Abstract
Debates about what and how children should learn are an enduring part of early childhood education. They rise and fall across time, focusing on questions like: What kinds of curriculum or instructional practices should be used? What kind of pedagogy is just right? Who should teach? What are the goals? A critical component of the debate is whether there are models of teaching/caring that can be used with all children, regardless of their perceived experiences, home resources, skills, or futures. These questions continue to shape discussions today about whether prekindergarten programs should be targeted to specific groups or offered to all, whether early childhood curriculum should be child-centered or teacher-directed, and whether children or schools should be ready at kindergarten.
Summary
Why do affluent children receive child-centered instruction while their under-resourced peers get teacher-directed scripts and activities? Stephanie Smith takes up this question in her book Against Race- and Class-Based Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education. Based on her 2011 dissertation at Rutgers University, Smith conceptualizes this problem as a structural reflection of language and ideology, bounded in specific ways by race and class. In this review, I consider Smith’s framing of the problem, how she explores it in a uniquely designed study, and her analysis.
Using a sociological lens to consider questions of early childhood education is an entirely different approach than using a developmental perspective. In essence, it shifts attention from individual children, families, and teachers to the way that institutions are a context in educational experiences. It provides a useful tool for exploring the production of educational inequality. Smith uses her positioning in both early education and sociology of education to explore how different teaching approaches create different opportunities and outcomes for minoritized children in poverty.
Smith centers her project on the ways that linguistic ideology is embedded in the distinction between child-centered pedagogy and the more structured teacher-directed models of teaching. Specifically, she uses Basil Bernstein’s (1971) concepts of framing and classification to better understand the early childhood curriculum. For Bernstein, classification describes how category boundaries are defined and maintained, while framing is the message system of knowledge delivery and reception, creating particular relationships between teacher and learner. In child-centered classrooms, classification and framing are weak, integrating school subjects and enacting largely invisible classroom rules. In contrast, teacher-directed instruction has both strong classification and framing, expressed through clear boundaries of school subjects and rules for behavior. Engaging these constructs locates curriculum and instruction as practices of power.
Smith applies this kind of analysis in an early childhood context, citing Delpit’s (1988) argument that the implicit rules in progressive classrooms put children who are not familiar with these types of interactions between adults and children at a disadvantage. Therefore, teaching children who are not part of the culture of power the codes of power in activities that are meaningful reflects an approach that promotes a mixture of weak and strong classification and framing.
With these tools, Smith designed a study that contrasted child-directed and teacher-directed programs on Chicago’s South Side that were part of the same federal Head Start and state Preschool for All public programs. Although they shared an official curriculum, assessments, teacher qualifications, and histories, the programs were quite different in their pedagogy and philosophy.
The progressive Frank Lloyd Wright Family Center was in a diverse neighborhood where the rates of low birthweight and infant mortality were among the city’s highest. According to the teachers, poverty, violence, immigration concerns, and language status were the community issues that shaped their practice. Reggio-inspired, Wright reflected Reggio principles, from the architecture to materials to practices. Smith’s descriptions of the center and classrooms reflect a progressive appreciation for aesthetics, with “brightly lit, softly colored rooms filled with natural materials and natural light” (47).
In contrast, the Casimir Pulaski Children’s Center was in a community center in one of the city’s high-poverty neighborhoods. There were enduring concerns about violence. The descriptions of Pulaski’s older building lack warmth. It was dark, with little natural light; the gymnasium had missing floorboards and broken windows. The classrooms had furniture [that] appeared to come from a supplier of preschool furnishings. Most of it was brightly colored and plastic. Dramatic play areas had toy kitchen materials rather than the real plates, pans, and silverware in Wright classrooms. Natural elements were largely absent. (51)
These descriptions provide a very clear window on which context Smith prefers.
Smith spent two weeks per month at each site, splitting her time between two classrooms from September to January. The data collection included classroom observations, staff and parent interviews, the collection of artifacts, photographs, and testing children in September and February with the Woodcock–Johnson III. Smith brings together these data sources through Bernsteinian analysis, comparing classification and framing, and initially using them implicitly in descriptions of practice. She then explicitly leans into contrasts, exploring them jointly along continua that range from very strong (+ +) to very weak (− − ).
Smith approaches the detailed analyses of practice in a case-wise manner, exploring how staff in each school and classroom approached teaching, health and motor development, classroom management, the roles of teachers and language codes, field trips, and engaging parents. In each chapter, the contrast between Wright and Pulaski is presented clearly, with Smith deftly weaving observation notes, interviews, and artifacts.
