| Abstract: | This paper examines the concept of ‘teaching’ in early education and childcare and argues that the activity of teaching, broadly defined, concerns all adults who work in this area and occurs in all phases of the educational system. Bronfenbrenner's (1979 Bronfenbrenner U 1979 The ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press) Google Scholar]) ecological perspective on human development is applied to conceptualise teaching as (1) adults' attempts to extend children's current phenomenological perspectives of the world; and (2) as being based on adults' ability to capture children's momentum towards learning. The implications of current terms such as ‘practitioner’, and the ways in which ‘teaching’ in early childhood education has been conceptualised, are also discussed. |
