Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care

Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care relates issues of early childhood to the sociology of childhood, philosophy, ethics, political science, and other related fields and to an analysis of the world we live in today. It places these issues in a global context and draws on work from Canada, Sweden, and Italy, including the world famous infant-toddler centers and preschools in Reggio Emilia.

Working with postmodern ideas, this book questions the search to define and measure quality in the early childhood field and its tendency to reduce philosophical issues of value to purely technical and managerial issues of expert knowledge and measurement.

With a brand new Preface to this classic text, the authors argue that there are other ways than the 'discourse of quality' for understanding and evaluating early childhood pedagogical work and relate these to alternative ways of understanding early childhood itself and the purposes of early childhood institutions.

Authored by Gunilla Dahlberg, Peter Moss, and Alan Pence, Routledge, 1999; softbound, 206 pages