Abstract/Notes: Like good government, thoughtful care of children requires those in power, whether teachers or parents, to recognize when it is appropriate for them to step back from day-to-day decision-making while still working behind the scenes to ensure an organizational structure that supports the independence and equitable development of those they serve. The research of Barrie Thorne and others into the school lives of elementary age children suggests that when classrooms are formed on the basis of narrow age groupings, children tend to further separate themselves into even more homogeneous groupings, first by gender and then, if at all further, by race or ethnicity. The homogeneity of traditional classroom groups is very different from the natural diversity by age and gender of extended family and neighborhood playgroups. The Montessori classroom is organized in a way that naturally promotes cooperation rather than competition, and the appreciation of diversity and difference rather than a heightened interest in homogeneity (Powell, 2001). But it does not automatically ensure these outcomes. In a Montessori classroom, children generally live in the same room with some of their peers for a year, others for 2 years, and those closest in age for 3 or perhaps even 4 years. And having been with their closest peers for up to three years, Montessori children are more likely to feel safe enough to take risks, make mistakes, and share parts of themselves that would, in a more traditional setting, probably go unnoticed or be left at home. Casual cross-gender conversations and cooperation in learning, as well as cross-gender friendships, are commonplace in the many Montessori classrooms. Montessori children also bring with them an unpredictable swirl of influences from outside their classrooms, which they continually rehearse on one another. Media, literature, neighbors, older siblings and other relatives, and child or adult acquaintances sometimes reinforce and sometimes contradict the influences of the Montessori classroom as they are soaked up by the undiscriminating and thirsty sponge that is the 6-to-9-year-old's social mind. As Maria Montessori understood so long ago, it is one of the developmental necessities of the 6-to- 9-year-old child to try to figure out the "rules" of their classroom's social order, whether the adults around them are part of this discussion or not. Thus, teachers should offer closeness to boys as well as to girls, and physical and academic challenge to girls as well as to boys. Never let gender used as a means for separating or excluding go without comment. Sometimes the effects of such unplanned, student-driven lessons can be more important to the psyches of children than the ones they have rehearsed.

Language: English

ISSN: 1054-0040

Language: English

ISSN: 1054-0040

Abstract/Notes: Reviews of books for children and adults

Language: English

ISSN: 1054-0040

Language: English

ISSN: 1054-0040

Language: English

Abstract/Notes: This paper attempts to open out investigations in ECEC by working beyond anthropocentric accounts of gender. Drawing upon feminist new materialist philosophies we ask whether it might be possible to reconfigure ideas about gender that recognise it as produced through everyday processes and material-affective entanglements. In order to do this, we work with Montessori materials, spaces and practices to grapple with the ways that gender is produced through human-material-semiotic encounters. By focusing on familiar Montessori objects, we follow diffractive lines of enquiry to extend investigations and generate new knowledge about gender in ECEC. This shift in focus allows other accounts about gender to find expression. We argue gender can be encountered as more than an exclusively human matter; and we go on to debate what that might potentiate (i.e. that if gender is fleeting, shifting, and produced within micro-moments there is freedom to break free from narrow framings that fix people, such as ‘the Male Montessorian’, in unhelpful ways). An approach that foregrounds affect and materiality makes a hopeful, generative and expansive contribution to the field.Abbreviation: ECEC, Early Childhood Education and Care

Language: English

DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2019.1620181

ISSN: 0957-5146

Abstract/Notes: The relationships among school adjustment, victimisation, and gender were investigated with 284 Turkish children aged between five and six years. Teacher Rating Scale of School Adjustment, The Preschool Behaviour Questionnaire, and Peer Victimisation Scale were used in this study. Analyses indicated that children's behaviour problems and victimisation variables were significant predictors of the school adjustment of children while controlling for gender.

Language: English

DOI: 10.1080/03004279.2013.848915

ISSN: 0300-4279, 1475-7575

Abstract/Notes: In the past few decades important work has been undertaken to unsettle essentialist conceptualisations of gender/sex in the early years workforce. Through an auto/ethnographic diffractive engagement that thinks with feminist ‘new’ materialist and postcolonial scholarships, this paper uncovers the need to move beyond an exclusive focus on diversifying the workforce by simply increasing the number of men. Moving beyond the narrow focus enables a richer and more expansive understanding of gender/sex that exposes colonialism and reveals everyday practices of early childhood educators to be shaped by place, space and matter. By attending to how matter matters in early years, child-sized chairs are used as a point of entry into this research inquiry to explore how gender/sex is produced through pastpresent, material-discursive-affective and more-than-human entanglements. The paper proposes that complicating understandings of gender/sex is important to decolonise early childhood spaces, and so hold space for the emergence of difference that is unmodulated by whiteness. Recognising the agentic potential of matter further opens up possibilities for that which is not yet, but available to us, to make life more thinkable in cis-white heteropatriarchy.

Language: English

DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2021.1884202

ISSN: 0954-0253

Abstract/Notes: Dr. Maria Montessori (1870-1952), saw the child as a ‘spiritual embryo’ naturally gravitating towards a state of ‘normalization’ through the evolving discovery of a ‘cosmic task’ that emerged from inquiring into one’s identity and role in the universe. Although she laid a philosophical framework for this ‘educating of the human potential’; she never openly discussed sexuality and sexual knowledge as a necessary part of this development. Dr Riane Eisler is a contemporary feminist systems theorist whose ‘partnership model’ of sexual politics embraces (and, in fact, openly endorses) the tenets of the Montessori approach.

Language: English

ISSN: 1916-8128

Abstract/Notes: Rukmini Devi Arundale, herself a choreographer and dancer, is considered one of the key figures in re-creating Bharatanatyam. Through her utopian arts colony, Kalakshetra, started during the movement towards Indian independence, she taught what she deemed to be a classical, religious and aesthetically pleasing form of dance. Her rejection of what she termed vulgarity and commercialism in dance reflects her Theosophical worldviews and her class position in a rapidly changing South India. The article examines the ways in which her understanding of Bharatanatyam developed in the context of contested forms of nationalism as a gender regime that contributed to creating proper middle-class, Hindu and Indian subjects. It also examines the impacts of this form of cultural heritage relating to gender, culture and nationalism in today’s globalised South Asian dance scenario.

Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/0262728019872612

ISSN: 0262-7280