Abstract
For this special issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, we wondered what it would mean, and ultimately what it might yield, to invite scholars in the field of early care and education to engage critically in conceptualizations of justice—for example, restorative justice (Zehr, 2015) or transformative justice (Winn and Winn, 2021)—and to imagine, explore, and critically (re)consider equity, inclusion, and belonging in early childhood. Our interest in this special issue reflects current dominant conceptualizations of justice that seek to protect privileges and safeguard entitlements (National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2020) for White, heteronormative, cisgender, and ableist communities at the continued expense and harm of those who are intersectionally marginalized. Countering such dominant conceptualizations of (in)justice, we share the work of colleagues and peers who critically theorize justice and consider: “Justice for whom and according to whom?” (Souto-Manning, 2014).
The matter of “Justice for whom and according to whom?” is highlighted in two of this issue’s articles—Soojin Oh Park's “Transforming a cemetery into a garden of languages: A justice-oriented, family-centered framework for cultivating early bilingualism and emergent biliteracy” and Adam Davies’ “Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics.” In questioning the universalistic assumptions about early language and literacy development that dominate early childhood settings, Park explores counterstories of Asian American parents and the practices in which they engage to resist linguistic erasure and cultivate their children's early bilingualism and biliteracy. Based on the stories of 10 Chinese and Korean immigrant, multiracial, and multilingual families, Park shares the vision of immigrant parents as gardeners—planters, pollinators, and pruners of bilingualism and biliteracy in their children, and challengers of monocultural and monolingual definitions of school readiness and success. Davies shares their own experiences, framed through the theoretical lens of mad studies (LeFrançois et al., 2013), which centralizes the voices and perspectives of people who experience psychiatric classification and violence, through autobiographical poetic writing. Davies challenges developmental and psychological perspectives of normative development and the role early childhood teacher training programs have in reproducing harmful ableist theories of learning and development that negatively impact intersectionally minoritized early childhood education faculty, teachers, and children and families.
This special issue also seeks to enact a “sociology of potentiality” (Povinelli, 2011: 16), including works that move from ideologies, methodologies, and pedagogies of expectability (what is expected based on the history of the field and the concepts of equity, inclusion, and belonging) towards ideologies, methodologies, and pedagogies of potentiality (the visioning, cultivation, and development of a future that does not yet exist, orienting to freedom and justice). Wintre Foxworth Johnson's article, “‘You cannot come to this country—that's what the government says sometimes, when you’re Brown’: African American children's critical literacies and emergent solidarity,” exemplifies the potential that there is in solidarity among intersectionally minoritized groups. Utilizing a framework of critical literacy (Vasquez et al., 2019) and critical consciousness (Jemal, 2017), Johnson's study of literature circles with African American children in a first-grade classroom demonstrates the children's capacity for cross-racial solidarity and rejects the assumption that children are egocentric in their understanding of justice. To the contrary, Johnson findings support potentiality in two ways: that young children who are marginalized and experience injustice can engage in solidary with other marginalized and minoritized groups, and that intentional literacy practices can provide opportunities for African American children to explore issues of injustice.
