Taking Early Childhood Education and Young Children’s Learning Experiences Seriously

Abstract

For decades, important early childhood scholars who critiqued normative ideas about early childhood frameworks, guidelines, and assessments have been silenced in highly ranked child development and early childhood journals. The qualitative methods needed to prioritize the perspectives of marginalized communities (i.e., ethnography, interview and focus groups, video-cued, narrative inquiry, testimonio, pláticas, counterstories, photovoice, and community mapping) routinely met (meet) resistance and rejection. Instead of continuing this rejective pattern, Teachers College Record has published provocative work that includes critical voices in early childhood education.

Two years before I was born, Teachers College Record published a special issue on early childhood education in 1972 (Volume 73 Issue 6) titled “The Why of Early Childhood Education.” The issue included 22 authors, five of whom were women. The theorists named in the articles conceptualized young children’s learning from a broad range of disciplines, including anthropology, developmental psychology, medicine, linguistics, speech pathology, child development, and biology. Theorists cited in the work, however, were stubbornly, overwhelmingly White and male, and the theories normalized White/Anglo ways of being as the only substantive, sophisticated way to frame teaching and learning with young children. This narrow theorization continues to keep our field from progressing because these historic deficit frames are built into the assessments, interventions, and practices we still offer, prescribe, or push onto young children.

Now, 50 years later, Teachers College Record is helping to diversify early childhood theoretical foundations and offer critical theorists within early childhood education a mainstream platform.

For decades, important early childhood scholars who critiqued normative ideas about early childhood frameworks, guidelines, and assessments were silenced in high ranking child development and early childhood journals. The qualitative methods needed to prioritize the perspectives of marginalized communities (i.e., ethnography, interview and focus groups, video-cued, narrative inquiry, testimonio, pláticas, counterstories, photovoice, and community mapping) routinely met (and continue to meet) resistance and rejection. Instead of following this rejective pattern, TCR has published provocative work that includes critical voices in early childhood education.

Having a high-profile journal such as TCR begin legitimizing critical ideas in early childhood education produced, over time, seats at the table with decision-making bodies (political, philanthropic, institutional, structural, etc.) that seemed impossible when I started as professor in 2009. Critical scholars in early childhood now lead national organizations, universities, foundations, centers, and government taskforces within the U.S. and globally. Many of them have published in Teachers College Record.

This support of critical early childhood work has impacted me personally. The hardest I have ever worked for a journal article in my career was my first TCR manuscript submitted in 2011 and finally published in December 2012 after repeated revisions and resubmits from the editor at the time. Instead of dismissing the methods I was using (multivocal, video-cued ethnography) or the setting of the work (preschools in five U.S. cities), the editor simply told me that my writing and empirical argument needed to improve. “Drastically improve. . .” I believe were the exact words they used.

I felt like a failure when I read TCR’s feedback. A few days later during my 4-7 am writing time, I somehow remembered something Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings had said while speaking to a very full AERA roundtable session (going on next to my own sparsely attended one). She advised everyone to rethink journal reviews. She claimed that a “revise and resubmit” decision from a journal was basically an “accept” if we were willing to work hard. I took her sentiment seriously and went back to the TCR editor’s suggestions and required changes. With Dr. Ladson-Billings logic, I began to see the reviewers’ feedback as not just criticism but also support and interest. I took the feedback line by line and ultimately, the editor’s ideas made both the writing and the argument stronger.

In the same way TCR helped me emerge a better writer, I see TCR as being one avenue toward improving the field of early childhood education. Early childhood education has been taken seriously in the journal since the 1940s. In the 1980s and 1990s, James Comer, Marian Wright Edelman, Leslie R. Williams, Urie Bronfenbrenner, and Ruby Takanishi wrote about deficit thinking, investing in early education programs, and the need to value racial and linguistic diversity within early childhood policy and practice.

Since the late 2000s, TCR has deeply supported the emergence of critical early childhood frameworks that approach policy and practice from the perspectives and theoretical orientations of marginalized communities. The inclusion of dis/crit and dis/abled communities in early childhood education, for example, is evident in Park’s (2020) article “Demystifying Disproportionality: Exploring Educator Beliefs about Special Education Referrals for English Learners,” as well as Lee’s (2017) “Making the Body Ready for School: ADHD and Early Schooling in the Era of Accountability” and Beneke and Love’s (2022) “A DisCrit Analysis of Quality in Early Childhood Education: Toward Pedagogies of Wholeness, Access, and Interdependence.”

TCR has published articles on racial equity in early childhood education, including Broom and Wint’s (2021) “Caring Now and Later: Black Boys’ Schooling Experiences of Relational Care”, Toward Critically Transformative possibilities: Considering tensions and undoing inequities in the spatialization of teacher education” by Souto-Manning and Martell (2019), and “Depicting Hate: Picture Books and the Realities of White Supremacist Crime and Violence” by Sciurba (2020). Doucet’s (2011) “(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds” challenges deficit, racist narratives that White institutions often maintain about immigrant families, as does Chávez-Reyes’s (2010) “Inclusive Approaches to Parent Engagement for Young English Language Learners and Their Families” and Ghiso’s (2016) “The Laundromat as the Transnational Local: Young Children's Literacies of Interdependence.” Over the past decade, LGBTQIA+ communities have been featured in TCR in articles that include early childhood education, such as “Transgender and Gender-Creative Students in PK–12 Schools: What We Can Learn from Their Teachers” by Tilland-Stafford and Airton (2016).

TCR has also published what continues to be rare: Early childhood education articles that use a variety of methods to learn from young children in real environments and everyday experiences. Several published articles in TCR feature the words, perspectives, ideas, creative work, and co-researching efforts of young children in their actual classroom environments. Yoon’s (2021) “Stars, Rainbows, and Michael Myers: The Carnivalesque Intersection of Play and Horror in Kindergarteners’ (Trade)marking and (Copy)writing” details how young children disrupt power hierarchies and regulatory boundaries in their play. Payne et al.’s (2020) “Critical Geography in Preschool: Evidence of Early Childhood Civic Action and Ideas about Justice” details observations and interviews with young children as they worked to use classroom space and materials to create justice for one another and their families. “African American Head Start Teachers’ Approaches to Police Play in the Era of Black Lives Matter” by Henward et al. (2021) centers Black teachers’ ways of thinking about young children engaging with real events in their lives and those they are witnessing in the larger society. Karsli-Calamak and Allexsaht-Snider’s (2020) “Manifestations of Mathematics Within the Power Dynamics in a Pre-K Classroom” explores how disciplinary actions and attitudes by educators can deny young children meaningful engagement with mathematics. Coauthored with Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove and McManus, the second piece I published in TCR, “Troubling Messages: Agency and Learning in the Early Schooling Experiences of Children of Latinx Immigrants,” centers on focus group interviews with dozens of 6- and 7-year-olds who revealed that even in supportive, academically successful districts, deficit thinking at any level can justify narrow, rote types of instruction that ultimately impact the types of messages young children receive about learning and being a learner (Adair et al., 2018).

My hope is that Teachers College Record continues to push for manuscripts that feature the expertise and brilliance of very young children as well as work that is both rigourous and critical of normative institutions and practices. We need methodological diversity. We need research that resists deficit (racist, sexist, monolingual, White-normative, gender conforming) ideology fueling most early childhood educational research and tool development.

Young children’s experiences and voices should be central in early childhood education. Young children deserve research that rejects White/Anglo/Ableist foundational theories and breaks methodological traditions that have done harm. They deserve to be seen and understood within their everyday lives, not just in labs or contrived settings. Gratefully, there is a journal willing to publish and support this kind of work.