Contextualizing child-centeredness: Lessons from an American Samoan Head Start

Abstract

Child-centeredness is a pedagogical approach common in US early childhood education, one that advocates young children should direct their own learning and excercise individual choice in activitites. This approach is reflected in national US Head Start policy. Using multivocal, video-cued, and traditional ethnographic methods, this study presents an analysis of interview data collected from three focus groups with American Samoan teachers to argue that the child-centered approach in newly adopted performance standards may not actually be child-centered, particuarly when ignoring the knowledge base and cultural expectations for children in culturally diverse communities. Analyzed through post-colonial theory, which recognizes the erasure of indigenous approaches to educating young children, we focus on Samoan teachers’ understanding of child-centeredness. Results indicate Samoan teachers had drastically different understandings of child-centeredness, instead pointing to optimal pedagogy as collaborative, community-oriented, and structured, and stressing the value of learning from each other. In forgrounding the voice of Samoan educators, we complicate the existing and pervasive binary positioning of child-centered and teacher-directed instruction in early childhood curriculums, to offer another alternative, an expanded notion of child-centeredness that is contextually bound and locally determined.

Keywords

Culturally responsive pedagogy Head Start early-childhood policy comparative and international education,child-centered pedagogy

What happens when curricular and pedagogical ideas in federal US early-childhood policy are imported from the US mainland to an island in the Pacific? In this paper, drawing on data collected during a two-year-long ethnographic study with Samoan educators on the island of Tutuila in American Samoa, we examine how local educators responded to this importation of policy in their practice with three and four-year-old children.

The spread of early-childhood curriculum, pedagogy, and policy across borders is far from a recent phenomenon. Globalization and transcontinental flows of early-childhood education have long been a central focus of educational anthropologists and scholars working in comparative and international education, who have attended to the way in which people, images, ideas, technologies, and economic and cultural capital, which typically emane from western nations, and then are spread to other global contexts (McCarthy et al., 2003). One theory proposed by some globalization scholars is that educational ideas and flows of influence move from powerful high-status contexts to low, consuming and dominating those who have a smaller degree of influence on the global stage (Barro and Lee, 2015; Park et al. 2013). Conversely other scholars, some of whom align with postcolonial perspectives, have articulated that global flows of beliefs and practices are not unidirectional, nor overly determinant (Bhabha, 1996; Gilroy, 2005; Hall, 2015). Scholars writing in this latter tradition attend to the ways in which local sociocultural contexts, including, but not limited to, local power structures, in some cases mitigat the impact of global circulating policy. For example, they have show the ways in which individual teachers and actors in local cultural contexts transform imported educational ideas (Anderson-Levitt, 2003; Vavrus and Bartlett, 2006, 2009), ultimately reformulating global policy and ideas from high-status countries (Anderson-Levitt, 2012; Bartlett and Vavrus, 2014; Tobin et al., 2009).

Aligning with this second tradition, our project Negotiating Curriculum in the Pacific was launched. It aimed to understand how Samoan Head Start educators on the island of Tutuila, the largest and most populous island in the federally unincorporated territory of American Samoa, dealt with recent increased policy requirements from the federal US Head Start program. As we will share, these policy requirements had substantial implications for curriculum, pedagogy and classroom materials in Head Start Classrooms in the 50 states, Washington DC and programs in US territories (Guam, CNMI, Puerto Rico, USVI, and American Samoa). For American Samoa in particular, they brought across the great Pacific curricular models, US favored developmentally appropriate pedagogical approaches and associated child-rearing values, that were often in conflict with traditional Samoan practices and local cultural knowledge.

In this paper, we place our focus on how ‘child-centered’ practices, inherent in Head Start performance standards were understood and negotiated in preschools on the island of Tutuila in American Samoa. In what follows, we discuss ‘child-centeredness’ as a western instructional and curricular approach, juxtaposing it with indigenous/Pasifika approaches to early-childhood education to elucidate that outside the continental US, there exists less certainty, perhaps even suspicion, about the value of a western child-centered approach. We then move to findings which illuminate Samoan teachers’ beliefs of child-centeredness through the concept of counter stories (Solórzano and Yasso, 2002) with attention to how these educators negotiated child-centered policy through a local community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). As we show, this negotiation was highly influenced by local contextual factors of fa’a Samoa, or the Samoan way of life. We illustrate this culturally diverse approach to articulate the limitations of western child-centered approaches in policy. We conclude with a recommendation for including an expanded and reconsidered version of child-centered approaches in federal Head Start policy impacting US territories, one that is informed by local sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts.

Background

Head Start, the US ‘premier’ federally sponsored early-childhood education program (Bierman et al., 2008), was developed as a component of Johnson’s War on Poverty. It aimed to reduce socio-economic disparities in elementary-school readiness through the implementation of a comprehensive education and social service program for children and their families (Bierman et al., 2008). In 2016 it funded the education for 732,711 children in 57,083 classrooms within the USA and US territories (NHSA, 2018a).

