Avis Ridgway – författare

This book offers a rich collection of international research narratives that reveal the qualities and value of peer play. It presents new understandings of peer play and relationships in chapters drawn from richly varied contexts that involve sibling play, collaborative peer play, and joint play with adults. The book explores social strategies such as cooperation, negotiation, playing with rules, expressing empathy, and sharing imaginary emotional peer play experiences. Its reconceptualization of peer play and relationships promotes new thinking on children''s development in contemporary worlds. It shows how new knowledge generated about young children''s play with peers illuminates how they learn and develop within and across communities, families, and educational settings in diverse cultural contexts. The book addresses issues that are relevant for parents, early years'' professionals and academics, including the role of play in learning at school, the role of adults in self-initiated play, and the long-term impact of early friendships. The book makes clear how recent cultural differences involve digital, engineering and imaginary peer play.

The book follows a clear line of argument highlighting  the importance of play-based learning and stress the importance of further knowledge of children''s interaction in their context.

This book aims to highlight the narration of peer play, mostly leaning on a sociocultural theoretical perspective, where many chapters have a cultural-historical theoretical frame and highlight children''s social situation of development.

Polly Björk-Willén, Linköping University, Sweden

This exciting new book brings fresh knowledge of affective pedagogies in early childhood education and care. The book draws on cultural-historical theory in alignment with visual methodologies to elucidate infant-toddlers’ affective pedagogies through analysis of case examples. The book reveals contemporary pedagogical practices in the infant-toddler space like mealtimes, nappy change and play. These pedagogical practices show the highly specialised nature of working with infant-toddlers such as the affective relations between educators and infant-toddlers, affective dialogue, affective engagement, and the creation of affective spaces. The value of collaboration is highlighted through creating an affective space for educators to become aware, reflect and position themselves as effective and affective educators. The book introduces innovative methodological tools such as images and collective drawings for collaborative reflection.  

This book makes an original contribution to researching child-community development so that those with specific interests in early childhood education have new theoretical tools to guide their research practices. The book explicitly theorises the use of digital visual tools from a cultural-historical perspective. It also draws upon a range of post-structuralist concepts for moving research and scholarship forward. Examples of visual technologies from research in different cultural communities are foregrounded.

In particular this book introduces contemporary methodologies for researching child and community development with a focus on visual methodology so the dynamics of development can be captured over time and analysed historically, culturally, socially, ecologically and psychologically through a range of iterative techniques.  Visual technology was not freely available in Vygotsky’s time for example, and therefore potentially represents an extension of his genetic experimental approach to researching child development.

The book presents a range of methodological arguments about research into child and community development through which new conceptions for research centred on young children have been created. The authors of the chapters also discuss why a more holistic, dynamic and ethical view of research is needed for generating new knowledge about child development in a range of cultural contexts.