The importance of communication partner intervention to support the successful implementation of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies has been established. Despite this, limited knowledge and use of AAC form serious barriers to inclusion. In this paper, we investigate the potential for the use of key word signing (KWS), one common form of AAC, as a communication partner intervention with pre-service early childhood teachers. In this study 196 pre-service early childhood teachers were taught KWS as an AAC strategy, along with approximately 80 Auslan signs. Participants were asked to develop ideas for implementing KWS in early childhood settings. Using participant journal entries, we conducted thematic analysis to investigate the perceived impact of using KWS in early childhood practice. Participants reported the belief that KWS was beneficial for supporting communication development. Participants identified that using KWS can facilitate inclusive approaches through reducing barriers to participation, valuing diversity, and supporting a sense of belonging. Additionally, participants reported that engaging with inclusive approaches to using KWS formed a catalyst for fostering openness to inclusion more broadly. Overall, the findings demonstrate that approaching KWS as a communication partner intervention holds potential for contributing to the conditions for inclusion in early childhood settings in line with social relational and human rights models of disability. Implications for teacher education and inclusive practice are discussed, as are the limitations of this study.

While the importance of inclusive approaches to research has been identified, much childhood research is still done ‘to’ not ‘with’ young children, with research focusing on the experiences of children who experience disability commonly involving data from parents/families/practitioners, rather than from children themselves. In this article, we explore the development of an arts-based research project involving young children who experience disability as active participants in an exploration of their perspectives on inclusive education. Accordingly, we ruminate on questions about how we can genuinely ‘listen’ to children who experience disability in an aesthetic and ethical manner, and how we can use artistic ways of knowing to engage in meaning-making with children. Using arts-based research as an aesthetic framework alongside insights from critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework, we explore ‘aesthetic’ approaches to being, teaching, researching and knowing. As a team of researchers who do and do not experience disability, we share reflections on arts-based methodologies informed by critical approaches to conceptualising disability and research. As artistic modes of expression are central to young children’s everyday lives and play and can create enjoyable and safe communicative spaces, we share dialogues, artwork and methodological reflections on opportunities for children to choose ways of interacting and communicating, allowing possibilities for agency, expression and creativity. Specifically, we conceptualise and concentrate on possibilities for using arts to foster ‘listening’, meaning-making and generative or transformative praxis, in order to explore how arts-based research can be a powerful, authentic, ethical and meaningful provocateur for listening ‘generatively’ to young children who experience disability in research.

THIS ARTICLE INVESTIGATES EARLY childhood educators' perceptions of advocacy in raising the professional status with multiple stakeholders in diverse contexts. The article reports on findings from a phenomenological study investigating the perceptions of 12 educators working full time in long-daycare settings across Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Findings revealed that participants were ambivalent towards power, as they perceived themselves to be influential within internal workplace settings yet felt raising the professional status to be the responsibility of senior stakeholders in wider sociopolitical contexts. Recommendations for the prospective utilisation of advocacy, and implications for supplementary research are relayed.

As an ideology, the concept of social justice has long been a worthy, if slightly volatile, companion of early childhood theorists and researchers. Whilst the majority of the literature has valorised social justice, discontented questions regarding 'what' the construct entails and 'how' it might be tamed to work still remain. Using complexity theory, this article problematises the amalgam of social justice by readdressing the role of participation, inclusion and equality in early childhood systems. It is argued that social justice evolves from essentially local and relational interactions amongst a range of stakeholders. By framing early childhood interactions as those occurring within the context of relationships which are embedded within open systems (that is, systems within systems), this article discusses how interactions in early childhood involve a set of complex, yet systematic, processes which can only be understood as they unfold. Contextualised against the dominant discourse of 'normalisation' in early childhood, this article uses aspects of complexity theory such as nonlinearity, emergence and recurrency to focus on the ways in which layers of social justice are embedded in the values and processes experienced in early childhood systems. Drawing on the philosophical roots of transformative education, it focuses particularly on the use of complexity theory to frame concepts of children's power, agency and participation. It discusses how the proactive praxis of social justice might emerge from within early childhood systems.

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