While Head Start programs are locally administered, they are federally funded. In 2007 the Head Start reauthorization was signed into law, which included more clearly articulated performance standards (Zigler and Styfco, 2010). These new performance standards included, among other things: increased education requirements for teachers, and the requirement that all Head Start grantees implement a research-based curriculum (Zigler and Styfco, 2010) that was shown to align with ‘scientifically-based and developmentally appropriate education performance standards related to school readiness’ (NHSA, 2018b).

In response to these mandates, the Samoan early-childhood education program, which serves over half of all eligible preschoolers in American Samoa (NHSA, 2018a) adopted Creative Curriculum, a commercialized curriculum with specific, detailed topics of study, daily schedules and scripted, pre-planned lessons with associated materials. As the director and teachers made clear, they faced a dilemma between continuing to implement their existing local curriculum,¹ which they believed supported the social/emotional, cognitive, physical and cultural needs of their children, and the need to comply with the revised federal policy to avoid risking the loss of federal funding for their 71 classrooms.

Samoa

American Samoa is a linguistic, ethnic and cultural minority island community of approximately 65,000 people in the South Pacific. American Samoa has a unique political status as an ‘unorganized and unincorporated’ US Territory (Zuercher et al., 2012) since an agreement between colonial powers divided Samoa into spheres of influence, with the US taking the eastern islands (Droessler, 2013). As an unincorporated federal territory, it retains many substantial aspects of Samoan Culture.² Culturally, the lives of Samoan teachers and students are centered around the extended family, the village and the church (Fiaui and Hishiniuma, 2009; Hunkin-Finau, 2010). Samoan language, traditional practices and social expectations revolve around these three institutions (Hunkin-Finau, 2010). Traditional Samoan culture is communal, collective and hierarchical, and places a high importance on fefaasoaai (collaboration), fetausiai (reciprocity), love, tapuia/va fealoai (respect) and tautua (service), tofa autasi (consensus), ava fatafata (protocol) (Toso, 2011). On Tutuila, churches are extremely plentiful, and the vast majority of the population attends church, with many families spending all day Sunday and often multiple days a week involved in church activities.

American Samoa’s education system has been heavily shaped by US influence and is closely tied to a US philosophy of education for more than 100 years (Zuercher et al., 2012). Tutuila in particular has long felt the pressure of imported curriculum and pedagogical approaches from the US, which historically have been given primacy in American Samoa as they have often been tied to policy mandates and funding. Samoan education scholars have noted that many US curriculums and the associated pedagogy are culturally (and often linguistically) incongruent with home environments of students in American Samoa (Hunkin-Finau, 2010; Zuercher et al., 2012). This has had serious ramifications for American Samoan children, who often fall to the bottom of US standardized measures. US education policy has largely failed to understand or recognize this incongruence (Hunkin-Finau, 2010).³

Understandings of child centeredness: Western and indigenous considerations

There is no doubt that child centeredness is an enduring and fixed entity in early childhood education. In fact, it could be said that it is a revered concept (Grieshaber and Ryan, 2005; Langford, 2010)

As Grieshaber and Ryan articulate, in western contexts (such as the field of US early childhood education), a child-centered approach is largely considered a universal best prac- tice for how young children learn (Brooker, 2005; Graue, 2005; Langford, 2010). This approach to pedagogy emphasizes the importance of intermingling inquiry through play, often with a belief that ‘children should be relatively free from adult direction and intrusion, enabling them to exercise agency, self-regulation, ownership and control and to direct their own learning’ (Wood, 2014: 4). While often considered pedagogically, child-centeredness is also a philosophical stance and a discursive frame which materializes in curricular models (e.g. in emergent and negotiated curriculums). Influenced by European models (Frobelian kindergartens, and more recently Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia approaches), child-centeredness is seen as promoting choice, an essential feature of democratic schooling (Moss, 2007). Emphasizing individual voice, the underlying assumption of child-centeredness is that preschool children learn best when they are given choice, and when they are allowed to direct their own learning, often through individually chosen activities. Adults are constructed as supportive facilitators that gently guide children’s play, careful to never take ‘too heavy a hand’ (Walkerdine, 1994). Within western child-centered pedagogy, roles for children are constructed as ‘active and inquiring, and whose activity leads to “real” understanding’ (Walkerdine, 1994: 61) These roles, Walkerdine (1994: 61) writes, are not happenstance, but are necessary to support the ‘possibility of the belief of the independent and autonomous child’ free from adult authority and pressure.

The cultural nature of child-centeredness

While, in the US, child-centered approaches are often lauded as best practice, there is a sizable body of literature which questions the construction and application of this approach in international and culturally diverse contexts (Gupta, 2006; Lee and Tseng, 2008; Viruru, 2001).

Using a cross-cultural lens, educational anthropologist Joseph Tobin (2005) argues that western concepts of quality (and that goes for child-centered curriculum) in early-childhood programs are cultural, yet these cultural beliefs are often disguised as universal truths for best practices within preschool curriculum and instruction. In his study of French and Japanese preschools, Tobin argues that preschool approaches must be viewed not as inappropriate or appropriate, but bound by specific logic and practices in local communities. He advocates for a cultural relativistic approach to explain that ‘beliefs and practices of a culture cannot be meaningfully evaluated using the criteria of another culture’ (Tobin, 2005: 425). As he elucidates, it is ‘intellectually and methodologically unsound to attempt to understand another people’s cultural practice using assumptions and categories of one’s own culture’ (Tobin, 2005: 425).

