Teacher Professional Development and Teaching Practice in Early Childhood Education: UNESCO’s Social Contract for Education

Dear Colleagues,

Early childhood education (ECE) is undergoing significant changes. Teachers require professional development that promotes equity, sustainability, inclusion, collaboration, and children’s holistic growth. This Special Issue aims to gather high-quality research that advances understanding of teacher professional development and teaching practices in ECE. Building on the first edition of this issue [1], the second edition invites new submissions that expand, deepen, and challenge current perspectives on ECE teacher professional development and teaching practices.

This second edition aims to deepen the conversation initiated in the first Special Issue—in  response to UNESCO’s call “Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education”—and to continue developing a shared research agenda for ECE. The second edition particularly encourages works that build on the main themes identified in the first edition:

• Reorienting professional development for sustainability and teacher agency.
• Supporting pedagogical innovation in teaching and learning.
• Building future-ready teacher competencies.
• Promoting equity, inclusion, and linguistic responsiveness.
• Identifying and defining core teaching practices in early childhood education.

We invite contributions that help reimagine ECE teacher professional development as a catalyst for equity, quality, and transformation. We seek studies that explore how teacher professional development can be redesigned to support teachers as reflective practitioners, enhance pedagogical innovation, and improve learning outcomes for all children. We are particularly interested in research that emphasizes the ongoing relevance of UNESCO’s vision for a new social contract for education. Empirical, theoretical, methodological, and conceptual contributions will be considered.

We look forward to receiving your contributions. 

Topics of interest

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Teacher agency, professional identity, and reflective practice.
• Collaborative and inquiry-based models of professional development.
• Sustainable and context-responsive teacher learning.
• Play-based, art-based, and child-centered pedagogies.
• Digital learning, AI, and technology in teacher education.
• Science, music, literacy, and other subject-specific competencies in early childhood education.
• Online and hybrid professional development models.
• Equity, multilingualism, culturally responsive teaching, and inclusive practice.
• Core teaching practices and their impact on children’s learning and development.

[1] Karim, S., Wu, X. E., & Bautista, A. (2025). Reimagining Teachers’ Professional Development and Teaching Practices in Early Childhood Education: Toward UNESCO’s New Social Contract. Education Sciences, 15(11), 1547. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15111547

Dr. Alfredo Bautista
Dr. Shahid Karim
Dr. Xuanyi Eliza Wu
Dr. Jerry Yeung
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• teacher professional development
• teacher agency
• early childhood education
• pedagogical innovation
• diversity, equity, and inclusion