Book Reviews: Flows, Rhythms, and Intensities of Early Childhood Education Curriculum, Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures, Wellbeing from Birth, towards Excellence in Early Years Education: Exploring Narratives of Experience

Over the past decade, an unprecedented number of Canadian provinces have developed early learning curriculum frameworks.As the editor of this volume of essays, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw notes that the early childhood curriculum in some parts of Canada has 'moved away from long-debated guidelines such as developmentally appropriate practice' (p.xiv) to frameworks which articulate visions, beliefs, values and principles related to early learning and pedagogy.The essays emerged out of lecturers, Master's and doctoral students, early childhood educators and teacher educators working with British Columbia's Early Learning Framework (Government of British Columbia, 2008), which was influenced by New Zealand's early childhood curriculum and Reggio Emilia's image of the powerful, competent child.Nevertheless, educators working with different curriculum frameworks will find in this book a range of essays that will help to keep all frameworks open to critical examination and discussion.In her introduction, Pacini-Ketchabaw writes that for several years the authors collaborated and explored different perspectives and theoretical standpoints on the early childhood curriculum; the stories and examples in the essays nicely capture the rich and dense conversations that the authors must have had.Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in early childhood studies programmes will find the book engaging and could continue and enrich these conversations.The early childhood curriculum issues -teacher-child relationships, routines and transitions, and family partnerships -that the essays examine will not be new to readers.It is the authors' indepth use of feminist and post-foundational theories to question their past and future curriculum practices, particularly in relation to curriculum frameworks, that brings a fresh perspective to conceptualisations of early childhood curriculum.Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) 'possibilities for other worlds', the volume is organised into three strands or sections -flows, rhythms and intensities -which Pacini-Ketchabaw uniquely describes as 'residing in curriculum's creative and productive practices' (p.xv).The premise of the book is that while the three strands 'run through early childhood curriculum' (p.xi), they remain hidden without examination.Have the authors been able to illuminate the complex nature of the strands using post-foundational theoretical tools?Working my way through each essay, all with thick descriptions of theory, concepts and practices, I was persuaded that the book offers opportunities to bring early childhood practice to 'other spaces of curriculum thought' (p.xiii).The first strand of essays, by Enid Elliot, Cristina D. Vintimilla and Kirsten Ho Chan, follows the rhizomes of the teacher and child in curriculum-making to find 'broken directions' and 'to conjugate deterritorialized flows' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 11).Using Bakhtin's (1981) concepts of dialogue and responsibility, Elliot makes an interesting argument that while a curriculum framework can articulate the importance of developing relationships with children, it cannot, as a monologue document, 'stimulate our curricula imaginations'.Rather, Elliot says, we need dialogues and interactions with children, out of which curriculum flows (p.14).Drawing on Austin's (1962) and Butler's (1997) concepts of performativity, Vintimilla examines images of teaching in student teacher assignments, which hung on classroom walls like 'ventriloquists'.Vintimilla writes rather poignantly about how the images presented and represented themselves 'as repetitions' every time the students and teacher educators entered and left the classroom (p.29).Vintimilla contends that students need to be introduced to better theoretical tools from educational

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