Abigail Hackett

• Professor of Childhood and Education at Sheffield Hallam University

This article takes a transdisciplinary approach to a relatively simple-sounding task – tree measuring. It asks the question, ‘How many ways are there to measure a tree?’, in order to provoke a discussion of our different ways of knowing. It attempts to engage a reader in thinking about disciplines and what they do. It does so by sharing insights fr...

What does it mean to bring very young children into conversations about climate change? Voices of the Future was a 3-year, multi-site project based in the UK, aiming to investigate treescapes through participatory research with children and young people. This paper focuses on a strand of the project that explored playing and making in and with tree...

Do you like apples? Do you want to plant trees? Do you love books? Qualitative research with children is peppered with vignettes of what we conceptualise as the ‘Good Research Child’. Good Research Children tell stories, plant trees, eat healthily, love reading and engage enthusiastically with researchers as co-playmates. They explore the world wit...

This article uses an Islamic lens to explore the question, What are the identities, aspirations, and motivations for Pakistani and Muslim women learning English? As Muslim women, the research participants had a strong allegiance to motherhood, with children being a motivating factor in learning English. This study explores how motherhood identities...

In this paper, we seek to intervene in the proposition that there are recognisable or abstract-able modes of doing qualitative writing, and instead affirm that writing from a feminist scholarly perspective is often an embodied, domestic, haptic and serendipitous gesture. Occurring in in-between spaces and moments, in which personal and professional...

n this paper, the authors report the findings of a narrative review of extant international research literature to propose a conceptual model for how young children’s language is entangled with place. Educational policy, curriculum docu-ments, and speech and language therapy assessments in England tend to frame children as placeless and treat the p...

In this article, the authors argue for what Édouard Glissant terms the 'right to opacity' in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE). We draw from Glissant's writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of 'opacity' and 'transparency', to consider two vignettes from sensory ethnographic rese...

In this commentary, we collectively examine a recent article titled “Effectiveness of Intense Accent Modification Training with Refugees from Burma” by Burda et al.(2022). Whilst our response is aimed at revealing the theoretical and methodological shortcomings of Burda et al., it will also expose the raciolinguistic ideologies in accent modificati...

This book challenges the developmentalist paradigm that dominates research into children and childhood, focussing on observation as a research method. It offers new postdevelopmental ways of conducting childhood observations which are diverse in context and theoretical orientation, and in the process, deconstructs the dominant traditions of childho...

By troubling notions of time-as-progress and human exceptionality, this paper considers what shifts in conceptualisations of children’s literacies and futures might be possible in the context of faltering of capitalist logics of progress. The paper draws on a 3 years ethnographic study with families and young children in northern England, which ask...

This paper draws on 3 years of ethnographic research with young children and their families in a northern English town, employing a more‐than‐human lens to pay attention to what, beyond humans, might be involved in the emergence of children's literacies. The paper focuses on the role of the body and place in the emergence of young children's vocali...

The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...

In response to increasing global environmental precarity, this chapter considers what kinds of literacies will be most relevant for young children, for the future they are likely to inherit. Setting out the problematics of human exceptionalism and “time as progress” that education in general and literacy in particular tend to get caught up in, I pr...

More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood draws on a three-year ethnographic study into the role of place, materiality and the body in the literacies of young children aged 12–36 months. It builds a picture of how children participate in, or become caught up in, literacies and language in the contexts of their everyday lives. Throughout the boo...

This paper explores what place means for early childhood education at a time of global environmental precarity. We draw on fieldwork in Arctic Norway, where kindergarten children spend time with snow for more than half of the year. Children’s movement attunes to the nuances and diversity of the snow, as seasons, temperature, light, wind and weather...

This paper charts an on‐going process emerging from a collaborative project between Manchester Art Gallery, and early childhood researchers and practitioners, who are currently working together to develop a new learning space for families. It revolves around the potential of exhibiting a collection of bonbonnieres in this space. These little 18th C...

