Refocusing our attention to children's learning and the complex interplay of context and culture

Editorial: In spite of a strengthening evidence base leading to an increasing number of countries aligning their early years curricular frameworks with experiential and play-based pedagogies (see Hunter and Walsh this edition), a persistent and pervasive globalised and globalising neoliberal discourse continually directs our attention to the massification and standardisation of children's learning outcomes. These are often accompanied by the drawing out in public discourse of an overly simplistic linear and unilateral relationship between learning outcomes and adult/educator inputs. In such a context, it is easy for us to be distracted from themes of central importance to the early years, such as the nature and conceptualisation of children's learning, the character and effects of the sociocultural context and more nuanced understandings about the influence of the educator, and the relationships between their identities, knowledge base and the various pedagogical approaches that they adopt. This edition of the IJEYE provides a refreshing opportunity to refocus our attention and re-affirm commitments to these key concerns about teaching and learning by enabling a close examination of learning and context, not in terms of how children are meeting pre-established standardised outcomes, but in how they are showing and acquiring understanding through joyful and meaningful engagement and interaction, the dynamic relationship between educators teaching and children's learning and the multistranded dimensions of these interactions across various knowledge domains. In addition to the more traditional frames of maths and science, the research about learning and teaching reported here includes a contemporary concern about the environment and children's learning in and about nature (see this edition–Klaar and Öhman, Gustavsson and Pramling, Westman and Bergmark). A further strand of important research being reported here relates to the cultural context and identity of the educator and how this shapes the teaching/learning approach, portrayed in a particularly powerful way in the article reporting research about home-based educators, their career aspirations and how they structure children's learning opportunities (see Tonyan and Nuttall). An additional richness in this edition's diverse collection of research articles lies in the array of theoretical and methodological tools and approaches used in conceptualising the research and conducting the analysis. These range from research conducted within more commonly used developmental, constructivist and sociocultural approaches to studies located in phenomenological and philosophical frameworks (philosophy of the lifeworld, Dewey's pragmatic philosophy). Analysis and interpretation of findings used in the studies in this edition are similarly diverse, ranging from studies using post-structural analyses of power and agency (Wood), Variation Theory (Gustavsson and Pramling), Epistemological Move Analysis and Substantive Learning Quality Analysis (Westman and Bergmark) and Tonyan and Nuttall's use of Ecological Eco(logical)-Cultural Theory (ECT). Such rich diversity in theory and method benefit the early years research field enormously.