A cultural lens in considering pedagogy is foundational within the work of educational anthropologists, who have shown the meaningfulness of other culture’s approaches to educating young children (Tobin et al., 1991). When culturally diverse teachers approach the education of young children in ways that conflict with curriculua dictates, or preferred or standard approaches, educational anthropologists have shown this to reflect culturally specific approaches to education and a diversity of beliefs in how children learn. Their work has also questioned the relevancy of universal curriculum and pedagogy within certain cultural contexts. Most notable within this approach is Barbara Rogoff’s ethnographic studies, who notes that children from Maya background in rural Mexico learn in drastically different manners than European–American children, mainly due to cultural expectations of the local community (Rogoff et al., 2003). The Mayan children she studied were encouraged to learn by watching and participating in highly contextualized activities of the community. Rogoff (2014) noted that children learn by ‘listening in’ and being part of the adult world. While Rogoff does not explicitly address child-centeredness as a concept, her work points out and acknowledges the stark comparison of western European approaches to contextualized, cultural approaches.

The appropriateness of Western, child-centered pedagogy has directly been called into question by indigenous scholars in the Pacific. For example, Native Hawaiian scholar Julie Kaomea (2009) shows that there are culturally specific aspects of quality for kānaka maoli (Native-Hawaiian) children that differ significantly from western, progressive, child-centered approaches. Kaomea focuses on the role of the teacher and child in articulating indigenous Hawaiian practice; in Hawaiian classrooms, she explains, the teachers’ role is to guide and explain, and children are expected to watch, listen, observe, and practice. Native Hawaiian teachers expect deference to authority and a respect for teachers, that western approaches, children, and parents often fail to grasp. ‘Questions or nïnau’, Kaomea writes, ‘are encouraged from the start in progressive, child-centered pedagogy’ and yet when these practices enter into indigenous classrooms, they are considered to be maha‘oi, ‘bold, impertinent rude or forward’ (Pukui and Elbert, 1986: 219). As Kaomea makes clear ‘there is a time and a place for questions in Hawaiian learning, after other aspects of learning, namely observing, listening, reciting and practicing’ (Kaomea, 2009: 85). In a similar vein, Tongan Scholar Pau’uvale (2012) articulates that Tongan/Pasifika concepts of ‘quality’ recognize a ‘deep understandings of the role of culture and in the context of social and cognitive development’. Tongan approaches, she explains, center on Fonua, or the ‘manifestations of Tongan people’ which is inclusive of the culture, traditions, history, values, beliefs and cultural practices which should be included and reflected in preschools serving Tongan/Pasifika children (Pau’uvale, 2012). One of her notable points is to call for the inclusion of vaa and vaha’a, in pedagogical and curricular matters, which she articulates is linked to cultural identity formation of Tongan/Pasifika people. These values are relational rather than individualistic.

Pedagogical practices such as these reflect values of interdependence, community voice, and a respect for adults rarely found in western approaches (Fairbairn-Dunlop, 1981; Lee and Tseng, 2008; Ochs 1988; Schoeffel et al., 1996). As both Kaomea and Pau’uvale make clear, through pedagogy, children learn not just the content of the lesson, but more importantly, are explicitly taught values of respect, patience, collectivism, and humility through early-childhood pedagogy. Surprisingly, despite the strong representation of diverse pedagogical approaches presented here, and the sizeable body of literature in the field of early childhood which refutes the universality of child-centered, progressive approaches (Langford, 2010) this acknowledgement is all but missing from policy discussions.

Theoretical perspective

In analyzing our data, we employ a post-colonial counter-narrative approach. Counter-narrative is an analytical method ‘of telling the stories of people who are often overlooked in the literature, and as a means by which to examine, critique, and counter majoritarian stories (or master narratives) composed about people of color’ (Harper, 2009: 701).

Aligned with Black, and Chicana feminist standpoint theory (Bernal, 1998; Harding, 2004) and related to the tradition of testimonio in LatCrit, or critical Latinx work (Huber, 2009). ‘Counter-narratives’ are concerned with the social and political as well as the personal; they resist or counter official texts and taken-for-granted assumptions (McCarty et al., 2006). As Gilmore and Smith point out (2005: 69, cited in McCarty et al, 2006) ‘amplifying counter-narratives in indigenous communities reassert cultural ties and hold possibility to challenge the dominant culture, language and ideology’. Counter-narratives have the potential to ‘transform the received circumstances they call into question’ (Gilmore and Smith 2005: 69, cited in McCarty et al., 2006).

