This paper reflects on the recent global youth climate change movement in relation to theoretical considerations of Indigeneity, post-Anthropocentricism and decolonial practices. It then highlights the perspectives of several young climate activists, before considering a range of factors (‘elephants in the room’) that lurk behind the incapacity of our current practices to create spaces that provide opportunities for full expression of young people, particularly Indigenous young people, to articulate their political analyses and collectively advocate for ways of being in the world that will honour their values and aspirations.

The COVID-19 pandemic jolted teachers to the front line of complex, under resourced negotiation of quality distance learning, whilst also being key communicators with students and families about how to be COVID safe. Media reports debated preschool and school closures and child safety, but scarcely considered teachers. Motivated by the silencing of teachers and extraordinary changes to education, we gathered as a group of nine educational researchers located in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and U.S.A to create a survey platform for teachers’ lived experiences of the impact of COVID-19. Our survey asked 22 questions and attracted 624 responses. This article focuses on question 12: What are the issues you are struggling with and need support with? Drawing from Latour’s provocation we distil key ‘matters of concern’ from the data, illustrated by excerpts from teacher responses and echoed by the authors’ COVID lived experiences as interwoven blackout poetry. Our collated experiences highlight struggles with online learning, connectivity/communication with students and families, quality of teaching, and workload, and the need to value and invest in education and the professionalism of teachers to address these struggles.

This article interrogates notions of teacher ‘partnership with parents’ within early childhood care and education settings in the context of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Te Whāriki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, clearly positions children’s learning and development as being fostered when their families’ cultures and practices are recognised. Yet findings from both national evaluative reports and recent studies indicate that, in many instances, families that are not members of the dominant cultural group do not experience this synergy. The authors draw on some recent national evaluative reports to paint a broad picture of the implementation of ‘partnership’, and then employ illustrative data from several research projects regarding the inclusion of Māori and Chinese families respectively. The authors apply hybridity theory, along with the related idea of funds of knowledge, to reinforce the need for teachers to proactively move beyond the hegemonic safe zones of traditional teacher-dominated practices towards opening up spaces of dialogic, fluid engagement with families whose backgrounds differ from their own. This aspect of teachers’ professional responsibility is particularly important in the current era of increasing superdiversity.

Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children’s schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as political time and space that make such civic action possible in the everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common (and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.

Research Findings: This paper considers the position of tamariki Māori, the indigenous children of Aotearoa (a Māori name for New Zealand), in relation to the impact of colonization on their rights, including a focus on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the current educational policy arena. It then provides an explication of a Māori perspective of tika and tikanga, Māori rights as enacted through a Māori worldview. We then proceed to offer some illustrations from our recent research projects in Aotearoa New Zealand of ways in which teachers are engaging with tamariki and whānau Māori (Māori children and families) in endeavors that give expression to pedagogical enactment respectful and reflective of tikanga Māori (values and cultural practices). Practice or Policy: It is concluded that there are possibilities for early childhood pedagogies that enable a re-narrativizing of Māori ways of being, knowing, and doing in affirmation of children's rights to identity possibilities sourced in their own tikanga (knowledges and practices that are culturally right).