Nicola Yelland is the Professor of Early Childhood Studies in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching and research interests have been related to the use of new technologies in school and community contexts. She has also worked in East Asia and examined the culture and curriculum of early childhood settings. Nicola’s work engages with educational issues with regard to varying social, economic and political conditions and thus requires multidisciplinary perspectives. Selected publications include; Reimagining play with new technologies in L. Arnott (Ed.) Digital technologies and learning in the early years. (London, UK: SAGE) and Yelland, N.J. & Leung, W.M. Policy into practice in Hong Kong pre-primary kindergartens: the impact of a reform agenda viewing early childhood as the foundation for lifelong learning in the International Journal of Early Years, and Arnott, L. & Yelland, N.J. (2020). Multimodal lifeworlds: Pedagogies for play inquiries and explorations in Journal of Early Childhood Education Research. She is the editor of an edited collection with Dana Franz-Bentley; Found in translation: Connecting reconceptualist thinking with contemporary early childhood practices (New York: Routledge). Nicola is the founding co-editor of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and Global Studies of Childhood and the Series Editor of Changing Images of Early Childhood with Routledge (New York). Lacey Peters is a tenured Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her teaching and scholarship emphasize advocacy, and weave together pedagogical, programmatic, and political aspects of early childhood. Dr. Peters’ current research explores early childhood educators’ lived experiences in classrooms and examines their roles as policy enactors. She is working on a project that foregrounds Universal Pre Kindergarten teachers’ perspectives on using authentic assessment systems. She is also engaged in children′s rights-based research, emphasizing the voices of younger people in her scholarship. Dr. Peters has published in the Journal of Early Childhood Research, Global Studies of Childhood, Early Years, the School Community Journal, and Teaching and Teacher Education. Nikki Fairchild is Associate Head (Research and Innovation) in the School of Education and Sociology at the University of Portsmouth (UK). Her research interests include post-humanist and new materialism feminist theorizing which have been employed to articulate more-than-human subjectivities in the Early Years. Her PhD thesis explored more-than-human subjectivities with Early Years Teachers and explored the ways in which these are linked to a fluid and distributed understanding of their professional identity. Her recent research centres on place/space in classrooms and gardens. This has been enacted using walking-with methodologies through which she has become interested in the work of Indigenous and Black scholars writing about settler colonialism. This work has encouraged her to think through the impact of Eurocentric colonial practices in English ECEC and consider how this intersects with post-humanist and new material feminist thinking. Dr Fairchild is also part of any International collective which challenges the knowledge practices in conference spaces. The collective enacts arts-based research-creation workshops at conferences to consider how human, non-human and other-than-human bodies interact. The collective has recently been awarded a Special Commendation for the BERA Anna Craft Creativities in Education 2020 Prize. Marek Tesar is an Associate Professor and the Associate Dean International at the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland. His expertise is in early childhood education in both New Zealand as well as international contexts. His work focuses on educational policy, philosophy, pedagogy, methodology and curriculum, and draws on his background as a qualified teacher as well as his extensive knowledge of international education systems. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications. His scholarly work has received numerous prestigious national and international awards and accolades. He edits three educational book series with renowned publishers, and is the Editor of six academic journals including Editor-in-Chief of Policy Futures in Education (SAGE). As of 2020, he is President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA), and currently chairs the Steering Committee of the Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education society (RECE). Michelle Salazar Pérez is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at The University of Texas at Austin. She uses women of color feminisms to inform her community collaborations, research, and pedagogy in early childhood studies. These perspectives not only critically orient her work, but they also foreground the urgency to re-envision the field to support culturally sustaining praxis and programs for minoritized young children. Michelle’s work has been published in Teachers College Record, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, and Review of Research in Education. She has co-edited several special issues and books, including an issue of Global Studies of Childhood, which centers global south onto-epistemologies in childhood studies. Michelle is the recipient of the 2020, AERA Mid-Career Award, from the Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Education SIG. She was also the Host Chair of the 27th international Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) conference in 2019, and the Chair of the AERA Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education (CPECE) SIG in 2018.
