SCHOOL OF EDUCATION: Education and Society

he article aims to analyze the status of childhood in today's society as it relates to the emancipatory goals of social pedagogy. Among the viewpoints to understand the status of childhood is the concept of social representation. Childhood is conceptualized in the study as a transversal topic that transcends many fields and is analyzed from a multidisciplinary perspective. Social representation is characterized in the text as a tool to construct analysis of social realities, while social pedagogy is characterized as an emancipatory practice.

The early childhood years are pivotal as they mark the beginning of a young child’s life journey into education. This paper offers critical reflections of the early childhood care and education landscape in Singapore as it has evolved over the last decade. The discussion will draw on findings of the study Vital Voices for Vital Years 2 (2019) to explicate the issues, debates and challenges facing the early childhood care and education sector.

The Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP) was founded in 2007 as an international, multi-disciplinary society intended to promote and advance the study of childhood and children in the past. The Society aims to act as an interdisciplinary agent for the presentation, discussion, dissemination and integration of ideas, information and discoveries about children and childhood in the past, worldwide and from any chronological period, uniquely bridging the gap between researchers in separate disciplines.

There is now a general consensus amongst education policy makers that there is a shift towards a global knowledge society that requires that we teach for those general transferable thinking and learning skills associated with communication, collaboration, and creativity. On this paper, we identify the idea of the knowledge society and there quired thinking skills for the knowledge age. We argue that ICT provides the best basis for understanding and teaching these knowledge age skills. We outline atheoretical framework for early childhood education incorporating the use of communications technology that offers a response to the educational challenge of the knowledge society. Finally, we discuss the key principles of good practices when using CT for early childhood education.

As editors of Children & Society, we are delighted to introduce a themed section comprised of three papers by leading figures in Childhood Studies, Alan Prout, Spyros Spyrou and Nigel Patrick Thomas. Their papers have been developed from keynote presentations at the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth' s 6th International Conference titled, The Social, the Biological and the Material Child, which took place at the University of Shielding July 2016. As these authors reflect on the future of Childhood Studies as an interdisciplinary field, they have prompted us to consider how these ideas inform and inspire the future of Children & Society.

Like many globalized urban cities, Singapore is a consumer society – a social system shaped by the production and consumption of commodities. Through a cultural studies framework, this article utilizes ethnographic data of children’s peer culture to raise questions about the child–adult binary and developmentalism that tends to govern educational thought and practice in Singapore. Drawing from the talk and action of a group of 4- and 5-year-olds and parent interviews, this article shed slight on how a group of preschoolers and their families actively wrestle with similar processes of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ within a consumer society, albeit in their own terms.

Social structure is a core concept in the field of sociology, and Anthony Giddens has extended this concept to structuration theory. This theory has multiple applications, but has never been used to analyze the structure of Tibetan society. Tibetan social structuration is an under researched area. The lack of basic sociological understanding of Tibetan society is due to insufficient study on the question of why neither Tibetan monastic education nor the state school system have produced Tibetan sociologists and social theory able to identify the social problems in contemporary Tibetan society.