Early Child Development and Care

In this special edition of Early Child Development and Care, our aim is to add to, extend and engender, knowledge in early childhood engagement with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Pre-school children rarely meet these disciplinary fields in any formal curricular sense, though in their early years they will very likely learn about their bodies, play with phones and iPads, build block towers and bridges, learn to count and quantify. Such ‘early-STEM’ learning will take place largely within the broad ambit of the family. The concept of a ‘family’ is, of course, notoriously difficult to define and we support each one of our contributors to this special edition in forging their own definitions. Culture, too, can be both over-specified and under-determined, and has many distinctive meanings. Nevertheless, our project here is to examine how the early STEM learning of children intersects with diverse cultural mores and values and these, in turn, with family norms and expectations. Our ambition is to weave together ideas, opinions, perspectives and insights from a range of thinkers, researchers and disciplinary sources. We want to open up understanding of how epistemic practices operate, the ways that early STEM knowledge emerges in different socio-cultural contexts.

This call for papers, then is an invitation to make a meaningful contribution to the advancement of knowledge and understanding in early STEM learning. We seek innovative thinking, novel research and reviews investigating the intersecting roles of culture on family STEM-related educative practices. We encourage submissions from scholars based in the global south and north from all career stages. Submissions should engage with theoretical frameworks that provide critical understanding of early STEM learning to provide new insights into the enactment and experiences in different contexts.

 Our timeline is:

1. January 2024: Issue the call for papers
2. April: receive first draft papers from contributors
3. July: receive fully edited versions from contributors
4. September: submit fully edited manuscript to the journal

Word limit: 6000 words

Papers: we invite a range of submissions from research-led articles, to policy and opinion pieces.

Submission: Please select "special issue title” when submitting your paper to ScholarOne’, and use the special edition title: Families, culture and early years STEM

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article