Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation - Softcover

'[This is a] wonderfully rich text. We feel the book to be an expression of our identity too...This a ‘good book’. Good because it is the product of dialogue and because it offers itself not only for consent, but also for dissent and negotiation by its non-dogmatic tone. Readers will feel welcomed, listened to and respected in their opinions, even when those opinions are in opposition to the authors.' - Carlina Rinaldi, executive Consultant for Reggio Children (taken from her preface to the 2nd edition)

"This book would be a good reesource for practitioner s as well as academic researchers. Overall, it provides interesting insight as to the philosophical perspectives of early education...The book accomplishes its goal of establishing itself outside the realms of dominant thought in developmental psychology." --NHSA Dialog, 10(3-4), 164-165; 2007

Taking a broad approach, this second edition of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care relates issues of early childhood to the sociology of childhood, philosophy, ethics, political science and other fields and to an analysis of the world we live in today. It places these issues in a global context and draws on work from Canada, Sweden and Italy, including the world famous nurseries in Reggio Emilia.

Working with postmodern ideas, this book questions the search to define and measure quality in the early childhood field and its tendency to reduce philosophical issues of value to purely technical and managerial issues of expert knowledge and measurement.

The authors argue that there are other ways than the 'discourse of quality' for understanding and evaluating early childhood pedagogical work and relate these to alternative ways of understanding early childhood itself and the purposes of early childhood institutions.