Abstract
Pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) is undoubtedly still entrenched in developmentalist onto-epistemologies that limit the imaginations of both pre-service students and the faculty and instructors who teach such knowledges (Davies, 2022a, 2022b; Davies et al., 2022), in turn impacting children participating in ECEC. We write this introduction as three researchers, educators, practitioners and facilitators who are highly concerned about the current status quo of pre-service ECEC education – and its emphasis on developmentalism – in Canada and internationally (Davies, 2021; Gibson et al., 2018; Krieg, 2010; Zaman and Anderson-Nathe, 2021). By so doing, we add our voices to the chorus of scholars who have shown why this entrenchment is highly problematic, and who offer alternatives to this dominant paradigm (e.g. see Cannella, 2005; Edwards et al., 2009; Kessler and Swadener, 1992; Taylor et al., 2016, to name but a few).
What specifically inspired this special issue is our own experiences and conversations regarding the predominance of developmentalism as the taken-for-granted hegemonic knowledge formation in pre-service ECEC training and education. Where we are currently located in Ontario, Canada – not unlike other places in the world – developmental psychology is forwarded as the ‘base’ or ‘foundational’ knowledge for pre-service ECEC. Such limited social imaginaries taught to pre-service ECEC students present developmentalism as the ‘rational’ form of knowledge that pre-service students must ‘apply’ in order to ‘work with’ children and families. Questions such as ‘What do we do with this?’ might emerge from developmentalist ECEC scholars and students who seek to maintain the status quo (Davies, 2022a; Snyder et al., 2019). However, through these questions come new opportunities for pausing and reconsidering the relationship between thinking and doing and theory and praxis (see Britzman, 2012; Freire, 1970).
Throughout our experiences, which vary and include teaching ECEC at the undergraduate and/or graduate level and/or working in pre-service ECEC, we have felt at an embodied level that who we are and the knowledges that we teach are unwelcome in pre-service ECEC. Despite ‘belonging’ commonly being the cornerstone of ECEC documentation and curricula (i.e. Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014), we question how normalcy has been entrenched within the fabrics of pre-service ECEC (Davies et al., 2022). In particular, this special issue seeks to contest the ways discourses and practices of normalcy are tethered to ideas of developmentalism in a manner that continues to reinforce and sustain a status quo engaged in the unjust practices of in/exclusion. The practices of in/exclusion referred to here offer a critical examination of the normative/developmentalist content that remains standard fare across degree programs in ECEC colleges and post-secondary institutions. Such ECEC programs subsequently sustain unjust practices that, as noted above, impact the everyday experiences of young children and early childhood educators in a myriad of childcare settings, and reinforce normalcy as the desired state for children. Our aim in this special issue is to invite educators, researchers, graduate students and scholars within the field of ECEC to infuse their teaching and learning practices with critical approaches and examinations of normative standards as a way to prepare pre-service students and educators to question taken-for-granted assumptions within their everyday practices.
We are particularly galvanized by mad-studies scholar Brenda LeFrançois (2020: 182), who describes the connection between developmentalism and normalcy by articulating how ‘theories of child development bolster this concept of what it means to be normal as that to which all children are meant to aspire’. This notion that normalcy is something to ‘aspire’ towards can be considered in relationship with the dominant ideas of ‘scaffolding’, drawing from the work of Vygostky (1978), and the predominance of developmentalists, such as Piaget (1971), within pre-service training courses. Steele and Nicholson (2019) describe the epistemic harm that ‘ages and stages’ theorists, such as Piaget, can propagate for practitioners who work with young children – in particular, Piaget's (1971) stage theory of children's cognitive development. Such theories promote ideas of children as ‘too young’, ‘innocent’ or ‘immature’, and thereby incapable of comprehending discussions pertaining to social justice and structural oppression (Steele and Nicholson, 2019). Yet, despite the well-documented harms of developmentalism addressed in the work of LeFrançois (2020) and Steele and Nicholson (2019), among others, these developmental theories continue to guide the professional practices of pre-service students – and early childhood educators – and are often taught as if they are ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’, and have no epistemological or ontological assumptions behind them. How can pre-service ECEC move beyond the legacies of these harmful theories and imagine new possibilities and potentialities? It is this question that orients the current special issue.
The articles in this special issue do the work of critiquing the dominant status quo and how developmentalism reigns over pre-service ECEC, while also presenting new potentialities and ways forward for pre-service ECEC. The scholars, educators and researchers in this special issue situate their work in and across a range of critical scholarship in the areas of arts-based pedagogies, Black feminist thought, care ethics, critical pedagogies, critical race theory, decolonial studies, disability studies, disability studies and critical race theory (DisCrit), feminisms, Indigenous studies, post-developmentalism and queer studies. Through their utilization and foregrounding of select concepts and approaches from these critical fields of inquiry, the articles effectively demonstrate that there are several entry points from which to begin to examine, confront, question and, ultimately, transform ECEC programming, pedagogy and practice.
