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This paper examines whether participation in quality early child education (ECE) lessens special education needs and insulates children against requiring costly, intensive supports. Sixty years of longitudinal data coupled with new research in the United Kingdom and Canada were examined to demonstrate how quality ECE reduces special education needs and mitigates the intensity of later supports for children with special education needs. Research demonstrates that quality ECE strengthens children's language, literacy/numeracy, behavioural regulation, and enhances high-school completion. International longitudinal studies confirm that two years of quality ECE lowers special education placement by 40–60% for children with cognitive risk factors and 10–30% for social/behavioural risk factors. Explicit social-emotional learning outcomes also need to be embedded into ECE curricular frameworks, as maladaptive behaviours, once entrenched, are more difficult (and costly) to remediate. Children who do not have the benefit of attending quality ECE in the earliest years are more likely to encounter learning difficulties in school, in turn impacting the well-being and prosperity of their families and societies.

Shortly before the Second World War, a woman who had never accepted her orphan status, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, nicknamed ‘Little Coco’ by her father and known as ‘Coco’ to her relatives, became the first women in history to build a world-class industrial empire. By 1935, Coco, a fashion designer and industry captain, was employing more than 4,000 workers and had sold more than 28,000 dresses, tailored jackets and women's suits. Born into a poor family and raised in an orphanage, she enjoyed an intense social life in Paris in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with artists, creators and the rising stars of her time.

Thanks to her entrepreneurial skills, she was able to innovate in her methods and in her trendsetting approach to fashion design and promotion. Coco Chanel was committed and creative, had the soul of an entrepreneur and went on to become a world leader in a brand new sector combining fashion, accessories and perfumes that she would help shape. By the end of her life, she had redefined French elegance and revolutionized the way people dressed.

In this paper we build upon previous research that examines how workers in devalued occupations transform structural conditions that threaten their dignity into resources with which to protect themselves. Through in-depth interviews and fieldwork with early childhood educators (ECE), we examine the work experiences of teachers in four distinct work contexts: daycare centers and within elementary schools, each in either the public or private sector. We find that these different school organizational contexts shape what kinds of identity challenges early childhood teachers experience. Different organizational contexts not only subject teachers to different threats to their work-related identity but also have different potential identity resources embedded within them that teachers can use on their own behalf. Thus, while all the early childhood educators in our sample struggle with being employed within a devalued occupation, the identity strategies they have developed to protect their self-worth vary across employment contexts. We show that the strategies these interactive service workers use to solve identity-related problems of dignity at work involve the creative conversion of constraints they face at work into resources that help them achieve valued work identities.

Discussions surrounding a lower voting age and its outcomes have been emerging in Canadian public discourse for over a decade. While discussions surrounding a lower voting age have centred around adults' concerns of young people's maturity, competency and interest in politics the voices of children have frequently been excluded from these conversations. This chapter aims to reinforce a visible sense of child-centred practice in political discourse and spaces. It is important to note that how we come to think about participation can be judged from many different perspectives; however, in this instance, I have had a chance to explore the question through the lens of the young people involved in the Vote 16 Steering Group who identified meaningful participation as a fundamental aspect of the value they saw in the opportunity. This chapter invites us to think about child-centred practice in relation to notions of meaningful participation (meaningfulness) through: (1) the value of the opportunity, (2) understanding change and political efficacy, (3) voice and the vote and (4) political identity.

Purpose – This chapter maps the conceptual territory that research on school shootings shares with cultivation analysis.

Methodology/approach – It outlines the history of cultivation analysis, which used the statistical methods of content analysis and survey research to argue that television violence was rampant and sexist, and that this had the effect of making audiences fearful. The point of this history is to show that the model was conceptually grounded in critical approaches to media, and established questions about the ideology of media violence that set the grounds for school shooting studies.

Findings – In particular, the chapter focuses on similarities between cultivation analysis and ritual theory, and the cultivation thesis that violence represents gender hierarchies, as the two most obvious points of intersections with studies on school shootings. It suggests that these intersections help explain why a “school shooting” frame was deployed to other sorts of media violence, and debates about the effects of media violence, using Jared Loughner's attack on Gabrielle Giffords as a case study.

Practical implications – Emerging concerns about the effects of aggressive news punditry and political commentary can be addressed by reflecting on what studies of school shootings say about the more general politics of media violence, and cultivation theory is an invaluable resource in this endeavor.

Originality/value of paper – Academically, an engagement with cultivation theory underlines how school shooting studies contribute to critical media research in general, by demonstrating the validity of “second generation” models of media influence in the digital age.