Solórzano and Yosso (2002) note that there are three types of counter-narratives or what they call counter-storytelling: other people’s stories, personal stories, and composite stories. Here, we consider the compilation of focus groups as a composite as it relies 'on data collected from multiple persons of color who have experienced a particular context or similar phenomena’ (Harper, 2009: 702). We acknowledge that by focusing on the approaches of Samoan educations through counter-narratives, we are consciously engaging in a political stance in research. Yet in keeping with critical postmodern approaches, we recognize all research as inherently political. As we show, this critical epistemological and theoretical perspective allows for multiplicity of meanings, which in turn problematizes a master narrative of appropriate practice for young children, opening possibilities for reparative practices (Smith, 2013). We, following Solórzano and Yosso, recognize counter‐storytelling as a theoretical and methodological approach for education research.

Methods

In an aim to understand the perspectives of Samoan teachers, we employed multiple ethnographic methods. We began the study with a traditional ethnographic design, in which two researchers conducted participant observation over a two-year period. We collected written field notes and conducted formal and informal interviews with teachers, directors, parents and educational support personnel such as mentor teachers, and program and curricular coaches. We collected policy documents, and took photographs of the classroom environment and children's work. In the second phase of the study, we added a third researcher and added a video-cued multivocal (VCM) ethnographic approach. We recognized VCM to be an effective methodological tool to better listen to these Samoan teachers’ implicit cultural logic (Henward et al., in press). In accordance with this method, we filmed a day in the Samoan preschool, and then edited the video to 20 minutes. In focus groups, we showed the edited Samoan video to the two preschool teachers in the class. We used scenes as a cue to provoke and organize discussion. We also showed them videos of mainland Head-Start classrooms (of Arizona, Pennsylvania and DC) for sake of comparison. We then repeated this with focus groups which were comprised of Samoan teachers and directors. In viewing their own video, the teachers are able to explain their own approaches to education. When teachers comment on other teachers’ practices, they in turn reveal their own cultural beliefs to educating children (Hsueh and Tobin, 2012). In VCM the video provides a shared prompt for discussion, and is not considered data.

All interview data was recorded digitally and then transcribed. Field notes were collected (Emerson et al., 2011). We used a two-tiered coding system to analyze transcripts and field notes (Saldana, 2015). Analysis of data began with open coding (Miles and Huberman, 1994) and continued iteratively, moving back and forth between the data and abstract concepts (Merriam and Tisdell, 2015). We then revised the codes. Using a constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss, 2017), the coded data were then clustered into conceptual categories including authority, collectivism, care, assessment, value of learning from each other and religious influences. Post-colonial literature was utilized in the analysis. Member checking, triangulation and peer debriefing were used (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

Results

Field notes and interviews revealed these Samoan teachers’ beliefs did not include a high reverence for individual inquiry and individually directed free play. Our field notes conducted on the two playgrounds and within a classroom showed that Samoan children typically engaged in shared, whole group activities that were often teacher lead. For example, one day we observed the children playing hopscotch. They were in groups of three to four, but there were many simultaneous games of hopscotch occurring at the same time. When they were in smaller learning groups within learning centers (that were required by the curriculum and performance standards), the children often attended to a single activity. Very rarely did they move between the ten centers and if so, it was at the direction of the teacher.

In what follows, we introduce the four core themes that gave shape to our interview discussions: community pressure, value of the classroom group and larger Samoan community, learning from each other, and the importance of deference to authority. These are components and concerns shaped by the cultural and sociopolitical forces in Samoa, and as we share, will help to explain why the teachers did not consider western child-centered approaches an appropriate pedagogical tool for children in Samoa.

One morning, Ms. Rina is sitting on a concrete bench on the patio of the Tafuna preschool. Seated in front of her are fifteen children in brown jumpers and lavalavas (a traditional kilt like skirt worn by boys and men in Samoa) and starched white button up shirts. As we watch, she directs these children to sit down. She raises a wooden mallet to begins to hit the pate, a traditional wooden instrument. At this signal, the children rise. It is a game similar to the US. game 'Simon Says'. Ms Rina calls out a cue ‘musa!’ and the children begin hopping up and down to the beat of the pate, following her command. They continue for 20–30 seconds until she calls out ‘taofia!’ (stop), as she silences the pate. She then calls out another command and in response, the children begin waving their arms at each other, turning in circles in an airplane fashion. Taofia (stop), they are told, and they comply, beaming at each other and Ms Rina.

When the two focus teachers were shown this video, they explained this as a gross-motor practice that they felt facilitated the children’s social, physical and cognitive development. Multiple focus groups of Samoan educators, when shown this video endorsed the approach in supporting children’s learning and development, but as we show below, this was understood within the context and values of Tutuila.

Author: What do you see here? What is the teacher doing? 

Ms Harmony declared ‘Samoan language, Samoan culture, everything is Samoan.’

Ms Masina: Yes, it’s student learning. Actually, when they’re learning, it’s like when the other student doesn’t know what they’re saying or what kind of action they are supposed to do, they’re learning from looking each other.

As focus groups of these teachers made clear, among Head Start educators on Tutuila, there was a strong belief that teacher-led, whole-group activities were most advantageous for children. One advantage, they explained was that whole group activities provided children with peer-modeled examples. As Ms Natia explained,

And then, that student role – like some students don’t know how to hop. So, when they see the other student hop, like they can’t hop on one feet…then they’ll be like, Okay, so this is how hop goes. And then each is learning from another. And it’s one of the benefits from working in groups too.

