Pandemic-Provoked Throwntogetherness : Narrating Change in ECEC in Canada

In Canada, multiple, intersecting, and incommensurable narratives promote investment in a public ECEC system. These dominant narratives are typically justified through an entanglement of discourses, including gender equity, colonialism, developmentalism, investment in children as future workers, and childcare as social infrastructure. With COVID-19, renewed economic arguments propose ECEC as an essential service, jump-starting an economy ravaged by the pandemic. Taking up a conversational approach, we question the potency of dominant narratives proliferated in media and policy initiatives as a way to effect large-scale change, and we seek to better understand alternative narratives of ECEC. We are drawn to those spaces where a range of new texts and narratives are generating possibilities for transformative changes. We co-create a bricolage of minor stories (Taylor, 2020) of change, keeping in mind Eve Tuck’s (2018a) theory of change and Elise Couture-Grondin’s (2018) premise of stories as theory

Passionate About Early Childhood Educational Policy, Practice, and Pedagogy: Exploring Intersections Between Discourses, Experiences, and Feelings...Knitting New Terms of Belonging

We are five early childhood researchers, from across Canada, thrown together amongst a series of alarming discourses, where developmental, economic, and neuroscientific rationales for ECEC drown out alternative theoretical perspectives, as well as personal experience, values, subjective knowledges, and the fierce passion we feel for our work. In the midst of this “throwntogethness” (Massey, 2005), how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? How do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the Canadian ECEC field as we knit together alternative ways of being, doing, and acting, figuring out what resonates in localized situations (Osgood, 2006)? To begin to answer these questions, we think with feminist theory (Bezanson; 2018; Langford et al., 2016; Prentice, 2009); the politics of the event of place, (Massey, 2005) and relational and spatial networked discursive entanglements (Massey, 2005; Nichols et al., 2012; Ingold, 1995; Haraway, 2016) as we untangle three vignettes related to advocating for a competent universal public ECEC system; writing post-developmental curriculum frameworks; and weaving productive relationships between university researchers and early childhood practitioners. These vignettes illuminate our struggles to “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) suggests, stubbornly hanging on to the hope of producing new terms of belonging (Burns & Lundh, 2011) as a form of resistance, allowing us to open up spaces to imagine, tell alternative stories (Moss, 2014), and create real change within our local contexts

Unfreezing Disney’s Frozen through playful and intentional co-authoring/co-playing

Often children’s opportunities to play are constrained by particular interpretations of play that instrumentalize its value in the service of adult-defined, future-oriented goals for children. As an alternative, we draw upon specific theoretical insights of play and playfulness, to closely examine the power of the present and past in childhood and adulthood, through ongoing play episodes created and re-created by co-playing, co-authoring adults and children. This particular playing collective takes up common popular cultural scripts embedded in the film Frozen, and through intertextual and multimodal adventuring, indoors and out, reveal emergent and playful uncertainties and potentialities that can occur when children and adults are committed to play as “a thing by itself” (Huizinga, 1950, p. 45)

Unfreezing Disney’s Frozen through playful and intentional co-authoring/co-playing

Often children’s opportunities to play are constrained by particular interpretations of play that instrumentalize its value in the service of adult-defined, future-oriented goals for children. As an alternative, we draw upon specific theoretical insights of play and playfulness, to closely examine the power of the present and past in childhood and adulthood, through ongoing play episodes created and re-created by co-playing, co-authoring adults and children. This particular playing collective takes up common popular cultural scripts embedded in the film Frozen, and through intertextual and multimodal adventuring, indoors and out, reveal emergent and playful uncertainties and potentialities that can occur when children and adults are committed to play as “a thing by itself” (Huizinga, 1950, p. 45)

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

Seeking Balance in Motion: The Role of Spontaneous Free Play in Promoting Social and Emotional Health in Early Childhood Care and Education