Gabrielle Civil, a Black feminist performance artist and professor, discusses developing and teaching her “Pleasure Syllabus,” a three-lecture module for a mandatory first-year undergraduate writing course. Grounded in Black feminism, especially adrienne maree brown's call for “pleasure activism” and Audre Lorde's embrace of the erotic, this syllabus aimed to consider and activate embodied knowledge. Contemplating pleasure (“what does and does not feel good”) also became a way to confront rape culture. With this module, Civil hoped to intervene in the rampant sexual violence happening on college campuses. She acknowledges the challenges of negotiating trauma and gender-based violence in the classroom. (Teaching about desire, sexuality, violation, and consent on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic was especially tough.) She shares specific strategies that supported her pedagogy and offers some suggestions for curricular planning while emphasizing that no one-size-fits-all approach exists to trauma-informed teaching. Her curriculum included visual art, music, graphics, and movement exercises along with critical/creative writing. Civil includes her actual “Pleasure Syllabus” and her module's signature assignment.

Climate change is recognised as a severe threat to human and planetary wellbeing. Many children and young people around the world have chosen resistance as their form of resilience in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises that threaten their current and future wellbeing. Their activism has widened the discourse pertaining to the climate emergency from a narrow focus on technical and scientific sources, bringing the discussion into broader public consciousness. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), the context for youth climate activism also reflects commitments to Māori, the Indigenous people, and to Pacific Peoples, given the ongoing impacts of histories of colonisation. This chapter draws from a range of focus group interviews with young Aotearoa (New Zealand) high school climate activists, and Māori and Pacific children and young people ranging in age from 10 into their 20s. Data were gathered during a recent small-scale project to develop a wellbeing guide which accompanies a climate change education programme for schools. It identifies the collective, collaborative leadership exhibited by these young people of diverse backgrounds, as well as their sophisticated analysis and advocacy for urgent remedies to address the climate crisis. It is argued that, instead of focussing on the blinkered continuation of restrictive assessment-driven pedagogies, teachers need to meet the moment of the current convergence of inter-related crises which include, along with the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, pandemic related exacerbation of socio-economic inequities, global conflict, and the unsustainable agenda of current global neoliberal economics. This can be done by supporting children and young people with knowledge and skills for climate action as they seek hope through active participation in endeavours to reshape their potential futures.

The racial makeup of the United States' elementary school population is in flux. While much discussion addresses the shrinking White population and the growing Latinx population, less highlighted is the growing number of individuals who identify as belonging to two or more races. This group of individuals currently constitutes the youngest, fastest growing racial subgroup. According to the US Census' projections, the two or more races population will grow by 226% between 2014 and 2060, almost double the Asian population, the next fastest growing subgroup. Though individuals with multiplicity to their racial backgrounds have existed in the United States since its inception, only recently has the government provided the option for individuals to quantify their self-reported belonging to multiple races. The resulting statistics alert educators to the fact that individuals identifying as biracial and multiracial are going to be an increasingly sizable group of students requiring, as all children do, individualized care and support within school walls. In this chapter, I draw upon Black-White biracial women's elementary school recounts to help educational practitioners understand lived experiences that inform young girls' navigations of the intersections of their Blackness and Whiteness in schooling spaces.

It was nearly twenty years ago that Howard Zehr (1990) wrote the first book about Restorative Justice (Changing Lenses), John Braithwaite (1989) wrote about “Crime, Shame and Reintegration” and New Zealand introduced the family group conference – a restorative process for resolving matters when children and young people became involved in offending.11Family group conferences are also used in the child welfare system when options are being considered for children thought to be in need of care or protection. These events marked the transition from a theoretical debate about alternatives to Western models of criminal justice to the recognition of a new theory, a new set of values and a new practical alternative to the Western-style court system. Since then, theory has evolved and many other jurisdictions have experimented with various processes for delivering restorative justice (Johnstone & Van Ness, 2007). Perhaps the most common form, especially for young people has been the use of the restorative conference in youth justice. From its beginnings in New Zealand, it has spread to Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Ireland, Macao, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Singapore, South Africa, Tonga, Thailand and the United States of America. Many different forms of restorative family conferencing for young people who have offended have emerged in these different states, provinces and countries for many different types of offences and for people from many different cultures. In this chapter, I want to briefly review what has been learnt about the transferability of the process. In particular, what are the questions that have been largely resolved and what issues still remain unresolved? And what are the key conditions which must be met for the process to work in different jurisdictions and among different peoples and what aspects of the process tend to vary to reflect the diversity of cultures and customs within and between peoples in various areas?