Children, one teacher explained, were very different. Children have ‘different stages of development’, and they ‘come from different homes with different strengths’, and in which different skills are taught. For Samoan teachers, collective, whole group activities were advantageous in that they provided children with clear expectations and if they needed help, whole group activities allowed them to ‘catch up’ with their peers. As another teacher noted,

Because if you look at the students, they all came from different families. So, some are other, you know, families. So, this is another way to recognize (what they need to work on) it and build their strengths. This way they have each other.

By organizing children in whole-group, teacher-directed activities, the teachers felt they could best asses the individual development of each child. As Ms Masina explained,

And also, this the way of evaluation for the teacher to watch, so that next time you make it better. You see what’s working. It’s easier to evaluate.

Ms Natia: Yes, teachers are observing through (sic) the students to make sure they are developing.

Building a group identity

The teachers explained that in Samoa, they structure activities so that young children learn to be part of a group. Ms. Lisa explained,

Nurturing. It is a way of taking care of them, they should be part of a group. We do activities that teach that. When they come, they know how to be in grouping (sic) and be in the school. As every year we do that. And in the villages, they play in groups… it’s how they should. They have games like cricket, they play volleyball, or they play catch ball, things like that. So, all those, they come in groups.

Children historically have been (and continue to be) instructed in groups outside of schools, in dance troops, games and church. Collectiveness, as the teachers indicate, is cultivated at home and within village and social activities. Gerber (1985) notes that approaches to child rearing through the Samoan concept of Alofa means creating strong collective relationships where the emphasis is on mutual obligation (e.g. parents providing food for the family, children cooking and serving food to parents). Anthropologist Elinor Ochs has noted that Samoan children are socialized from birth to be highly in tune with the emotional utterances and effect of community members (Ochs, 1986). This she suggests, is because community members and relationships in the community are so highly regarded in the Samoan context. And as we add, to be so closely attuned to the feelings of others reflects a deep belief that there are strengths in groups and that children should be taught this. As a traditional Samoan proverb advises: Ua o gatasi le futia ma le umele (we must be of one mind in the undertaking).

Learning from each other

Child-centered individual play as shown in mainland videos was seen as violating expectations of group cohesion, collectivism and as the teachers supplied, ‘togetherness’. While Samoan teachers endorsed the idea of children learning through play in the preschool classroom, they did not mean the open-ended free play in the other Head Start classrooms.

This was exemplified one afternoon when we observed two teachers leading the children to a playground. Entering into the fenced area, the children made their way to one ladder, where every child in the class waited at the base of the ladder for their turn to go down one slide, despite multiple entrances and slides on the play structure. One at a time the children slid down a yellow tube, turning left and then ran back to the ladder get in line again. When one girl attempted to turn right, a parent-volunteer took her wrist and moved her back in line. We noticed this many times in our fieldnotes; when children were not in groups, the teachers often physically moved them to be part of a group.

When Samoan teachers were shown a clip of this, they explained it as a pedagogical practice in schools as well as a practice shaped by cultural norms and ways of being on Tutuila. As Ms Elena explained,

Yeah. I think consciously speaking, most of our Samoan people, we kind of have more activities, like grouping in groups. So, in Sunday Schools, there is a teacher teaching and children in a group activity. And then if you have a family dance or activity held outside the church, it’s like a continuity thing that we do it as a group.

As one of the teachers further explained ‘we bring this all into our curriculum. So yes, so it helps them to understand and how we live in this environment.’ As Ms Elena succinctly expressed ‘the child is part of our culture. We bring Samoan ways into school.’ Samoan teachers held collaborative learning and whole group activities in a high regard. This, they explained to be child-centered, not the western conception that is typically lauded in early childhood.

The stark contrast between US and Samoan approaches and what counted as appropriate pedagogy was highlighted when Samoan teachers were shown videos of mainland approaches in video-cued focus groups. One clip, shot during center time, showed children playing and moving among and in between activities within learning centers. When the children would tire of an activity such as the sand table, they would then move to another activity at their own discretion.

Overwhelmingly, Samoan teachers had difficulty considering the open-ended, child-centered approaches they viewed in the videos as best practice. One recurrent concern voiced in interviews was that child-led practices left children undirected and without an activity.

Ms Tamah: I noticed that because on the mainland, that they encourage um, kids to you know play independently.

Ms Isophina: I guess it’s just a mainland thing then. But then I guess that their curriculum is play. So, I think it just a different way of learning. Because I notice there is a lot of encouragement in playing where they play to learn. And like for us over here, yes, we do play. But we still have certain directions. But in the group area, I think the teacher should have an activity there where the students are together. 

Ms Tamah: What are the other kids doing? So, my question is either she’s (the teacher) giving them (the other students) an activity to work on like sit down and work on- but what about the other students?

Ms Isophina: Well our feeling is, it’s not typically good to just focus on one student and the other bunch of students are just roaming around doing their own thing. While the other two (children), you’ve got them standing there. So, you monitor all of them when it comes to small groups and you make sure that they have certain things to do to keep them occupied.

