Early Childhood Education and Care Quality in Europe and the USA

Issues of Conceptualization, Measurement and Policy

Konstantina Rentzou, Ruslan Slutsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000008050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book captures information about early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies and practices in different countries and aims to question the degree to which these countries have managed to meet the needs of children, families, and the ECEC workforce.

The book illustrates how different countries have adapted different strategies focusing on policy when it comes to quality ECEC. The goal of the book is twofold. First and foremost, it aims to present key findings and challenges for improving ECEC as a whole. Second, it aims to highlight problems and concerns which the field of ECEC faces, with respect to delivering high-quality care and education to all children.

As neither "ECEC" nor "quality" are universal concepts – but are shaped by social-cultural values, as well as national, economic, and political contexts in which ECEC services are provided – this cross-country volume is extremely relevant for fully understanding issues in the field of ECEC.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Early Child Development and Care.

There is still nothing better than quality play experiences for young children’s learning and development: building the foundation for inquiry in our educational practices

Stacey Pistorova

and Ruslan Slutsky

ABSTRACT

Teachers face a growing call for implementing inquiry-based teaching and learning in a current pedagogical environment that contradicts this through educational practices that silo content, disseminate knowledge, and produce classrooms of passive learners. We address a hot topic in the United States on how a push for more “academics” is changing the landscape of education and driving play and inquiry away from the typical experiences of children in schools, resulting in an educational system disconnected from the needs of the 21st century learner. The authors suggest that when we provide young learners with quality opportunities for success in their earliest learning experiences that support play, a natural form of inquiry where children engage in the process of constructing meaning of their world, children will naturally develop inquiry skills for future learning upon which all teachers can build.

Introduction

Critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity, commonly referred to as the Four C’s, are the learning and innovative skills considered the most relevant and crucial to the twenty-first-century K-12 learner. Embedded within the P21 framework for the twenty-first-century learning the ‘Four C’s’ are four specific skills determined by business and community leaders as well as educational professionals to be the most important to a student’s success in school, work and life. The P21 framework recognizes that education needs to respond to the changing world and prepare students not for the past, but for the twenty-first century. This challenge to educators and our educational system to respond better to our ever-changing world cannot be addressed through traditional practices that silo content and asks students to passively absorb standardized knowledge that is then assessed by filling in bubbles on a test. If we are serious about preparing children and youth for the challenges and skills of the twenty-first century, we need an educational system that fully integrates the Four C’s, all of which can be grounded in inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning.

Inquiry is the process through which we make meaning of our world. Children are innately curious and inquisitive, constantly engaging all of their senses as the means of constructing knowledge. Inquiry manifests itself within the play of young children, a prevalent component of development and instinctive to all children. Inquiry-based teaching and learning triggers children’s curiosity (Wolpert-Gawron, 2016) and views learning not as the transmission of knowledge, but as the generating and posing of questions grounded in real-world problems to which children actively engage in the process of finding solutions and answers. Inquiry-based approaches call teachers to view education as the process through which students learn through the discovery and creation of knowledge (Hamlin & Wiskneski, 2012).

While the notion of inquiry in education is far from new to education there has been a growing consensus of its value to the twenty-first-century learner, resulting in a call to K-12 teachers to implement inquiry-based approaches within their classrooms. And yet, what we currently find even within the preschool and kindergarten classrooms of the United States are one-size fits all, prescriptive curricula where students spend the majority of their time being instructed and prepared not for the twenty-first-century world, but for standardized tests (Elkind, 2009; Miller & Almon, 2009; Nicolopoulou, 2010). The growing call for inquiry highlights an accumulative crisis within the educational system of the United States where inquiry-based, student-centred approaches to education are displaced by standardized curricula focused on the teaching of academic skills through direct instruction (Cronin-Jones, 1991; Miller & Almon, 2009; Nicolopoulou, 2010).

Inquiry proves a significant challenge to early childhood education teachers within the United States who find themselves within a politically driven pedagogical climate and educational legislation that seek to script and standardize teaching through the acceleration of the learning process as the means of promoting early acquisition of key skills, all in the name of ‘school readiness’ (Hirsch-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009; Miller & Almon, 2009; Nicolopoulou, 2010). The increasing pressure on teachers to engage in such didactic, pedagogical approaches now permeates our earliest learners in the preschool and kindergarten classrooms and has little to do with what research tells us is effective in early childhood education and developmentally appropriate pedagogical practices for young children. The result is a crisis in early childhood education in the United States that removes play and inquiry, the means through which young children make sense of their world (Miller & Almon, 2009).

This crisis in early childhood education within the United States and its implications go beyond the boundaries of the classroom. As early childhood practices continue to be informed by policies that emphasize a sole focus on academics and standardized tests that seek to measure student outcomes, leaders of major corporations state that the future of the economy of the United States lies in creativity and play (Miller & Almon, 2009). As our youngest children are spending the majority of their time in school being the recipients of teacher-directed instruction in literacy and math, the twenty-first century is calling for people who have the ability to respond to the growing demand for skills and knowledge that cannot be outsourced or quantifiable, skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity (Pink, 2006). This crisis calls on us to evaluate what informs the current pedagogical practices within the United States that are currently being pushed down into preschool and kindergarten and are dichotomously opposed to both how we know children develop and learn and what the twenty-first century requires.

