INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 12: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THEORY, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Abstract

When Brent McBride and Nancy Barbour approached me with a proposal for an Advances in Early Education and Day Care theme volume on child development laboratory schools, I was eager to pursue the topic with them. This Advances series has always been dedicated serving as a forum to furthering the knowledge base on all aspects of early education, broadly defined. The disciplinary roots of the field are necessarily interdisciplinary, reflecting the range of disciplines that are relevant to us, including sociology, psychology, policy studies, curriculum studies, history, and related fields. A fair amount of our existing knowledge base was generated in campus laboratory programs, which were designed to be interdisciplinary, as Barbour shows us in her chapter in this volume. At the same time, I am aware of some of the turmoil and transformation that has shaken campus child development programs over the past two decades (Keyes, 1991); venerable programs have closed, converted from nursery schools to child care, altered to reflect communities beyond the ivory tower of campus, or asked to do things that they had never done in the past. What might a special volume on campus laboratory programs for children tell us about the state of knowledge, and the state of the field of early childhood education and care?

Citation

Reifel, S. (2003), "INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 12: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THEORY, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE", Mcbride, B.A. (Ed.) Bridging the Gap Between Theory, Research and Practice: The Role of... (Advances in Early Education and Day Care, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0270-4021(03)12012-5