Traditional Practices,New Possibilities: Transforming Dominant Images of Early Childhood Teachers

Abstract

In the early childhood literature good early childhood teaching is often reduced to the dominant stereotype of the sensitive, nurturing, and child-centred developmentally appropriate educator. Critics of the developmental discourse argue, however, that good early childhood teachers are of en apolitical carers of the young who need to reposition themselves from this image of facilitators to that of interventionists; teachers who take a proactive and explicit political stance with children against social inequities. In this article we examine the image of early childhood teachers as interventionists by employing feminist poststructuralism to describe and interpret the gender equity practices of two American kindergarten teachersⁱ. We use these teachers’ practices to argue that becoming interventionists does not necessarily imply reversing the current dichotomy to favour developmentally inappropriate teaching, but instead requires reconstructing the knowledge base to expand our definitions of what constitutes good teaching.