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1. The need for shared educational theories, goals, and perspectives.
2. a general trend toward dominance of the elementary school over the preschool
in setting agendas for cooperation.
3. Teachers’ views that collaboration is ex­tremely time-consuming.
4. Efforts to promote collaboration and coordination between preschool and school
typically begin at the level of organizational structure rather than at the level of
pedagogy (Pramling Samuelsson, 2006, p. 109).
Later in her chapter, Pramling Samuelsson (2006, pp. 114–115) almost laments that
While some progress toward reform is taking place in Sweden, old tradi-
tions weigh heavily on the process, especially with regard to cooperation
between preschool and primary school. Preschool teachers and primary
school teachers often hold vastly different views about children, as well
as about teaching and learning. These differing views are strongly rooted
in old structures and established traditions, which influence their ways of
thinking and acting.
Questions about the need for continuity, especially in Fabian’s (2002) ‘philosophical’
category, have been studied and discussed in many different jurisdictions around
the world, with a seemingly general agreement that there do need to be closer links
between preschools and schools. Given Pramling Samuelsson’s (2006) finding that
elementary schools dominate preschools in setting agendas for cooperation, what this
would seem to mean is that preschools become more like schools in terms of their
pedagogy, curriculum and approaches to children’s learning. at least in australia,
and, we suspect in other countries, this would not be a very popular move among
preschool educators. Nor, it would seem, would it satisfy the need ex­pressed by
children that they want change. Obviously, there is need for much further work in
this area and in the more general issues surrounding continuity and change in early
childhood education.
Insight­s from t­he 16t­h Annual Conference of t­he Europ­ean Early Child­
hood Educat­ion Research Associat­ion
at the recent annual conference of the European Early Childhood Education Research
association (EECERa) held in Reykjavik, Iceland, a number of presentations were
made which shed some further light on the questions of continuity and change in
early childhood education.
Each of the five keynote speakers ex­plored continuity an­d change and continuity
in­ change in various ways. For ex­ample, Barabara Rogoff emphasised the necessity of
seeing change within social and cultural contex­ts that provide much of the continuity
for children and families as they ex­perience change.
Hrafnhildur Ragnarsdóttir provided the conference with many instances of how
s­Ue doCkett, BoB Perry­