There is accumulating scientific evidence of the potential of play and playfulness to enhance human capacity to respond to adversity and cope with the stresses of everyday life. In play we build a repertoire of adaptive, flexible responses to unexpected events, in an environment separated from the real consequences of those events. Playfulness helps us maintain social and emotional equilibrium in times of rapid change and stress. Through play, we experience flow—A feeling of being taken to another place, out of time, where we have controlled of the world. This paper argues that spontaneous free play, controlled and directed by children and understood from the child’s perspective, contributes to children’s subjective experience of well-being, building a foundation for life-long social and emotional health. The paradoxical nature of young children’s spontaneous free play is explored. Adaptability, control, flexibility, resilience and balance result from the experience of uncertainty, unpredictability, novelty and non-productivity. These essential dimensions of young children’s spontaneous free play typically produce play which is experienced by adults as chaotic, nonsensical and disruptive. The article concludes with a preliminary discussion of the challenges and possibilities of providing for spontaneous free play indoors, in early childhood care and education programs

Differences in COVID Related Anxiety Between Those with and without Type 2 Diabetes

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals with diabetes may be at higher risk for experiencing negative behavioral, psychosocial, and disease-related outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to compare COVID-19-related anxiety between adults with and without type 2 diabetes. Two separate samples were recruited for this study from web-based panels of adults: 372 adults with type 2 diabetes and 259 adults without type 2 diabetes. COVID-19-related anxiety was assessed using the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S)This scale includes 7 items scored on a 5-point Likert scale. Scores are summed to generate a total score with higher scores indicating greater anxiety. Bivariate comparisons were used to compare the sociodemographic and medical characteristics of the samples. An independent samples t-test was used to compare the means of FCVS-19 between the two samples. A multivariable linear regression model was used to examine the relationship between diabetes status and the COVID-19 anxiety scale, controlling for age, race, sex, level of education, income, having a primary care provider, and health insurance status. There was a significant difference in the COVID-19 anxiety scores between those with Type 2 diabetes (M = 20.34, SD = 6.93) and those without Type 2 diabetes (M = 18.37, SD = 7.07; t = 3.48, df = 548.50, p \u3c.001). The multivariable regression model accounted for 16.1% of the variance in COVID-19 anxiety (F [8, 622] = 14.92, p \u3c.001). Diabetes status was a significant predictor of COVID-19 anxiety (B = 2.20, SE = 0.56, p \u3c .001). Age was also significantly associated with lower COVID anxiety (B = -0.17, SE = 0.02, p \u3c.001). However, race, sex, level of education, income, having a primary care provider, and health insurance status were not significantly associated with COVID-19 anxiety. Adults with type 2 diabetes are significantly more likely to experience COVID-19 anxiety than participants without type 2 diabetes – even when controlling for potentially important sociodemographic and healthcare variables. Additional research is needed to determine whether COVID-related anxiety is adaptive or maladaptive among adults with type 2 diabetes. If maladaptive, additional work is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of evidence-based approaches for the treatment of COVID-related anxiety in medical populations with risk factors for severe COVID-related outcomes

Passionate About Early Childhood Education Policy, Practice, and Pedagogy : Exploring Intersections Between Discourses, Experiences, and Feelings...Knitting New Terms of Belonging

We are five early childhood researchers, from across Canada, thrown together amongst a series of alarming discourses, where developmental, economic, and neuroscientific rationales for ECEC drown out alternative theoretical perspectives, as well as personal experience, values, subjective knowledges, and the fierce passion we feel for our work. In the midst of this “throwntogethness” (Massey, 2005), how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? How do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the Canadian ECEC field as we knit together alternative ways of being, doing, and acting, figuring out what resonates in localized situations (Osgood, 2006)? To begin to answer these questions, we think with feminist theory (Bezanson; 2018; Langford et al., 2016; Prentice, 2009); the politics of the event of place, (Massey, 2005) and relational and spatial networked discursive entanglements (Massey, 2005; Nichols et al., 2012; Ingold, 1995; Haraway, 2016) as we untangle three vignettes related to advocating for a competent universal public ECEC system; writing post-developmental curriculum frameworks; and weaving productive relationships between university researchers and early childhood practitioners. These vignettes illuminate our struggles to “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) suggests, stubbornly hanging on to the hope of producing new terms of belonging (Burns & Lundh, 2011) as a form of resistance, allowing us to open up spaces to imagine, tell alternative stories (Moss, 2014), and create real change within our local contexts