Józefa Joteyko was the outstanding scientist in the end of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century. Together with Maria Skłodowska-Curie she was the most famous woman and scientist of Polish origin in Europe. She was given the right to present her lectures in the Collége de France and she was, after Adam Mickiewicz, the second Polish lecturer at this great academy. She had committed her life to scientific disciplines which included child neurology, neurophysiology, psychology and pedagogy. She had managed to develop each of them evenly with the same progress and in relation to children. Such approach was aimed at understanding the child and gathering the knowledge about its character and predisposition. These was also meant to help in determining what kind of educational and professional way the child should take. The present-day psychological and pedagogic clinics are the practical fulfilment of Józefa Joteyko’s idea and we cannot imagine the contemporary education without the support of such institutions.
In this text the author poses a question about the direction of the evolution of early childhood education, considering its specificity in the context of the academic nature of pedagogy itself and its historical development, and especially the modern trend for interdisciplinarity. The author associates sources of diversity of this sub-discipline with a focus on the child, emphasizing, on the one hand, the setting of the sub-discipline in the tradition, especially pedological and, on the other hand, a growing and critical phenomenological perspective of research in this area. In conclusion he emphasizes that a reorientation of the multi paradigmatic research conducted in early childhood pedagogy, its openness to differences, but also the use of the methodology of the humanities and social studies recognized by the international community of scholars, make this sub-discipline of learning begin to regain the appellation of an integral discipline.