Beyond Developmentalism? Early Childhood Teachers' Understandings of Multiage Grouping in Early Childhood Education and Care

Abstract

POSTDEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES IN early childhood education and care increasingly reference alternative ways of understanding learning, growth and development in early learning. Drawing on these ideas, this paper examines research findings which focused on early childhood teachers' understandings of multiage grouping. The findings suggested that teachers used predominantly developmental approaches to describing their experiences of multiage grouping, and proposed that the use of postdevelopmental perspectives in multiage grouping research has the potential to realise new ways of understanding learning and development as both concepts and practices within the multiage classroom.