Preparing and supporting professionals working with infants and toddlers

The education and care of infants and toddlers involve both an individual and collective ongoing commitment towards their rights and, relatedly, towards the rights of the professionals who accompany and support children’s everyday experiences. This Special Issue (SI) is dedicated to educators who undertake this relevant, specialised and emotional endeavour. Specifically, this issue focuses on initial and continuing professional preparation and support for those working with infants and toddlers, as well as on systems and processes that support and develop their daily practices. In constructing this SI, we have been helped enormously by the scholarly assessments of progress in researching pedagogy with infants and toddlers set out in four prior SIs published in the last twelve years. The first of these was organised by Sylvie Rayna and Ferre Laevers (Rayna and Laevers 2011) with the title ‘Understanding children from 0 to 3 years of age and its implications for education. What’s new on the babies’ side? Origins and evolution’. The authors acknowledged that a focus on children from birth to three meant working with the most dominated people (infants, toddlers, practitioners and mothers) and underlined the need for a process of empowerment and emancipation of the birth-3 field. Furthermore, the possibilities brought about by research initiatives were stressed, with articles contributing to the debate around rigorous research tools and ethical positions in this sector. The special issue presented a collection of articles that brought powerful evidence and insights into an agentic image of the child, the centrality of interactions and relationships, the relevance of practitioners’ professional qualifications and accompaniment, and the critical role of infant–toddler pedagogy. In 2012, the SI ‘Professional Issues in Work with Babies and Toddlers’ was published in this Journal. The editorial by Pamela Oberhuemer (2012) acknowledged the diversity in theoretical frameworks, research foci and research methodologies across the SI. The articles in this SI focused predominantly on studies carried out in continuing professional education, stressing core processes such as collegial dialogue, critical professional reflection among professionals, relationship-building between children and caregivers, systematic documentation and analysis of children’s experiences, as well as co-constructive and participatory approaches to supporting professional development and everyday practices with infants and toddlers. Susan Recchia and Minsun Shin (Recchia and Shin 2016) guest edited the SI ‘Preparing early childhood teachers for infant care and education’ that added to the previous contributions in arguing for deliberate, specialised and meaningful preparation of teachers for working with infants, toddlers and their families. Despite the diversity across the articles in this SI, the authors identified common themes, such as the lack of adequate preparation in early childhood teacher education, the need for integrating more EARLY YEARS 2023, VOL. 43, NO. 3, 443–454 https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2023.2240668