An additional concern raised by the teachers was that in a free play, child-centered classroom, teachers could not account for the mastery of a particular lesson. As Ms Samaria pointed out,

They should sit down in a group and work on hands-on with us. Because if we do a clothing unit, each center has an activity with them. So, then the students will take home (the activity), they’ll work on it and then after that, only then they move from center-to-center. This activity is different than this (other) activity. 

She compared this to what she viewed in the mainland Head Start classrooms.

Okay. The students are finished with this activity, so they’re moving. It’s kind of like a creative thing. They should have a lesson plan. They should finish what they start.

The teachers also voiced concern that free play did not allow for teachers to teach the other components of the curriculum. Teachers felt that too much time was wasted when children were left with what they perceived to be undirected in play.

Community pressure

Child-centered pedagogy often requires teachers to be facilitators, guides and observers to the individual practices and activities of many children in US preschools (Walkerdine, 1989). When children engage in child-centered activities, they are assumed to be engaged in an individualized experience that captures their individual interest through their own choice of activities. In the focus groups we conducted, it quickly became apparent that this was not valued by Samoan teachers. Their concern was that by focusing on one child, as would be required of a teacher in a child-led free play scenario, or a teacher working with one child, they would be in turn privileging this child over other children. In this understanding, it was far from being child-centered to attend to only one child, because as they asked ‘what about the other children?’

Ms Arihi: Well, yes, the interaction with the students are very active and everything. I like that. But there is one thing with it, she’s focusing on that on that one student, but what about the rest, you know?

Ms Tamah: And you can see the students are all – running around, and going around, and they bump into each other or hit somebody, then there will be a situation.

Ms Arihi : Yes, and then the parents will come and ask us (if something happened) what we’re not aware of.

Ms Tamah : Students, some are rolling, some are talking… (grimaces) but over here, to us, because you know how our culture is. We have to and they have to listen to what the parents said. But … we’re different.

Our initial coding of these teachers’ comments indicated a strong concern by these teachers for safety. As a US territory, this might not have been surprising as diminishing risk and ensuring safety in preschools has been shown to be a US cultural preoccupation (Tobin et al., 2009).Yet using an interpretive, contextually informed lens, we suggest other concerns, ones that come from the interconnected, collective, and hierarchical Samoan community.

Teachers everywhere feel some degree of pressure from parents and communities. Yet as Ms Tamah’s comments indicate, Samoan teachers feel a specific pressure from the families and community to teach in a way that aligns with the cultural expectation in Samoa. In Samoa, the teachers are beholden to pressures very few other teachers are, namely pressures from the local village community, which are governed by matai. As a teacher explained during the course of fieldwork, if she were outside on a nature walk with the children, a matai chief of her village (who could be a parent, a grandparent, or an uncle of one of the children or even of the teacher) could tell her to take her children inside, or stop an activity, or express displeasure because of her teaching approaches. The expectation, the teachers explained, would be to comply without hesitation. As matai, his opinion would be honored and enforced by other village residents, and would supersede any approach, recommendation or requirement from Head Start. This helps to explain why preschool teachers could be so attuned and concerned about violating local social expectations. For children to engage in individualistic, open-ended free play that they feared might cause harm and that did not match the wishes and preferences of the parents and community, the teachers might understandably be reticent.

The beliefs articulated by these Head Start teachers reflects local mores; specifically, that in Samoa, you must defer to chiefs and community. It also reflects a largely shared perspective on the best way to educate children. As these teachers are from the same cultural group on a small and interconnected island, they are aligned with parents in many beliefs in practices, unlike some situations where teachers teach other people’s children. As has been noted elsewhere, Samoan parents have been shown to prefer a pedagogical style that emphasized deference to authority and approaches which see the value in collectively-based, rote-style of learning (Dickie and McDonald, 2011). Educationally, churches influence pedagogy; churches tend to emphasize teacher-directed, rote learning and oral presentation of biblical texts that are read and committed to memory (Dickie and McDonald, 2011). Church membership and religious affiliation, particularly conservative Christian, can also influence pedagogy in preschool (Henward and MacGillvray, 2013). It is also what many Samoan parents and grandparents come to expect. These teachers, while emphasizing some aspects of western European child-centered approaches, also implement pedagogical styles favored by the community. We suggest that because the beliefs of the teachers and community were not in extreme conflict, it is easier for the teachers to listen to the community. The shared belief also meant they were not as likely to feel pressure from community and most notably, the chiefs over conflicting pedagogy. Samoan teachers were in this way sensitive to the opinions and wishes of parents. The tension for the Samoan teachers is less that they don’t share beliefs of parents and community, than that they are caught between their beliefs as and notions of early-childhood professionalism.