One approach that readers might consider is reading the articles collected in this special issue in the sequence presented by the editors. Starting with Cagulada and DeWelles and ending with Love and Hancock, this collection not only provides an array of diverse perspectives and approaches, but also foregrounds a questioning of the ongoing and persistent experiences of racism, ableism, classism and heteropatriarchy that are co-constituted when discourses and practices of developmentalism are uncritically sustained as the norm. Another approach that readers might consider is the refusal of reading what is presented here in a straightforward sequence. As Ahmed (2006) suggests, readers might begin to question what is straightforward and move in, out and through this collection, as representative of the need to disrupt the sequential ‘order of things’ and as integral to contesting the grip of developmentalism within current ECEC practices .
For example, readers might consider beginning with the post-developmental approach of Land and Frankowski. Land and Frankowski think with the work of both Ahmed (2016) and McKittrick (2021) in their critique of citational practices as emblematic of the kinds of erasures and exclusions that continue to manifest themselves across ECEC. The work of d’Beltran-Selitti and Shayan addresses and confronts past and present colonial erasures of Indigenous experiences and knowledges by exploring public art as a medium of teaching and learning in their instruction of ECEC candidates at the post-secondary level. While d’Beltran-Selitti and Shayan address these erasures within ECEC in the context of Vancouver, Canada, Wu and Oxworth foreground the importance of Indigenous knowledges and experiences in the Australian context. Bezaire and Johnston situate their work against the persistent repetition of objectivity as one of the main aims of sustaining developmentalist approaches. By focusing on feminist critiques of objectivity, Bezaire and Johnston foreground ‘subjectivity as valid and valuable’ (this volume). Feminist approaches, and in particular feminist care ethics, as articulated by Richardson and Langford, welcome readers to the kind of feminist care ethics that ‘values differences in perspective-taking but contests social hierarchies and binaries produced by valuing some differences over others’ (this volume).
In contesting the social hierarchies and assumed linear sequences of western-centric progress and developmentalism, this issue offers several opportunities to begin and/or continue the conversation related to the entangled and co-constituted experiences of racism, ableism, classism and heteropatriarchy in ECEC. By applying and positioning their work in DisCrit, Love and Hancock explore the impacts of developmentalism by examining discriminatory practices that occur at the intersections of racism and ableism. Love and Hancock delve into DisCrit Curriculum, DisCrit Pedagogy and DisCrit Solidarity as vitally important practices that are intended not only to contest the status quo but also to transform our knowledge-making and sharing practices in ECEC. The work of Brady contributes to this intersectional approach by emphasizing the necessary and pivotal work in the field of Black feminist thought in refusing the unidirectional hegemony of childhood developmentalism. Finally, readers of this special issue might choose to begin or end or perhaps enter in the middle of things with the work of Cagulada and DeWelles, which immediately follows this editorial introduction. Cagulada and DeWelles are early career scholars whose work explores the childhood memoir of Black feminist scholar bell hooks alongside the childhood memoir of Mary Herring Wright, who grew up Black and deaf in the southern USA. Through a critical examination of the intersections between racism and ableism, Cagulada and DeWelles seek to examine the key question: ‘How might one encourage and support a disability studies approach to inclusion in pre-service early childhood education settings?’ (this volume).
Therefore, as the editorial introduction to this special issue reaches its end, our aim as editors is to contemplate the possibilities in new beginnings. We hope that this collection contributes to the work of refusing the injustices of past and present in/exclusions that remain pervasive in ECEC. By questioning the kind of ECEC programming that continues to insist that western developmentalism is the one and only way to understand childhood and the only way to prepare early childhood educators, we also propose that sustaining the status quo will continue to sustain the mechanisms of in/exclusion in and across ECEC settings. This is an urgent call to ECEC to rethink current knowledges, onto-epistemologies and practices in pre-service education. In this sense, the new beginnings on offer here also prioritize finally closing the chapter on developmentalism and the injustices sustained within this set of hegemonic discourses and practices, while also never forgetting the harms experienced through its hierarchies of power. Similarly, as we begin anew to (re)commit ourselves as researchers, educators, practitioners and facilitators, we wish to invite readers of this special issue to orient themselves to the work of equity, diversity and inclusion not as an add-on to ECEC programming but as integral to transforming the conditions of our teaching and learning relationships. As McKittrick (2021: 107) asks: ‘How might we shift our methodological questions so that we do not end up in an analytical bind that affirms rather than undoes racial violence?’ In disrupting the powerful grip of developmentalism in ECEC, one of our goals is to contribute to the undoing of racism, classism, ableism and heteropatriarchy, and how such ongoing legacies are intertwined with developmentalist knowledges (Burman, 2016). It is to this process of undoing and beginning again that we offer the contributions of this special issue and hope to continue to reimage, reinvent and rethink pre-service ECEC education.
In solidarity,
Adam Davies University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada Maria Karmiris Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Rachel Berman Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada