Look-normal: the colonized child of developmental science

Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics

In this article, the author forwards the importance of mad autobiographical poetic writing to challenge and disrupt epistemic injustice within pre-service early childhood education and care. They explore their own mad autobiographical poetic writing as a queer, non-binary, mad early childhood educator and pre-service early childhood education and care faculty member, and argue that mad poetic writing can methodologically be used as a form of resistance to epistemic injustices and epistemological erasure in early childhood education and care. This article argues for the importance of autobiographical writing in early childhood education and care, and the necessity of centralizing early childhood educators' subjectivities and histories when addressing - and transforming - issues of equity, inclusion and belonging in early childhood education and care. The personal and intimate mad autobiographical poetic writing of this article - written by the author - focuses on how personal experience with madness as it pertains to working within pre-service early childhood education and care can challenge norms that govern and regulate madness. Ultimately, the author argues that transformation in early childhood education and care can take place by reflecting on experiences of mental and emotional distress, and considering poetic writings as starting places for imagining new futurities and a plurality of educator voices and perspectives.

Research at a Distance: Replicating Semantic Differentiation Effects Using Remote Data Collection With Children Participants

Remote data collection procedures can strengthen developmental science by addressing current limitations to in-person data collection and helping recruit more diverse and larger samples of participants. Thus, remote data collection opens an opportunity for more equitable and more replicable developmental science. However, it remains an open question whether remote data collection procedures with children participants produce results comparable to those obtained using in-person data collection. This knowledge is critical to integrate results across studies using different data collection procedures. We developed novel web-based versions of two tasks that have been used in prior work with 4-6-year-old children and recruited children who were participating in a virtual enrichment program. We report the first successful remote replication of two key experimental effects that speak to the emergence of structured semantic representations (N = 52) and their role in inferential reasoning (N = 40). We discuss the implications of these findings for using remote data collection with children participants, for maintaining research collaborations with community settings, and for strengthening methodological practices in developmental science.

STORY AND HISTORY IN FETAL BEHAVIOR RESEARCH

In their monograph, DiPietro, Costigan, and Voegtline present an important and thoughtful portrait of low-risk fetal development during the last trimester of gestation, and they also pay tribute to the Fels Longitudinal Study investigators' early work in this area. In this commentary, the history and legacy of the Fels Institute is further explored within the broader context of fetal research, and DiPietro et al.'s findings are placed in alignment with contemporary dynamic systems' theoretical approaches that emphasize longitudinal analysis of emergent behavior and process during early development. The commentary puts forth the assertion that the work reported by DiPietro and her colleagues tells a story that sets the stage for a new generation of technology-enhanced and culturally expanded investigations of fetal behavior.