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Take a walk: following the complexities of young children’s lives

A new journal issue presents readers with a range of possibilities. We are able to make our own comparisons, drawing together ideas and reflections across different studies, methodologies and foci brought side by side. But is this how most journal issues are now read? Editors bring together a series of articles but readers may search and find only by targeted key words, especially if our engagement with journal reading is almost all online. This is an adjustment that newspaper editors also need to face as a higher percentage of readers engage via a screen. Articles online are not anchored in the same way, but float ‘free’, whether we are reading news or academic papers. However, a slower and more eclectic read of a journal issue may sometimes lead to surprising connections from study to study and to our own research. So this is an invitation to take a walk... Taken as a whole, the articles in this issue are indicative of the geographical and methodological breadth of research currently being undertaken across Europe and beyond, concerning young children’s lives. The texts travel from rural China (Fleer and Li) and urban Russia (Bayanova and Mustafin), to Turkey (Kotaman), Cyprus (Tsangaridou and Genethliou), Finland (Iivonen, Sääkslahti, Mehtälä, Villberg, Soini and Poskiparta), to a Korean child in French-speaking Canada (Kim). International perspectives are further developed through cross-national conceptual, empirical and policy-driven collaborations. Huser, Dockett and Perry’s conceptual article brings together German and Australian academics’ shared understandings of the metaphor of ‘bridges’ in transitions. Hammer and He’s empirical article is based on a comparative study of science teaching in kindergartens in Norway and China. Moving to the policy level, Nyland and Ng explore recent curriculum changes in Singapore and Australia. Such assemblage of ideas is one of the strengths of this journal and the community of early childhood researchers involved in EECERA activities, this dynamic process of research and exchange. This issue also enables comparison by subject matter, featuring two articles on the under-researched area of the relationship between young children’s physical activity and motor-skills in Finland (Iivonen et al.) and in Norway (Sigmundsson and Haga).