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Teacher–child interactions in Early Childhood Education and Care classrooms: characteristics, predictivity, dependency and methodological issues

The present special issue ties in with those fundamental questions in educational research by presenting current international research on the characteristics, predictivity, dependency and methodological issues of teacher–child interactions in ECEC classrooms. Teacher–child interactions in ECEC classrooms, which are assumed to serve ‘as the primary engines’ (Bronfenbrenner and Morris 2006, 798) of children’s development, have been a focus of theoretical work and empirical research for several decades. To cite just a few prominent examples: theoretical thoughts on the importance of adults for the promotion of young children, which were introduced by the psychologist Lew Semjonowitsch Vygotski (1896–1934), have been considered a crucial basis for the development of concepts such as ‘scaffolding’ (e.g. Berk and Winsler 1995; Bodrova and Leong 2012) and ‘sustained shared thinking’ (e.g. Purdon 2016; Siraj-Blatchford 2009). These concepts play a pivotal role with regard to the determination of developmentally appropriate high-quality teacher–child interactions in preschools and comparable settings (Bredekamp and Copple 2002; Winsler and Carlton 2003). In addition, theoretical approaches that rely on the domain specificity of children’s knowledge acquisition (e.g. Carey and Spelke 1993; Wellman and Gelman 1998), as well as broader theory-based frameworks like the Process-, Person-, Context-, Time-Model (e.g. Bronfenbrenner and Morris 2006; see also Essa and Burnham 2001), also provide an important basis for researchers to investigate the characteristics, predictivity, dependency and methodological issues of teacher–child interactions in ECEC classrooms. In fact, the theoretical underpinned significance of teacher–child interactions in ECEC classrooms was validated in numerous quantitative and qualitative empirical studies, which focused on various topics, such as quality characteristics of teacher–child interactions in ECEC classrooms (e.g. Smidt and Rossbach 2016), predictivity of teacher–child interactions for the development of children’s competencies (e.g. Ulferts and Anders 2016), predictors of teacher–child interactions (e.g. Castle et al. 2016) and methodological problems corresponding to teacher– child interactions (e.g. Colwell et al. 2013). Against this background, the purpose of the special issue is to bring international studies from interdisciplinary backgrounds together and present the current results in early teacher–child interaction research. Concretely, the considered studies conducted in Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Greece and Portugal each aim to enrich the scientific discourse and provide fruitful implications for policy and practice. Seven articles have been considered for this special issue.