Longstanding and innovative programs in early childhood education

For several decades, practitioners and researchers are investing time and creativity in the development of new approaches for the education of children in early childhood education (0–8 years old), on the assumption that the developmental potential of young children can be raised by involving them in innovated programs, which do justice to both the children’s perspectives and to the teachers’ pedagogical responsibility to introduce children into the culture of their community. The following chapter introduces a collection of seven long-standing and innovated programs from different countries all over the world, based on a variety of theoretical foundations. The chapter begins with a historical and theoretical analysis of the notion of ‘program’ and suggests a number of criteria on which different programs can be compared. On this basis the seven programs are summarised and analytically compared. Even though the discussed programs may not give a complete overview of all innovative programs, it can be concluded from the program analyses that future constructions and innovations of early childhood approaches should concentrate on topics like properly balancing the relationship between play and learning, the notion of play itself, the choice and ordering of cultural contents and how to hand these out to children and the ways of assessing children in ways that help promote their development as autonomous, responsible and critical moral and intellectual identities. The bottom line of the author’s argument in this chapter boils down to the claim that (future) educational programs should involve young children in activities (practices) that help children to learn how they can gradually become co-regulators of their own cultural development.