This article critically interrogates the model of language that underpins early years policy and pedagogy. Our arguments emerge from an ethnographic study involving 2-year-olds attending a day care centre that had begun to hold a substantial proportion of its sessions outdoors. The resultant shift in pedagogy coincided with changes in the children’...

The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers ref...

This paper makes a case for a view of young children’s meaning-making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning-making emerges, we focus on meaning-making through running and rolling that we have observed in ea...

This article explores how close attention to sound can help one to rethink literacy in early childhood education. Through an analysis of text, audio, video, and photographic data from a sound walk undertaken with a parent and a child, we make two arguments. First, contrary to skills-based approaches that abstract literacy from context, we show how...

In May 2017, a group of museum researchers and practitioners met to discuss the writing of Elee Kirk (1977–2016), whose pioneering doctoral study of young children visiting a natural history museum connects with our own work and practice in a number of different ways. Kirk [2015. “Budding Photographers: Young Children’s Digital Photography in a Mus...

In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children’s museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children’s presence in museums. We hope that t...

This chapter attempts the question: how can one re-imagine provision for parenting and families with young children in Rotherham through the knowledge that exists in these families and communities? It does so by detailing a series of family den-building events, with community partners, in order to think through how children learn and have experienc...

Mothers live in a universe that has not been accurately described. The right words have not been coined. Using habitual vocabulary sends us straight down the same old much-trodden paths. But there are other paths to which these footpaths do not lead. There are whole stretches of motherhood that no one has explored. (Stadlen, 2005, p.12) At Clifton...

This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children’s museum visitin...

This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris’ [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childho...

In this article, the authors bring together the cultural studies of emotion with theories that foreground the agency of place and objects in order to analyse the entanglement of place, children and emotion (particularly fear) in children’s play encounters. When children, objects and places come into play with each other, intensities and emotions em...

This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualization of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis,...

In this article, we bring together relational arts practice (Kester, 2004) with collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter, 2015) in order to propose art not as a way of teaching children literacy, but as a lens to enable researchers and practitioners to view children’s literacies differently. Both relational arts practice and collaborative e...

This article describes a series of studies of young children’s experience of place in which parents acted as co-researchers, collecting and analysing data. This approach to research resulted in an emphasis on sensory engagement and embodied experience, for both adults and children. As my own young daughter accompanied me during this research, the b...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community. Design/methodology/approach – At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed t...

This article describes the walking and moving of young children around places. It is based on an ethnographic study of children aged between 24 and 36 months visiting a museum. Drawing on Ingold's (2007) concept of wayfaring, the author argues movement through place creates embodied, tacit ways of knowing and experiencing the world. This embodied a...

In this chapter, I draw on a range of interdisciplinary theories of space and place to show how they enabled me to make sense of my research with young children and their families. In particular, during an ethnographic study of young children’s meaning-making in museums, I turned to a range of theories of space and place in order to make sense of w...

This chapter reflects on two ethnographic studies that both necessitated the foregrounding of non-linguistic frameworks, drawing on visual research methods, in order to best understand children’s meaning making. The cultural contexts of these two studies, and the age ranges of the participants, did not fit easily with Western linguistic theory, but...

This book highlights how recognising the role of space can enhance understandings of children’s ordinary, everyday experiences. Our aim is to connect spatial theory to the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. We argue that spatial perspectives are central to understanding how children’s practices and trajectories are situated within more-t...

This paper is about what happens when children under three years visit museums with their families. It draws on a four year doctoral research study, funded by the University of Sheffield. During this study, I spent a year making repeated visits to two museums with seven families and their young children. I wanted to understand how families with pre...

The articles in this special issue are united around the topic of emergent literacy, and particularly new directions for this field of research. Typically an editorial for a special edition starts with a definition of the topic on which it focuses, in this case literacy. However, our work is primarily focused on the difficulties involved in interpr...

This article draws attention to the walking and running of young children as a key element of their multimodal communicative practices. In addition, the article argues that the walking and running of young children can be seen as a place-making activity, acknowledging the power of young children to create meaning in their world. Drawing on ethnogra...

The authors deconstruct the fictional image of Neanderthals, showing why we see them in the way we do.