Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education... more Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education have argued that preschools are key sites in which children learn about race and racism. However, there is little research on how teachers negotiate conflicting tensions and enact antiracist approaches within Head Start (HS) classrooms that use comprehensive and commercialized curriculums. Study Purpose: This article is about the challenges early childhood educators face when young children (ages 3-5) bring painful and uncomfortable issues of race, racism, and incarceration to preschool. This study is part of the research project Negotiating Head Start Curriculum (NHSC), a comparative study of policy implementation in four cultural communities in the United States. Here we focus on educators' response to the "Jail Scene," a pivotal scene taped in an HS classroom serving African American children. Research Design: The method used in the NHSC project is a multivocal ethnographic research method combined with a comparative case study design. We selected classrooms in each community that implemented both Creative Curriculum® and Teaching Strategies Gold®, led by experienced teachers in Chicanx and Latinx, Samoan, and white Appalachian communities. We made videotapes of similar activities across all sites. We then used these videos as cues for focus group interviews with educators (teachers, directors, and instructional personnel). We applied constant comparative, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Voloshinovian literary analysis to 41 interview transcripts of 132 educators' talks. Findings: Analysis of transcripts indicates Black teachers are more likely to recognize racism, including the effects of incarceration and arrest on children's talk and play, in
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education... more Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education have argued that preschools are key sites in which children learn about race and racism. However, there is little research on how teachers negotiate conflicting tensions and enact antiracist approaches within Head Start (HS) classrooms that use comprehensive and commercialized curriculums. Study Purpose: This article is about the challenges early childhood educators face when young children (ages 3–5) bring painful and uncomfortable issues of race, racism, and incarceration to preschool. This study is part of the research project Negotiating Head Start Curriculum (NHSC), a comparative study of policy implementation in four cultural communities in the United States. Here we focus on educators’ response to the “Jail Scene,” a pivotal scene taped in an HS classroom serving African American children. Research Design: The method used in the NHSC project is a multivocal ethnographic research ...
This volume offers both theoretical and research-based accounts from mothers in academia who must... more This volume offers both theoretical and research-based accounts from mothers in academia who must balance their own intricate knowledge of school systems, curriculum and pedagogy with their children’s education and school lives. It explores the contextual advantages and disadvantages of "knowing too much" and how this impacts children’s actions, scholastics and developing consciousness along various lines. Additionally, it allows teachers, administrators and researchers to critically examine their own discourses and those of their students to better navigate their professional and domestic roles. Gathering narratives from academic women in traditional and nontraditional maternal roles, this volume presents both contemporary and retrospective experiences of what it’s like to raise children amidst educational and sociocultural change.
This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, ... more This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, motherhood, family and community [...]
Child-centeredness is a pedagogical approach common in US early childhood education, one that adv... more 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 pedag...
Ethnographic Studies of Children CHAPTER 13 and Youth and the Media Joseph Tobin and Allison Henw... more Ethnographic Studies of Children CHAPTER 13 and Youth and the Media Joseph Tobin and Allison Henward DEFINITIONAL PROBLEMS Given that ethnographies are studies of cultures, what are the cultures studied in eth-nographies of children and the media? This ...
In this paper, we focus on how indigenous Head Start teachers in American Samoa, an unincorporate... more In this paper, we focus on how indigenous Head Start teachers in American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the US located in the South Pacific negotiated imported policy and curricular models that were not always congruent with local, indigenous approaches to educating young children. Here we place our focus on the negotiation of curriculum within these spaces and in doing so, show that through the reweaving of curriculum, western discourses and influences from the US were altered. We conclude with implications for US territories and other contested spaces across the globe.
Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education... more Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education have argued that preschools are key sites in which children learn about race and racism. However, there is little research on how teachers negotiate conflicting tensions and enact antiracist approaches within Head Start (HS) classrooms that use comprehensive and commercialized curriculums. Study Purpose: This article is about the challenges early childhood educators face when young children (ages 3-5) bring painful and uncomfortable issues of race, racism, and incarceration to preschool. This study is part of the research project Negotiating Head Start Curriculum (NHSC), a comparative study of policy implementation in four cultural communities in the United States. Here we focus on educators' response to the "Jail Scene," a pivotal scene taped in an HS classroom serving African American children. Research Design: The method used in the NHSC project is a multivocal ethnographic research method combined with a comparative case study design. We selected classrooms in each community that implemented both Creative Curriculum® and Teaching Strategies Gold®, led by experienced teachers in Chicanx and Latinx, Samoan, and white Appalachian communities. We made videotapes of similar activities across all sites. We then used these videos as cues for focus group interviews with educators (teachers, directors, and instructional personnel). We applied constant comparative, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Voloshinovian literary analysis to 41 interview transcripts of 132 educators' talks. Findings: Analysis of transcripts indicates Black teachers are more likely to recognize racism, including the effects of incarceration and arrest on children's talk and play, in
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education... more Background: Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education have argued that preschools are key sites in which children learn about race and racism. However, there is little research on how teachers negotiate conflicting tensions and enact antiracist approaches within Head Start (HS) classrooms that use comprehensive and commercialized curriculums. Study Purpose: This article is about the challenges early childhood educators face when young children (ages 3–5) bring painful and uncomfortable issues of race, racism, and incarceration to preschool. This study is part of the research project Negotiating Head Start Curriculum (NHSC), a comparative study of policy implementation in four cultural communities in the United States. Here we focus on educators’ response to the “Jail Scene,” a pivotal scene taped in an HS classroom serving African American children. Research Design: The method used in the NHSC project is a multivocal ethnographic research ...
This volume offers both theoretical and research-based accounts from mothers in academia who must... more This volume offers both theoretical and research-based accounts from mothers in academia who must balance their own intricate knowledge of school systems, curriculum and pedagogy with their children’s education and school lives. It explores the contextual advantages and disadvantages of "knowing too much" and how this impacts children’s actions, scholastics and developing consciousness along various lines. Additionally, it allows teachers, administrators and researchers to critically examine their own discourses and those of their students to better navigate their professional and domestic roles. Gathering narratives from academic women in traditional and nontraditional maternal roles, this volume presents both contemporary and retrospective experiences of what it’s like to raise children amidst educational and sociocultural change.
This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, ... more This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, motherhood, family and community [...]
Child-centeredness is a pedagogical approach common in US early childhood education, one that adv... more 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 pedag...
Ethnographic Studies of Children CHAPTER 13 and Youth and the Media Joseph Tobin and Allison Henw... more Ethnographic Studies of Children CHAPTER 13 and Youth and the Media Joseph Tobin and Allison Henward DEFINITIONAL PROBLEMS Given that ethnographies are studies of cultures, what are the cultures studied in eth-nographies of children and the media? This ...
In this paper, we focus on how indigenous Head Start teachers in American Samoa, an unincorporate... more In this paper, we focus on how indigenous Head Start teachers in American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the US located in the South Pacific negotiated imported policy and curricular models that were not always congruent with local, indigenous approaches to educating young children. Here we place our focus on the negotiation of curriculum within these spaces and in doing so, show that through the reweaving of curriculum, western discourses and influences from the US were altered. We conclude with implications for US territories and other contested spaces across the globe.
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