Research in Comparative and International Education Volume 3 Number 3 2008 www.wwwords.co.uk/RCIE 222 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/rcie.2008.3.3.222 RESEARCH IN Education Comparative & International RESEARCH IN Education Comparative & International INTRODUCTION Early Childhood Education and Care AILIE CLEGHORN & LARRY PROCHNER This thematic issue on early childhood education and care (ECEC) takes the reader from the lead article by Peter Moss to the United Kingdom, Italy, India, Bangladesh, and beyond, to explore a wide range of issues involved in the transition from pre-school settings as well as from the home to formal schooling. The reader will find in these articles that the notion of transition is expanded not only to include an important event in the life of a child, but also to be shown as a cognitive phenomenon and a social process. The collection of articles thus contains several foci: shifts in the culture and language from the home/pre-school setting to school; differences in pedagogical approaches; and a kind of reverse border crossing or transition that the child of immigrant parents engages in as she traverses the socio-linguistic/cultural landscape from school to home, taking on the responsibility of interpreter of the new culture for the parents. Whilst each article is grounded in the author’s or authors’ own country circumstances, or in the country where their research is located, this volume of Research in Comparative and International Education is international in scope and comparative in several ways: issues, policies and/or practices may be seen in the cross-country comparisons that the reader of all articles will be certain to make, and in the many ways in which the notion of transition is conceived. For example, Peter Moss stretches our thinking about the transition to formal schooling by challenging the reader to think beyond the early years. He notes that the job is not yet done if we resolve the problem of children’s adaptation only in the early years of schooling, or even the adaptation of the school to the child, since formal schooling involves constant transitions from the early years through the end of secondary school with increasing shifts in subject focus, to teachers as subject specialists, to a reduction in the number of female teachers, to an increasing focus on the assessment of competencies and, in some countries, to examinations that determine the learner’s life-chances. The second article, by Martin Levinson, invites us into the world of Gypsy children in England, underlining the many boundaries that they have to traverse in a now changing world. The long-entrenched value system of the Romani people remains at odds with those of the school, yet parents see the need for formal schooling of their children as their traditional ways of making a living become less and less secure. As is the case in several of the articles in this volume, Levinson implicitly asks that the school make greater efforts to open wider its doors and its personnel’s minds to this very marginalised group of learners. William Corsaro & Luisa Molinari then bring to the reader the policy implications of the results of a six-year ethnographic study in northern Italy. Here, in Modena, they pinpoint the key events in pre-school that appear effective in preparing children for school. In this regard, readiness for school involves a complex set of transitions in three domains: academic, emotional and social. Next, Amita Gupta homes in on the ways that India is affected by globalisation, with particular reference to children’s early encounters in urban classrooms. She notes how local cultural and linguistic traditions are giving way quickly to the increasing pressure for instruction via English, and to the fast-growing influence of the media on children’s lives. The difficulties that teachers have in negotiating these shifts for themselves and for children are highlighted.