Jane Merewether

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Murdoch University

This article engages with discard studies scholarship to interrogate findings from a study that set out to deliberately follow wastepaper in an early childhood setting. The study, which used participatory methods positioning teachers and children as research partners, began with purposeful noticing and attunement to paper’s movements and materialit...

Onrushing ecological precarity and collapse disproportionately affects particular humans and their common worlds. This article proposes that in the face of the myriad crises the Earth is experiencing, and the uneven distribution of their effects, extending conceptions of justice in education beyond the human is crucial. This, however, requires honi...

This article concerns itself with the potential for ateliers to disrupt conformist approaches to pedagogy in early childhood education and care. An illustration of the role of the atelier in amplifying the aesthetics of the experience of the educational project of Reggio Emilia illuminates how disruption of conformity can be activated through the p...

This article explores how pedagogical documentation, as the refusal of method, can be aligned with post qualitative inquiry, opening up possibilities for refuting dogmas and methods in early childhood pedagogy, theory, practice, and research. It delineates understandings of pedagogical documentation in the educational project of Reggio Emilia, and...

This paper explores how ‘caring collaboratories’ advance new possibilities for imagining and enlivening early childhood education and research. Thinking with María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) feminist materialist theory of care the authors bring a retrospective analysis to their research experiences within three different climate change focused c...

Professional learning is considered essential for early childhood teachers, and is frequently associated with childhood outcomes and dominant constructs of quality which perpetuate neoliberal ideals and position early childhood teachers within a framework of rationality, privileging discourses of masculinity and power. By engaging with feminist new...

Jean Piaget, whose work continues to be very influential in early childhood education, associated young children’s animism with their ‘primitive thought’ claiming children remain animists until they reach a more advanced and rational stage of development. This article proposes a rethinking of the Piagetian view of animism, suggesting instead that c...

The Earth is in the midst of a recent acceleration in the rate of species extinction and the unravelling of ecological communities. The authors think with the emerging field of Extinction Studies to explore educational approaches to ecological endangerment and extinction. Using a notion of visiting as ‘curious practice’, we story encounters between...

This chapter outlines a co-enquiry journey involving academic researchers and public sector funders in the joint construction of knowledge about early childhood in regional Western Australian settings. The focal approach for the South West Early Childhood Project (SWECP) involved ‘rapid appraisal’ while largely utilising qualitative research method...

If children are to be heard in research and pedagogy, we need to find ways to listen to them. But how do we listen to young children when words are not their primary means of communication? Drawing on research investigating children’s perspectives of outdoor spaces in pedagogical settings, this article discusses the use of pedagogical documentation...

This article introduces the notion of enchanted animism, contending that an enchanted re-animation of the world may be necessary for learning to live on a damaged planet. The paper draws on a project with young children which invited them to share what they thought was ‘good’ in the outdoor spaces at their early learning centre. These encounters re...

This article draws on new materialisms to highlight children’s sensitivity to the agency of nonhuman materials. Working with data fragments from an ongoing project investigating children’s relationship with their outdoor environments, the article uses the figure of murmuration in a diffractive analysis approach to reveal materialdiscursive intra-ac...

Drawing on qualitative data from a study of three towns in the South-West of Western Australia, this article emphasizes participants’ yearning for spaces to play and places to meet by detailing the towns’ narratives of welcome and longing and framing themes of playfulness and hospitality. We argue that towns that see themselves as places of courtes...

The early childhood education and care reforms in Australia have been heralded as a cause for celebration, greatly anticipated by a sector that has lamented its invisibility. Drawing on qualitative data from a study of three towns in the south-west of Western Australia, this article aims to provoke reflection on where we stand with the celebrated a...

OUTDOOR SPACES ARE A FEATURE of most Australian early learning settings and have potential for many learning opportunities. This article reports on a study that investigated three- and four-year-old children's perspectives of the outdoor environment in their early childhood education setting. The research was conducted using multi-method approaches...

This article discusses why researchers and educators might choose to seek children's perspectives. It also highlights some of the key considerations when seeing children as having the right to contribute to decisions that affect them. The article draws on findings from a study that used pedagogically oriented methods for researching three- and four...