This book explores how wisdom can be cultivated through learning in the early years and primary schooling. It brings together diverse traditions and practices, showing how children’s encounters with nature, stories, and community can nurture curiosity, resilience, and ethical awareness, resonating across cultures and generations.

The chapters weave together case studies and approaches that highlight the richness of learning for wisdom. Philosophical inquiry into wisdom can develop a child’s social, imaginative, cogitative, cognitive, intellectual, moral, emotional, and spiritual skills – helping to bring their sense (and sensitivity) of wisdom to life in practice. Forest-based education demonstrates how outdoor environments foster imagination and ecological responsibility. Bibliotherapy illustrates the power of stories to support emotional growth and empathy. Social-emotional learning and whole school initiatives show how communities can embed wisdom into everyday practice. Perspectives from Australian Indigenous traditions emphasise relationality and respect, while Chinese approaches highlight continuity, moral formation, and dialogue. Together, these examples span geographical and temporal contexts, offering readers a tapestry of methods that connect ancient insights with contemporary classrooms, and practical strategies like the Wisdom Wheel.

Accessible and inspiring, this collection is designed for educators, researchers, and general readers seeking fresh ways to enrich early years and primary education. By weaving together diverse traditions and practices, it offers groundbreaking insights into how learning can cultivate wisdom – transforming early years and primary education into a foundation for lifelong flourishing.

Its sister volume, Teaching for Wisdom in Early Childhood and Primary School Education: Educators’ Practices and Pedagogies, demonstrates how educators can nurture children's curiosity, ethical reflection, and resilience in the early years and primary schooling.

Research shows that large-scale sporting events and accompanying media coverage contribute to the dissemination of nationalist and neoliberal ideologies intersecting with gender norms embedded in the power structures of the modern nation state. Elite athletes competing in these events often become media focal points, with women athletes susceptible to intense scrutiny and differential coverage. Despite a recognized need to investigate the gender-sensitive interplay between ideologies, power and context through mediated sport, scholarship has frequently focused on gender-blind, isolated expressions of ideology in the Global North. Through an innovative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of online media portrayals of Indonesian women athletes competing in the Southeast Asian (SEA) games, this article highlights the complex manifestations of nationalist and neoliberal ideologies with gender in a nation of the Global South. It delivers a deeper understanding of the contextually contingent, multifaceted relationships between ideologies and power expressed in discursively mediated sport, and the impact on women in sport and broader society.

Following a whirlwind period of planning reforms, explored in our last edition, this issue of New Planner steps back to the roots of what planning is, or should be, all about: being bold, brave and beautiful.

Early Childhood Education has been evolving in the United Arab Emirates. The country is young both in its foundation and in the age of its population. For children to prosper, they need a well-built academic curriculum that supports their aspirations. In this chapter, basic components of a futuristic early childhood curriculum are proposed, namely, the children’s characteristics, the cultural elements and the academic requirements for success. The children’s characteristics include developmental strengths and needs, diverse learning modes and creative abilities. The cultural elements include a well-founded heritage, the family unit, and a multicultural and multilingual environment. At the centre of the academic component is the process of teaching and learning that needs to account for teacher preparation programmes, curriculum areas and advances in technology. The connections among those components would allow for a congruent outcome where inclusion, diversity, innovation and heritage are represented. An emphasis on self-learning for parents, educators and children, along with an alignment of what it means to be successful among all stakeholders, would be necessary to carry out an effective curriculum. The educational institutions represent the ideal vehicle that could fulfil the needs of parents and children; therefore, collaboration between universities and schools, including early childhood settings, would facilitate sharing the latest educational innovations and help overcome challenges.