Ritchhart (2015) asks us to look at ‘how do we talk about the value of school?’ and ‘How do we define the meaning of a quality education?’ as a starting point for ‘changing the way we talk about education’ (p. 15). The precept being that how we define quality in education directly correlates to what we prioritize and give time to in the classroom. This article is grounded in the understanding that if we truly are to transform our education for the twenty-first century, we must return to the child, their ability to construct knowledge through play and how model quality preschool environments grounded in play and inquiry can provide for a pedagogy not of the past, but the future (Samuelsson & Carlsson, 2008). In order to do so we must first look at the current, prominent definitions of quality in early childhood education within the United States that counter play as the foundation for a sustainable pedagogy where inquiry becomes a core component of every student’s life and the means of preparing them not for a standardized test, but for the world. This paper challenges the prevalent measures and definitions of quality in education that quantify and standardize early childhood experiences and turns towards research-based definitions and measures of quality in early childhood education that make a direct correlation to practices that support play and inquiry as the means of providing a foundation for learning and the Four C’s of the twenty-first century.

The problem space: ‘Play is a waste of time’

‘It was obvious that whatever they knew they had learned in an entirely mechanical manner, and they could only gape in a sort of dull bewilderment when asked to think for themselves’ (Orwell, 1960, p. 209). This quote, taken from the novel A Clergyman’s daughter by George Orwell, describes a classroom of young children whose school experiences consist primarily of rote instruction. And yet, this fictional description is not far removed from the experiences of most children within our school system in the United States who are exposed to teacher-centred learning where subject matter is isolated and students are passive recipients (Cuban, 2004). These experiences isolate the child from their disposition to engage with the world and disconnect the child from learning, eroding the essential relationship between play, inquiry and learning for all children and all for the sake of high-stakes testing and test preparation (Almon & Miller, 2011; Baines & Slutsky, 2009).

But, if we are to talk about play, we need to address the diverse definitions of play and how one word, play, evokes multiple meanings in relation to learning and inquiry within the educational system in the United States (Reifel, 2014). While the majority of educators view play as essential to development and learning, play in the United States continues to be viewed as a leisure activity, quite separate from instruction and learning (Samuelsson & Carlsson, 2008). As adults, play is the reward for putting in hard work (Adamson-Kain, 2014). This concept of play as only being those things we do after work has transferred into the early childhood classroom in which play and learning are separate and play is always at the expense of ‘learning’. Play is believed to be a waste of time in schools that should be ‘places’ of learning (Miller & Almon, 2009). The result is that pedagogical practices that eliminate play for the sake of scripted, didactic curricula are linked solely to standardized test scores (Miller & Almon, 2009; Ritchhart, 2015). The lack of seeing play as a viable quality experience for children is at the root of the societal push for more academic rigour.

So how does this manifest itself in the early childhood classroom within the United States? Research shows the transformation of early childhood education classrooms from places where young children were engaged in the construction of knowledge through play and inquiry to classrooms that have eliminated play for the sake of direct instruction and increased pressure for academic performance. Kindergartners and preschoolers are now subjected to content that previously was not introduced until first or second grade and spend the majority of their time learning what is needed for a standardized test and teachers feel the pressure to revert back to direct instruction, behaviourists thinking and worksheets (Fuligni & Hong, 2009; Kuhn, 2015; Miller & Almon, 2009). The push for early achievement outcomes in the United States continues to increase the pressures on young children to ‘master’ more and more skills at earlier ages while removing their capacity for play (Miller & Almon, 2009).

Piaget called this push for early achievement and the desire to speed up the developmental process ‘the American question’ (Zigler & Gilman, 1998). The cumulative effect of ‘the American question’ in the United States over the past decades has resulted in an increasingly hurried curriculum where didactic approaches to pedagogy dominate and have resulted in policy that has sought to define ‘quality’ by quantifying learning within standardized assessments as the best way to gauge young children’s progress in school. The problem is that this policy and culturally mediated separation of play from learning is far removed from the experiences of the child (Adamson-Kain, 2014; Samuelsson & Carlsson, 2008). This push is compromising the quality of educational experiences children are having and instead replacing it with more rigid teacher-directed instruction driven by developmentally inappropriate expectations of young children (Miller & Almon, 2009). In summation, what we currently do in education within the United States has little to do with quality pedagogy for young children and what we know leads to learning (Elkind, 2009).

The crucial question we must pose then is, why do current policies and practices in the United States dismiss and act in opposition to evidence-based research on child development and quality teaching practices in early childhood education if we know that ‘there is no evidence that a heavy emp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Contemplating and probing issues of conceptualization, measurement and policy of ECEC quality in Europe and in the USA
• 1 There is still nothing better than quality play experiences for young children's learning and development: building the foundation for inquiry in our educational practices
• 2 Teacher–child relationships make all the difference: constructing quality interactions in early childhood settings
• 3 The long way towards abandoning ECEC dichotomy in Greece
• 4 The relationship between quality of pre-school child care institutions and teachers’ teaching approach
• 5 Ensuring quality in early childhood education and care: the case of Turkey
• 6 Family support and early childhood education and care in Cyprus: existing policies and challenges
• 7 Cultural considerations of ECERS-3 in Sweden: a reflection on adaption
• 8 Parent-practitioner partnerships in early childhood provision in England, Hungary and Kazakhstan: similarities and differences in discourses
• 9 Enhancing the quality of early childhood education and care: ECEC tutors’ perspectives of family engagement in Spain
• 10 Early childhood education and care in Austria: challenges and education policies
• Index