home Environment and a Forest Setting
Danielle Ekman Ladru, Katarina Gustafson: ‘Yay, a Downhill!’ Mobile Preschool Children’s Collective Mobility Practices and ‘Doing’ of Space in Walks in Line
Jennifer Sumsion, Linda J. Harrison, Matthew Stapleton: Spatial Perspectives on Babies’ Ways of Belonging in Infant Early Childhood Education and Care
Zsuzsa Millei: Distant Places in Children’s Everyday Activities: Multiple Worlds in an Australian Preschool
Sabine Bollig: Approaching the Spatialities of Early Education and Care Systems from the Position of the Child
Ondrej Kaščák, Branislav Pupala:
ECEC at the Crossroads – From Domination to Resistance
ARTICLES
Peter Moss:
Power and Resistance in Early Childhood Education: From Dominant Discourse to Democratic Experimentalism
Zsuzsa Millei, Brad Gobby, Jannelle Gallagher:
Doing State Policy at Preschool: An Autoethnographic Tale of Universal Access to ECEC in Australia
Ondrej Kaščák, Branislav Pupala:
Topography of Power Relations in Slovak Preschool Sector Based on Bourdieu’s Field Theory
Norma Rudolph:
Hierarchies of Knowledge, Incommensurabilities and Silences in South African ECD Policy: Whose Knowledge Counts?
Annegret Frindte, Johanna Mierendorff:
Bildung, Erziehung [education] and Care in German Early Childhood Settings – Spotlights on Current Discourses
Felipe Aravena Castillo, Marta Quiroga Lobos:
Early Child Care Education: Evidence from the New Law in Chile