The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is initiating the International Early Learning Study, a cross-national assessment of early learning outcomes involving the testing of 5-year-old children in participating countries. The authors use this colloquium to inform members of the early childhood community about this project and to raise concerns about its assumptions, practices and possible effects. The authors also invite readers' comments, to start a process of democratic dialogue and contestation. Keywords Cross-national assessment, early childhood education, early learning outcomes, OECD Anglo-Saxon 'testology' … is nothing but a ridiculous simplification of knowledge, and a robbing of meaning from individual histories. (Malaguzzi, in Cagliari et al., 2016: 378) The very act of ordering and measuring the world also changes the world.

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This article surveys the emergence and application of critical pedagogy to the field of early childhood education in the USA and beyond. It explores selected portions of the field's vast body of literature vis-à-vis loosely configured and intersecting lines of research and praxis. The field continues to expand, with positivist orientations of child development, postmodern critical reconceptualizing models, and post-colonial discourse spaces. The article concludes with a discussion of liberatory praxis as a space of possibility and suggests post-colonial hybridity as a framework for the field of early childhood education.

In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, streamlined curricula, standardized assessment and deprofessionalization are not new. However, the authors wonder whether these arguments are missing something. Does our localized and highly contextualized identity construction enable ‘divide and rule’ politics by global agents such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank and international corporations? The authors’ (preliminary) answer is to build individual and collective professional identities that are grounded in diverse local contexts and in a broader transnational professional (political) consciousness and collective voice.

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