The contrast between locally-valued notions of child-centeredness and those endorsed in policy documents, curriculum and in practice in Head Starts was crystalized as focus groups of Samoan teachers watched a clip of children engaging in free play on a playground in Arizona. In the video, they observed children running, playing independently on slides, doing a letter activity in a sandbox, climbing on bikes and swings; each following their interest and engaging in activities of their choice; common practices in US mainland Head Starts, but practices rarely seen on Tutuila. At no time were these practices documented in our fieldnotes, nor in video. As these teachers explained, not only were these were not typical practices, they were also seen as ‘strange’ and inappropriate for the Samoan context. In more individual activities where children play their own games and choose their own activities, Samoan teachers felt something was lost.

Ms Malua: Our students, basically when one goes and climbs the stairs, everybody follows. It’s like they make a line. And then if they go slide, everyone goes slides. Everyone always together.

Ms Mealofa: Um, the way, we know what it meant [sic] for our students that like we say you form a line and then they walk on the line. But here they are all over on the playground.

Allison: Do you feel uncomfortable (with the way the teacher is teaching)? 

Ms Mealofa: Yes.

As these teachers made clear in their practices and in their interviews, these desirable attributes are best fostered and displayed in activities that allow for children to be together and to work together, under the watch and direction of a teacher. And, when children are not part of the group and not participating in group activities, something is assumed to be wrong. The Samoan teachers’ logic indicates that collectivity is highly desired, to such a degree that children who do not participate effectively in whole-group, collaborative activities, are perceived to need remediation and support.

One of the goals of preschool activities, the teachers show, is for children to learn among peers. This pedagogical strategy allows children substantial support in the classroom. Group activities with the teacher as the director, provides an opportunity for modeling and various ways to support for children who might not have mastered an activity, much like a built-in Vygotsky scaffolding. Although the children are capable of autonomy, child-centered approaches for these teachers meant an emphasis on collective practices. Much like many western children are socialized to participate in democratic exercises such as choosing Cheerios over goldfish, and an encouragement of voicing their individual opinions, Samoan children learn through practices in school how to navigate and get along in a collective, connected, religious and hierarchical Samoan society. For Samoan teachers to encourage children to participate in drastically individualistic, free play would be neglectful of the cultural and social expectations of children on Tutuila.

In traditional Samoan households, children are often taught to eat after parents and look to their parents for direction. This is to teach children respect for elders and about the hierarchal society of Samoa. In Samoa, protocol means an acknowledgment of the hierarchy and knowing one’s place within the system and one’s place in the community. Children directing activities in the preschool classrooms with little regard for adult input and direction violates roles and expectations for children who are largely expected to defer to authority. This means that children in preschools, while knowing the expectations and routines, are often taught to look to the teacher for guidance. And cultural expectations, as Pau’uvale (2012) and Kaomea (2009) show can transfer into pedagogy as appropriate ways of teaching. As the teachers articulate, they consciously tie the Samoan approaches, the importance of deference to authority is consciously and tacitly infused in their approaches. In this way, the responses of the teachers considered through post-colonial lenses indicates a conscious, intentional cultural logic to educating young children. Teacher-directed, whole-group and authoritarian approaches that are often constructed as less than desirable, inappropriate or misinformed by western early childhood cannons, are given new meaning when considered within social, political, and cultural context in Samoa. Teachers in Samoa choose their approaches based on what is known about their own cultures (Gutiérrez and Rogoff, 2003). These include learning to be part of a group over individually chosen activities, and practices that regard teachers and elders with respect.

Discussion

Our study has empirically shown one way in which globalized racial and cultural power relations configure, in this case through the importation of Head Start policy. Given the most recent federal reauthorization, these models had been legitimized and given power through policy and curriculum. For these Samoan teachers, these models were reflected in curriculum but also in the performance standards that they, as Head Start teachers were beholden to in their practice.

By studying the impact of globally circulating policy in local environments, several findings emerged. As our data shows, there was a substantial discord between preferred US models of child-centeredness and what it meant on Tutuila to be child-centered. By listening to the voices and studying the approaches of local Samoan educators through counternarratives, it pointed to the mismatch of what is assumed to be child-centered in policy and by what is actually child-centered on Tutuila. Approaches which are intended to place children at the center of the curriculum fail to do so in American Samoa as they do not take the local and cultural context of the child into account. As these teachers made clear through their counternarratives, the assumptions of how teachers and children interact through pedagogy in a child-centered approach does not fit with other cultural practices on Tutuila. To teach children to privilege individualism over community and to ignore the important role of group dynamics and cohesion, as well as the deferential and hierarchical practice of listening to their teacher, would be anything but child-centered.

In demonstrating the divergent cultural practices of child-centeredness, we wish not to reinscribe binaries of colonizer/colonized identity or center–periphery practices as hermeneutically sealed, fixed ideas in some type of post-colonial imaginary. While power relations are real, this paper does not adopt a modernist narrative of dependency theory (Ashcroft et al., 2013). Acts of rememoration should also combine acts of deconstruction, that is, acts that expose the fragility of pure categories and pure hierarchies (Gregoriou, 2004). In some cases, western discourses were evident in their practice and in their talk. For example, as teachers trained in progressive approaches by western institutions, these teachers also spoke of the importance of play, developmentally appropriate practice and children meeting goals across multiple developmental domains. The way in which these teachers understood appropriate pedagogical and curricular approaches were informed by the imported notions of child-centeredness and influences of developmentally appropriate practices. However, as fieldnotes and interviews made clear, these progressive approaches articulated in drastically different ways. For example, play was acknowledged as important, yet it reflected Samoan beliefs and not western child-centered notions of free play. In this way, it became easier for the teachers to embrace some aspects of Head Start performance standards and western progressive approaches, yet largely stay secure in many of their local pedagogical approaches.

