Inquiry-based curriculum is a responsive approach to education in which young children are viewed as capable protagonists of their learning. Inquiry-based curriculum has the potential to challenge the dominance of developmental psychology as the primary way of understanding young children’s learning. This approach to curriculum-making also disrupts the instrumentalist “technician” image of the early childhood educator. Practices of inquiry-based curriculum can also extend beyond the early childhood classroom as a potentially transformative teacher education tool, and as a research methodology that counters dominant deficit discourses of childhood. Inquiry-based curriculum in North American early childhood education has been greatly influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach, which is a powerful alternative to predetermined theme-based didactic curriculum. The revolutionary possibilities of inquiry-based curriculum, inspired by Reggio Emilia, are not standardized frameworks to be copied in practice; rather, they create critical entry points into contextual, creative, rigorous, meaningful, and justice-oriented curriculum. One of these entry points is the practice of pedagogical documentation, which not only makes children’s learning visible but also enables educators’ and researchers’ critical reflection. Such reflections can act to foreground the complex, political, and dialogical thinking, doing, and exchanging that happens in inquiry-based early childhood education classrooms. Reggio Emilia–inspired inquiry-based curriculum has brought attention to the important role of the arts in young children’s inquiries. Important research in this area includes work that has put new materialist perspectives to work to gain insight into new pedagogical and curricular possibilities that are made possible by attuning to children’s relations with materials, where materials are active participants in learning. While more research is needed in this area, recent research has also engaged with how attention to the arts and materials does not preclude attending to and responding to issues of race and racialization. In U.S. early learning contexts, an important area of research in inquiry-based curriculum has demonstrated that this approach, alongside a pedagogy of listening, is central to shifting deficit-based practices with historically marginalized children. This is important work as access to dynamic inquiry-based curriculum remains inaccessible to many young children of color, particularly within increasing policy pressures to prepare children for standardized testing. Finally, there is a growing body of work that is investigating possibilities for inquiry-based curriculum that is responsive to the inequitably distributed environmental precarities that young children are inheriting. This work is an important direction for research in inquiry-based curriculum as it proposes a radical shift from individualist and humanist modes of understanding childhood and childhood learning.

This study challenges a common view that sexualities and the topic of sexuality are irrelevant and inappropriate to children’s lives. In early childhood education, sexuality is generally viewed as an innate developmental experience that evolves over time as children grows. Framed in a postmodernist and queer perspective, this study upholds sexuality as a social construct influenced by cultural and societal values. This study examines how heteronormativity is discursively constructed in an early childhood education setting. Participant observation was employed and video recorded with ten kindergarten children and their early childhood educators. First, the children were found to employ a number of discourses, including: “hair;” “clothes;” “colours;” “masculinity as the rejection of femininity;” “superhero” and “princess play.” Secondly, the findings suggest that play is a site for children to transgress hegemonic discourses regarding genders and sexualities. Thirdly, the early childhood educator was found to be a critical role in this transgressive play by posing questions and problematizing children’s heteronormative assumptions.

Holes, the concept that holds together this special issue of the Journal of Childhood Studies, may seem a strange choice as a metaphor for a collective project like this, yet holes poke through each article we share in "Responding to Ecological Challenges with/in Contemporary Childhoods. " In this editorial we ask what centering holes, gaps, and openings might make possible for reinvigorating the relations of the interdisciplinary colloquium on climate pedagogies that sparked, and shares its name with, this special issue. Held in February 2020, the colloquium took place on the lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron peoples, at Western University. This special issue picks up strands of thinking shared at the event and asks: How might we, more than two years later-two viral, extraordinary years-reenter the colloquium's openings and explore its gaps and holes?We see holes as endemic to climate realities: We dig literal holes, large and small, into the ground while the profound erasures and egotism of anthropocentrism pretend not to notice the holes increasingly needled into the Euro-Western fallacy of its impenetrable skeleton. Concurrently, we see holes as a practice of hope-a mark worth tending to and ready to be cared for as a way of immersing ourselves into the mess and vitality of our contemporary worlds. As we worked on this special issue, we met many holes: COVID-shaped holes in our timelines, holes in our memories, and increasingly urgent holes in our own scholarship as we imagined how we might respond well to our ever changing common worlds. Before visiting with each article and its hole-making, we propose three manifestations of holes that poke through the articles: holes as fragile reading practices, puncturing holes in the human, and thinking holes with climate pedagogies. We invite readers to experiment with these holes.Within neoliberal logics of individualized perfection, romanticized holistic approaches to education, and ontologically indestructible relations with knowledge, a hole might seem almost an apology, akin to a marker of unavoidable imperfection or a highlighting of something too slippery to be contained by the margins of an article. These manifestations of holes certainly hold energy in this special issue, as authors name their positionality and the limits of perceptibility that accompany their situated relations, where not everything is knowable to everyone. But holes also matter otherwise throughout this gathering of articles. Holes, as Isabelle Stengers (2005) proposes, are about "giving to the situation the power to make us think" (p. 185). In early childhood education and beyond, the drive for certainty and solutions during the climate conditions of the Anthropocene (Drew & MacAlpine, 2020;Hodgins et al., 2022;Nelson & Hodgins, 2020;Taylor et al., 2021) urge us to read toward innovation, explanation, and stopgaps. This is reading animated by the panic felt by the all-knowing, powerful human amid ongoing settler colonialism (Nxumalo, 2019) who feels a n...

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