This approach takes taken-for-granted early childhood categories and positions them within the Bernsteinian framework. For example, Smith shows the ways language ideology operates in classroom management through cycles of comparison among the four classrooms on topics like establishing rules and routines, managing transitions, and correcting inappropriate behavior. The category is the organizing principle, effectively illustrating Smith’s key ideas. However, I realized that I have a strong bias toward constructing narratives by case rather than category. When the case is the organizer, the focus is on the lived experiences in particular classrooms. This can give a sense of the why behind pedagogical choices. This may seem to ask for a different analysis. I know all the critiques of this trope as a modernist tool that uses the holistic appearance to mask analytic moves. Nevertheless, I mention it to illustrate some of the affordances and trade-offs embedded in the choices we make in writing.
In the final chapters, Smith speaks directly to the strengths and weaknesses of classification and framing in these classrooms, working to move beyond description to quantify pedagogical differences. Coding all observations for classification and framing, Smith calculated the distribution of instances labeled very strong to very weak. All four classrooms had weak classification, meaning that disciplines were mixed in instruction. The two schools varied in terms of framing. Wright classrooms exhibited weak framing and invisible pedagogy, with children presented with opportunities to explore materials and ideas guided indirectly by teachers. In contrast, Pulaski classrooms had both strong framing and visible pedagogy, with teachers preferring to give explicit instructions and guide student learning directly.
Smith works to link these patterns to student growth on the Woodcock–Johnson and other assessments, reporting that while all four classrooms produced the expected five months of growth, the students at Wright more than doubled that. Smith attributes this to the way that Wright teachers paid close attention to individual learning, while the Pulaski teachers were so focused on explicit teaching that assessment was underutilized. From this, Smith argues that programs with weak classification and framing can allow children to internalize the codes of the culture of power while teaching the academic skills required for success. Smith takes this as evidence to question Delpit’s call for more explicit teaching for minoritized and under-resourced students. This is seen as an indication that progressive pedagogy can be useful for all students.
About the author
Smith is an Assistant Professor and the Yew Chung–Bernard Spodek Scholar in Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the Early Childhood Teacher Education program. Her research focuses on progressive pedagogy in early childhood education. She received her PhD in Urban Systems from Rutgers University in 2011.
Strengths
This book has many strengths. The first is Smith’s clear and descriptive writing. For anyone who has spent time in childcare and education centers, she evokes their sights, sounds, and energy. The organization of the text provides a good balance between theory, data, and analysis. The design of her study, which focuses on different types of programs in similar communities, is well thought out, reflecting her theoretical framework. The inclusion of her classification and framing codes is particularly crucial for understanding how Smith uses the critical constructs in this study. She employs Bernsteinian analysis to good effect through descriptions of classification and framing, and descriptive analyses of practice. For dedicated progressives, this comes out on the right side of the child-centered–teacher-directed debate by showing how children who have increasingly received the most didactic instruction benefit from more progressive pedagogy. I appreciated the nuanced approach that Smith takes to the problem, doing more than just linking outcomes to curriculum type, and instead carefully detailing the conditions that create opportunities for learning.
Weaknesses
Like any book, Smith’s is not without some challenges. One challenge rests in the time span between the dissertation, the book’s publication, and this review. With the most recent reference for 2011, this analysis is outside the new bodies of research on curriculum, instructional practice, and quality in the last decade. Given their prominence in policy, practice, and research, this seems like a missed opportunity.
Although it draws from sociology and classic early childhood texts, the book’s attention to authors who directly theorize the importance of race and culture in education is limited to Lisa Delpit. Although Delpit most directly set up the contrast pursued in this book, it is missing the voices of critical scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings, Luis C Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, Norma Gonzalez, Carl Grant, Jacqueline Irvine, and James Banks. In addition to the depth their work could have contributed to this analysis, I worry with 2020 awareness that crossing identity borders like race or class, as Smith does, can be tricky, even if informed by theory like Bernstein’s.
My reading of Smith’s book brought up several unaddressed questions with which I will end this review. I was grateful for the opportunity to read this book. It clarified for me how I read and write case studies. It made me think (and that is a good thing): Why did the staff at Wright embrace Reggio, and how did they pass this on to families? What role did language, race/ethnicity, and culture have in curriculum and student success? What does it mean to use a progressive program curriculum like Creative Curriculum in contexts like these?