Cultural Worlds of Early Childhood

<p>This reader contains source material for an up-to-date study of child development as it applies to major issues in child care and education. The emphasis is on studying early childhood in cultural contexts - in families and in preschool settings.<br><strong>Part 1</strong> elaborates a socio-cultural approach to early development taking emotional attachment communication and language and daycare as examples.<br><strong>Part 2</strong> considers how children's emerging capacities for empathy inter-subjectivity and social understanding enable them to negotiate talk about and play out relationship themes both in the family and preschool. <br><strong>Part 3</strong> concentrates on early learning with chapters on the way parents support children's acquisition of new skills young children negotiating their role in learner-teacher relationships and toddlers learning to collaborate with each other.<br><strong>Part 4</strong> continues the theme of children's initiation into socio-cultural practices from a cross-cultural perspective with studies drawn from such diverse contexts as Cameroon Guatemala Italy Japan and the United States.<br> This is the first of three readers which have been specially prepared as readers for the Open University MA Course: ED840 <em>Child Development in Families Schools and Society</em>.</p>