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A case study is reported of a relationship-based early intervention (EI) service for children with complex needs in New Zealand. The purpose of this paper is to explore parent and professional views and perceptions about the key characteristics of a relationship-based EI service.

This qualitative study involved interviews and observations with 39 participants (10 children, 11 parents and 18 professionals).

Parents appreciated the knowledgeable, well-trained professionals who invested time in getting to know (and love) children and families and family practices, worked together in harmony and valued the contribution that parents made to their child’s progress and achievement. Professionals described the key characteristics of the service in terms of the range of therapies offered by the service, the focus on a strengths-based and family-focussed approach, play-based assessments, acceptance and value of family practices (including responsiveness to Maori and bi-culturalism), appropriate and respectful places to meet and greet families and work with children, and recruitment and retention of humble professionals who identified with the ethos of the model. Observable social processes and structures within the delivery of the model include respectful professional interactions and relationships with children and families, integrated professional working, effective and timely communication between professionals and families, pedagogy of listening, waiting and personalisation, engaged families and actively participating children.

This case study emphasises the significance of professional love and relational pedagogy to EI services and the value of this to improving parent-child relationships and children’s long-term outcomes.

Business Schools and other executive training providers have come under withering attacks since before the global financial crisis for their standardised, non-integrated executive curricula, rigid methods of instruction and weak participant engagement. The crisis has extended this critique. Further criticisms relate to the inability of providers who are schooled in Western paradigms of instruction to manage increasingly multi-cultural, executive workshops. This chapter proposes a play-based approach to executive training. The chapter argues that a play-based approach re-dresses some of the above imbalances and re-positions the interests of entrepreneurial and executive learners. The chapter evaluates the development of the approach to learning by using play-based and experiential-learning simulator called Synergy. Initial arguments are presented with indications and results on why play-based designs can offer a productive response to some of the current criticisms that are levelled at executive and entrepreneurial training provision.

This paper offers a reflection of a research process aimed at listening to young children's voices in their everyday school life through a play-based context in a Scottish school. Throughout the research process, the complexity of conducting this research was kept in mind as listening to children's voices presents methodological and conceptual difficulties and tensions. Reflecting on the research process after the data was collected, the process was critiqued using Deleuze-Guattarian ideas. The critique aims at opening and challenging each researcher, allowing them to think-again about the next research project aimed at listening to children's voices.

The research involved an observation study that took place over one week in a primary school in Central Scotland. As part of the educators' approach to play-based pedagogy, children had the opportunity to engage in free play throughout the day. Observations were chosen as the main approach to “capture” children's voices in their natural settings.

The empirical research brought forth two main ideas, that of children as agents, and how children amplify their voices through play. The reflective part offers the possibility of understanding the intensities and forces when conducting such research and the possibilities of engaging with these.

This paper offers a critique of research aimed at listening to children's voices. The aim is not to limit engagement in researching children's voices but to open, or make complex, such processes.

This chapter explores how to introduce young children to coding as a literacy using mobile devices. Learning how to code is changing what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century and, increasingly, early years educators are expected to teach young children how to code. The idea that coding is a literacy practice is relatively new, and this chapter first presents strategies for introducing coding without technology. It then explores how to scaffold young children’s coding literacy proficiencies through programming and coding robotic toys. When young children have become familiar with coding and solving challenges using concrete materials and robotic toys, it is possible to introduce mobile devices, apps and humanoid robots in playful ways. This chapter explores how this can be done.

This chapter will explore the impact of life in warzones, life in transit, and life in camps on children’s development. It will consider the potential of play-based approaches in supporting children holistically, providing respite, and enabling positive learning experiences.

It draws upon the authors’ experiences of two visits to the Dunkirk Refugee Children’s Centre at La Liniere refugee camp, located in the Grande-Synthe area of Dunkirk. We will discuss the approaches that have proved successful in supporting children’s learning and development, the challenges faced, and the lessons learned. It will consider how these approaches could support successful transition into more formal education. Finally, it will examine the implications for staff training and development.

Drawing from the inclusive pedagogical approach in action framework and Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory concepts of habitus, field and capital, this chapter positions literacy and numeracy learning as core components of further learning, and living successfully in the world. It addresses learner diversity in early childhood settings and recognises the uniqueness of every child within the context of a broad range of cultural knowledge. The chapter concludes with two sample lessons and reflective questions, which early childhood teachers can use as models to expand children’s literacy and numeracy concepts, enabling creative and critical interactions across a range of modes in the context of everyday life across families and cultures.

This study aims to investigate the social and affective impacts of inviting residents of a socially divided, post-war city to “play tourist” for a day, exploring their own backyards with a new intentionality and perspective.

This qualitative research within a transformative worldview uses a creative, place-based approach of role-playing based upon principles of participatory action research.

While each tour was unique, participants’ insights reflected three common themes: shifts in observations and perceptions of place arising from the intentionality of the “tourist” lens, a sense of freedom created by the touristic research opportunity, and the varying abilities of tourism experiences to help build empathy or awareness in a post-conflict setting.

The inventive research approach allows for a unique examination of local tourism-styled explorations, a subject of growing interest that has largely been overlooked in literature, while paying special attention to ways in which a history of conflict may manifest in contemporary urban tourism experiences.

Currently, the world is experiencing the highest levels of displaced peoples ever recorded by The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2016). Consequently, greater numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers are being resettled in host nations in Anglophone and some European nations. An increasing body of literature is examining the consequences for educational systems as this new and increasingly diverse cohort of students enters various education sectors – preschools, schools, universities and adult education. Despite a surge of interest in this area, however, the practical and theoretical implications for school leaders’ practices and praxis remain under-examined and under-theorized. Moreover, scholarship on leadership for diversity fails to capture the complex nature of leading learning for refugee students who too frequently are homogenized and essentialized under the umbrella of immigrant or culturally diverse students. This chapter contributes to filling a critical gap in our knowledge in these areas.