Book Review: Exploring the Role of Narrative and Play in Young Children's Development and Education

The work that emerged in sociocultural approach during the last decade has contributed to our conceptualization of young children's development and education in important ways. Many scholars who adopted this framework converged on the point that both children's development and our characterizations of it are influenced by the social and cultural contexts within which children's and researchers' development takes place. Illustrations of this claim justified our search for culture-specific as well as universal features of children's development. However, our efforts to describe the processes by which children's development and education are formed by their cultural contexts are still in a state of evolution. As part of a search for local theories and research methods that enable the examination of children's development and education in relation to their cultural context, Narratives of Childhood is a welcome addition.