In representing and aiming to legitimize the practices of these educators, we also make clear that these practices are always in flux and always negotiated. Findings from this study show the complex relationship between mores of two cultures, but it also points to the undue dilemma and pressure it puts on local teachers as they attempt to rectify policy from the USthat may not fit with Samoan children on Tutuila. When these practices are imported to an island nation far away from the US mainland Samoan educators change practices as they enact them. As a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) Samoan educators, altered, localized, and contextualized policy as pedagogy. In doing so, they revealed a deeper belief about the need for cultural continuity, honoring and sustaining culture and utmost respect for the context in which the children live.

Politically and administratively, these Samoan teachers are a minority living within the US system. Yet geographically, they live in an unincorporated territory of the US some 9000 miles from Washington DC, and the relative intactness of the Samoan culture in Samoa insulates the teachers to a degree. Within this small and interconnected island nation, they receive constant reinforcement of fa’a Samoa approaches to educating young children from other teachers as well as directors, mentor teachers, program coaches, and supervisors who shared beliefs about the ill fit of western child-centered approaches in Samoa. The responses of indigenous and culturally diverse early-childhood teachers to imposed, western curriculums must be seen on a continuum. Teachers in Samoa can be argued to have less educational and cultural autonomy than indigenous teachers in New Zealand, where the Maori negotiated Te Whariki, a fusing of indigenous curriculum with the progressive White early childhood community (Nuttall, 2003). But as we have shown, the Samoan teachers have more educational and cultural autonomy than might be seen in other culturally diverse contexts in other places in the US. These Samoan teachers are given substantial latitude to teach in culturally responsive ways. In comparison to culturally-diverse teachers on the mainland who continually face resistance to carrying out their cultural beliefs (Adair et al., 2012), the Samoan teachers have immediate supervisors and support personnel (such as curriculum directors and mentors) who, like them, are from the mainstream Samoan culture. This, along with the extremely interconnected early-childhood community provided substantial amounts of cultural strength allowed the teachers, directors and Samoan Head Start personnel to function as a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), able to effectively and collectively contextualize pedagogy to provide culturally relevant education. As this community of practice, they could find the strength to incorporate local ideas and approaches to the education of young children, even when Head Start policy guidelines and western curriculum suggested otherwise.

Critical ethnographic work by its nature attempts to identify and unseat power relations to share often marginalized perspectives. Counternarratives allow for representation of perspectives that are rarely included in policy (Solórzano and Yasso, 2002). Counternarratives, as a critical-race methodology and as a theoretically grounded approach to research foregrounds ‘race and racism in all aspects of the research process’ identifying how Eurocentric perspectives have privileged certain epistemologies over others (Solórzano and Yasso, 2002: 24). For policy makers who might not have previously considered or may have delegitimized these approaches in a discussion of quality or appropriateness, attending to the voices of indigenous Samoan educators holds promise. A focus on these educators’ counternarratives opens space for considerations of local voices in determining appropriate practices for children.

Thus, we call for expanded notions of child-centeredness in federal policy. Given these Samoan educators objection to scripted and western approaches and the substantial amount of work that these educators shouldered in contextualizing practice, we suggest that Head Start policy must expand performance standards and what is considered child centered. As our data clearly shows, understandings of child-centeredness in early childhood practice and policy is narrow and potentially limiting, as western conceptions of child-centeredness often fail to recognize and consider the cultural values and practices of Samoan or other indigenous, culturally-diverse, collectivist societies. After all, at their core, child-centered approaches are intended to attend to and support the physical, intellectual, emotional, and social needs of children. We suggest rather than abandoning the concept of child-centered pedagogy as a western construct, we call for a restoration of indigenous approaches to educating young children as we expand the understanding of what it means to truly be child centered. This means focusing on children’s learning and development within local context not as a consideration, but as a central, fundamental aspect of what it means to learn. If Head Start is intended to serve the children and teachers in American Samoa, we suggest that it must truly serve them, and this means allowing them to teach in culturally appropriate ways that are truly child-centered.

As Head Start serves all 50 states and all US territories, this is an issue not unique to American Samoa. Our findings point to the need for many more ethnographic studies in the US territories, as well in other culturally diverse communities in the 50 states to articulate how concepts of child-centeredness are understood in individual communities, particularly in light of Head Start policy.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Allison Sterling Henward is an Assistant Professor of early childhood education at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research compares ECEC programs across the US and within US territories to examine how local cultures shape curriculum and pedagogy for young children, and the ways that these curriculums serve and in some cases disserve culturally diverse and economically marginalized children.

Mene Tauaa is a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a teacher educator in American Samoa.

Ronald Turituri is a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a teacher educator in American Samoa.

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