Race and the space in between: Practitioner reflections on anti-racist practice in one Froebelian early years setting

The rise of ‘Black Lives Matters’ has brought to the fore a need to unsettle early years praxis that positions race as separate from the individual, as a problem to be solved through the tokenistic provisioning of resources. In this paper, we explore how a team of early years practitioners were able to bridge the space between themselves and the multicultural community in which they worked. An interpretative onto-epistemology supported the crafting of the research design as a case study that provided insight into multiple meanings through participants’ narratives during weekly informal anti-racist reflective meetings, focus group discussions and individual interviews. “Political correctness”, social justice and children’s rights emerged that highlighted the importance of intra-actions arising between practitioners, their history, society and the environment. Consequently, new conceptualisations of race and anti-racist praxis emerged that transformed their practice and their way of being in the world

New Developments and Emergent Challenges in International Inclusive Education—A Response to Growing Family Needs and the Pandemic

Home education is a phenomenon that has been increasing globally over the past decade, particularly for families of children with special educational needs or disabilities. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this phenomenon with many families continuing to home educate even after their children can officially return to school. This paper reports on a small-scale design-based research project that explored the needs of families who are home educating children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). Working in partnership with educational settings, practitioners, and families during the second year of the pandemic, academic researchers in Malaysia and England designed, implemented and evaluated a home learning pack for children with ASD aged 6–12 years old. The findings emphasised the role of economic, social and cultural capital for the families involved and how this impacted their ability to work and educate their children successfully. This raises crucial questions in relation to the place of home education within the wider international inclusive education debate and matters of social equality whilst also highlighting key questions for future research in this field on how policy and provision might develop to meet a growing diversity of need

Using diffractive activity to (re)configure parental choice of pre-compulsory education

Prompted by the increasing number of children accessing alternatives to mainstream education, this research project was designed to investigate the activity of parents as they engaged in choosing different forms of education for their four-year-old child. The intention was to highlight the individual and entangled activity of parental choice in the English system of education. Facet methodology facilitated an exploration of the multi-dimensionality of each parent’s lived experience. It allowed for flexibility within the research process that used open interviews to follow the narratives of six sets of parents while they were thinking about and making different educational choices for their child. This included home education, the local primary school, a creative education, a Steiner school, a Montessori school and an independent selective school. Drawing upon Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory of individual activity as a framework for thinking about educational choice, combined with the new materialist concepts of intra-action and diffraction, the conceptual framework of ‘diffractive activity’ has been developed. Diffractive activity brings to the fore the role of history, society and relationalities within the activity of choice. It is built upon five principles of complexity, intra-action, diffraction, entanglement and movement. Findings cast the activity of educational choice as a complex process of coming to know, influenced by possibilities, relationalities and entanglements. It starts as an internal process of thinking where educational choice is not limited by practical circumstances but is open to different possibilities. Relationalities emphasise how choice is not a linear process but a dynamic, iterative and entangled process. Entanglements bring choice alive, as a lived experience, an activity that is threaded through time, space, and place. My conclusions are two-fold, firstly that educational choice does not begin with a choice of school, but is a relational activity of thinking about education, and secondly through the introduction of diffractive activity as a framework for thinking about individual human activity