Unearthing Why

Authors: Jill McLachlan and Clare Britt

Unearthing Why is a collection of stories offering a distinct and hopeful outlook for the future of education.

Each chapter invites you to consider the complexity and beauty of children’s capacity to learn, think and be together. Jill McLachlan’s and Clare Britt’s retellings of their experiences learning alongside children in prior-to-school and primary school based contexts will gently, but compellingly, invite you to join them in considering the deep purposes of education — questioning the ‘whys’, just below the surface, that inform ‘what’ and ‘how’ you teach.

Perhaps, as they have, you will find yourself looking beneath the surface of your everyday and begin (or continue in) asking questions that lead you towards new and optimisticways of being with children and living out your teaching with a new measure of dignity and joy.

“This book has great potential to contribute to and extend the conversations around the inspirations from the educational project of Reggio Emilia.The context of the early years of school offers rich possibilities for dialogue amongst those teachers who might have considered themselves to be outside the ‘Reggio space’. This is a welcome contribution, and one that will no doubt be relevant to contexts outside the Australian one”.

– Stefania Giamminuti, Lecturer, Early Childhood Education – Curtin University (Perth, WA)

2020 edition