This focus on potentiality—although hopeful and potentially transformative, advancing the pursuit of justice—is rife with tension; after all, the field has historically sought to stitch its future to its past in ways that prevent (re)imaginations and (re)conceptualizations (Souto-Manning, 2021). Such tension is evident in three of the articles in this special issue: Daniel E Ferguson and Bessie P Dernikos’s “Reorienting curriculum materials as agents of restorative justice in early literacy classrooms”; Kiri Gould, Jennifer Boyd, and Marek Tesar's “Equity, inclusion and belonging for teachers in early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand”; and Helen Adam, Lennie Barblett, and Gillian Kirk's “(Re)considering equity, inclusion and belonging in the updating of the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia: The potential and pitfalls of book sharing.” Examing children's texts as agents of restorative justice (Winn, 2013, 2018) and pedagogical possibilities “to seek justice and restore peace that reaches beyond the classroom walls” (Winn, 2013: 126), Ferguson and Dernikos discuss the implementation of a specific curriculum reading program designed to concomitantly support young children's knowledge acquisition and literacy skills via sets of modules centered around “content-rich” texts, designed for students to “build their knowledge of important topics as they master literacy skills”. Unfortunately, a module on “Civil Rights Heroes” using the text Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story (Bridges, 2016) exemplifies the tension that too often accompanies the pursuit of justice: the adoption of books addressing civil rights while issuing teaching guides that work to orient text and readers toward Whiteness, glossing over issues of race and racism and focusing on the acquisition of decontextualized vocabulary. Ferguson and Dernikos find that despite the curriculum evading explicit discussions of race and orienting justice and fairness with Whiteness, White parents objected to the curriculum on the grounds that it stoked hate and divisiness, and caused feelings of shame among White children.
Gould, Boyd, and Tesar's article identifies tensions between the intent and impact of policies aimed at addressing injustice and inequity among Indigenous and colonial groups within early care and education. Specifically, they highlight that while the Aotearoa New Zealand policy that emphasizes early childhood teachers who are bicultural, highly qualified, and focused on quality education, making space for Māori and Western perspectives, it limits the perspectives and contributions of early childhood educators from other marginalized and intersectionally-minoritized groups. Such policies and associated guiding documents, while purporting to value diversity, create further inequity. A key responsibility of early childhood teachers is to support the cultural and linguistic diversity of all children as part of promoting an inclusive environment. However, recognition of how cultural and linguistic diversity within teaching teams can contribute positively to (or challenge) this aspiration is not addressed. Similarly, Adam, Barblett, and Kirk found tension between the intent and impact of the Early Years Learning Framework, the foundation for early childhood education in Australia. Their study on the implementation of the Early Years Learning Framework highlights tensions between policy and advancing justice. Specifically, they found that justice-oriented educational policy that intentionally seeks to strengthen perspectives, foster inclusion, and create culturally safe environments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families through the use of children's books requires early childhood educator training and alignment with an explicit evaluation system.
Finally, the impetus for this special issue is rooted in the understanding that, as a field, there is much work to do to upend its racist structures and exclusionary practices. In the USA and in much of the world, Black lives continue to be rendered disposable; Black boys are disproportionately excluded and suspended in preschools; and immigrant children experience persistent xenophobia (US Department of Education, 2016). We believe that such structures must be upended in the context of the USA and globally, and that a North Star logic for developing (im)possible futures for the profession and for the field that unfalteringly orient towards freedom and abolitionism (Shange, 2019) is critical. Cathery Yeh, Ruchi Rangnath-Agarwal, and Alejandra Albarran Moses's article, “Abolition and ethnic studies in early care and education," reflects that North Star logic. As motherscholars and educators of Color, they use collaborative storytelling (Kinloch and San Pedro, 2014) to bring ethnic studies and abolition to early care and education as a means of eliminating "dehumanizing practices, surveillance, and the control of our children's bodies and minds to create sustainable and flourishing spaces that honor the humanity of young children and their families.”
The contributions included in this special issue offer fresh perspectives, envision more just futures, and build on and sharpen the field's focus on the urgent and interrelated endeavor of advancing children's rights, expanding anti-racism, and engaging in the pursuit of transformative and restorative justice (Winn and Winn, 2021; Zehr, 2015). In particular, this special issue brings North Star potentialities together, plotting a constellation of transformative ruptures (Delgado Bernal and Alemán, 2017) for and in the field of early care and education. As such, it has the potential to offer a constellation of (im)possible educational experiences for young children, families, and communities, all rooted in the pursuit of anti-racism and justice, while also offering policy-related insights into the equitable and just provision of early care and education. Our hope is that this special issue can propel the field to engage in critical dialogue on rethinking and reconceptualizing equity, inclusion, and the politics of belonging, aligned with the pursuit of transformative and restorative justice.