Abstract
In a context characterized by polarized discussions about best practices in early childhood education, Continuity in Children’s Worlds: Choices and Consequences for Early Childhood Settings offers a much needed perspective about the complexities in continuity of care in children’s lives. Continuity and discontinuity have usually been used to refer to children’s transitions through early childhood education settings. The three authors – Melissa M Jozwiak, Betsy J Cahill, and Rachel Theilheimer – begin their analysis by defining continuity as ‘a connection, a flow between two things’, while ‘discontinuity can be a break, separation, or lack of connection’ (2). When children move from home to their daycare, from circle time to outside, or from the toddler group to the preschool group, they experience continuity and discontinuity, and so do their teachers and parents. This book offers early childhood educators a perspective that problematizes the binaries constructed around children’s worlds from birth to age eight – more specifically, around their multiples transitions. The purpose of the book is to encourage a deeper understanding of the inherent complexities in working with young children, professionals and families.
Continuity of care and discontinuity often suggest they are oppositional processes rather than different points on the same continuum. The authors offer a multilayered discussion that challenges the continuity–discontinuity binary by bringing together stories of teachers and parents about how children and adults face transitions in continuous or discontinuous ways. Challenging binaries opens up an opportunity to bring difference into the discussion, and the authors accomplish this task throughout the book. For example, they address how difference and diversity confront decisions about best practices, quality and standardization. They ask: ‘if we respect difference and diversity, can we justifiably call for continuity that might lead instead to homogenization?’ (4). They also point out that developmental continuity – ‘a belief that all children progress predictably according to ages and stages’ (39) – may lead to discontinuity of care.
The core of the book is the stories about continuity and discontinuity of early childhood professionals in different roles, from administrators, counsellors, educators and parents across the USA. These stories represent a wide range of realities from different socio-economic statuses and rural and suburban contexts. The authors carefully articulate diverse perspectives, including those of historically marginalized communities that have been continuously absent in the literature and represented as subjects of intervention. This point is of particular relevance in a context where discourses of best and developmentally appropriate practices are paramount for the decisions that affect the early childhood education community. One of the important contributions of the book is that it lays out a number of relevant critiques for the field of early childhood education. For instance, the reader can find a critique on quality (73), standardization (93) and testing: ‘The teacher educator who told this story fears that tests will determine what teachers teach, in contrast to teaching based on what children are capable of and interested in learning’ (78). As Beth Blue Swadener appraises in the book’s foreword, the authors manage to bring a critical perspective into practice with hope: while discontinuity may be experienced as a challenge for some parents and teachers, their stories also demonstrate that discontinuity offers valuable opportunities for growth.
The authors develop their argument in six chapters. In chapter 1, they introduce the book’s approach by bringing attention to continuity, consistency and the need for flexibility. They propose that we understand continuities and discontinuities in early childhood education environments through the stories of teachers, administrators and families across the USA, including the authors’ own stories. They anticipate that their stories of practices, policies and relationships based on lived experience will convey a more complex understanding for the space in-between the continuity/discontinuity binary. Chapter 2 focuses on continuity of care, taking into account the child as the centre. However, this section draws on parents’ and educators’ perspectives, not on those of children, which could have added a richer account. Chapter 3 examines continuity from home to school: what is possible, what is desirable, and what can be learnt from those experiences, including the many challenges that family–teacher relationships might impose. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the macro level, including policies for early childhood development and their impact on continuity of care through state, federal and local governments. Chapter 5 turns to the educators’ identities in light of continuity and discontinuity. Issues of power are at the centre of their discussion. In chapter 6, the authors offer as a conclusion the experience of one early childhood education programme to show how continuity and discontinuity operate at every level of children’s contexts, from their home to federal policies.
One of the strengths of this clearly laid-out book is the ability of the authors to expose complex ideas using jargon-free language. I appreciated how the authors organized the book, guiding the reader through the book’s arguments. In order to support their claims, the authors draw on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory to place the child at the centre of analysis, while bringing together the macro and micro levels of continuity of care. The macro level includes those structural mechanisms that sustain or interrupt continuity of care, such as policies, programmes and regulations, while the micro level comprises the child’s experience of continuity in close relation to teachers’ and parents’ experiences. Although Bronfenbrenner’s theory has been used to support claims in favour of standardized perspectives of quality in early childhood education, the authors draw on his ecological approach to offer an analysis of continuities and discontinuities from a different perspective without advocating for universality in early childhood education.
I recommend this book for early childhood education professionals, graduate students and researchers who are interested in challenging ideas like traditional notions of continuity of care and discontinuity. I found that this book stands in a very unique place, where theory meets practice and complex ideas are conveyed with simplicity. Although the stories come from the US context, they are relevant for other national contexts. I agree with the authors that their intention in this book is of great relevance: ‘We hope that as a result of reading this, our reader will feel equipped to thoughtfully consider and critically reflect on the impact that continuity and discontinuity have on the early childhood years’ (5). I believe that the authors offer a rich account for readers to accomplish this undertaking – embracing continuity as well as discontinuity in their everyday practices.