Handbook of Early Childhood Teacher Education

Leslie J. Couse, Susan L. Recchia, Leslie J. Couse, Susan L. Recchia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317816287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This handbook synthesizes both contemporary research and best practices in early childhood teacher education, a unique segment of teacher education defined by its focus on child development, the role of the family, and support for all learners. The first volume of its kind, the Handbook of Early Childhood Teacher Education provides comprehensive coverage on key topics in the field, including the history of early childhood teacher education programs, models for preparing early childhood educators, pedagogical approaches to supporting diverse learners, and contemporary influences on this quickly expanding area of study.

Appropriate for early childhood teacher educators as well as both pre- and in-service teachers working with children from birth through 8, this handbook articulates the unique features of early childhood teacher education, highlighting the strengths and limitations of current practice as based in empirical research. It concludes by charting future directions for research with an aim to improve the preparation of early childhood educators.

Part I
Context, History, and Public Policy of Early Childhood Teacher Education

1
21ST Century Early Childhood Teacher Education

New Frames for a Shifting Landscape

Rebecca S. New

The Handbook of Early Childhood Teacher Education is a unique and timely contribution to ongoing debates about the early care and education of children and what it will take to recruit and retain qualified, competent early childhood (EC) professionals. After decades of resistance, there is widespread acknowledgement at national and global levels of children’s early learning potentials and the risks we take—for children and society—in ignoring this special period in human development. Unfortunately, this latter awareness has surged due to mounting evidence of the consequences of adult ignorance or indifference to this highly responsive period in human development, including a widening gap in school achievement.

The convergence of understandings about the significance of the early years has led to calls for increased funding for child care and early childhood education (ECE) at local, state, and national levels. ECE’s economic capital is based on the premise of well-educated children being key to the nation’s future fiscal health and global standing. This argument informs new research initiatives, more technological devices targeted to increasingly younger children, policy treatises, and magazine articles on the importance of high-quality early care and education.

What’s exciting about this is the level of advocacy—local, state, national—for the importance of our work with young children, families, and teachers. What is so daunting is the extraordinary gap between rhetoric and reality. The continued juxtaposition of long-held cultural biases with new understandings about the importance of children’s early childhoods is painfully apparent in EC’s current landscape. The stakes for more effectively responding to social prejudices with compelling principles, as well as data, have never been higher. The children at the center of U.S. social and political discourses are more ethnically and linguistically diverse than at any time in our history and represent the largest percentage of Americans living in poverty. This handbook represents a much-needed opportunity to add our voices to ongoing efforts to comprehend and respond to 21st century challenges in a nation that proclaims American exceptionalism in spite of global perspectives to the contrary (OECD, 2006).

The editors envisioned this handbook as an occasion for us to think deeply, critically, and constructively about where we’ve come from, why we do what we do, and what we might do differently. In the course of writing this chapter, I was repeatedly provoked and occasionally thrown off-course by events of natural and man-made disasters in a world that continues to whirl beneath our feet. I returned often to a guiding principle—that all children deserve and are capable of much more than many are granted— and wondered why we must still make that social justice argument on children’s behalf. This tension pushed me to take yet another look at the EC teacher education landscape to better understand the origins of our image as a profession. In the pages that follow, I consider the sources of that image in light of their relevance to our future work with EC teachers on behalf of more equitable early educations and socially just childhoods in America.

The metaphor of landscape is a helpful way to consider U.S. early care and education (within which teacher education is firmly planted), although the depiction of such a vast territory raises questions of method. To survey a landscape generally entails standardized tools with which to measure and describe the terrain in ways recognizable to those within and outside the boundaries. Such precise plotting and appraisal of U.S. ECE is unlikely, given overlapping boundaries, confusing labels, and public and private settings for children from infancy through age eight. What we do know, however, is not encouraging, as described at length in other chapters. Large-scale surveys on the costs, quality, availability, and professional salaries of those working in child care and early education services in the U.S. confirm the perennial unevenness of the terrain in which EC teacher education is planted and hint at further erosion if we don’t diagnose causes and find new ways to nourish the soil.

I borrow from the tradition of landscape painting to illustrate alternative perspectives on the unfulfilled rhetoric of ECE in American society. The representational genre of figurative landscapes depicts both people and context in relationships, with selective attention to critical details. A wide-angled format permits the inclusion of temporal aspects, thus conveying the dynamic relationship between how things were and how they are.

With those potentials in mind, the landscape portrayed illustrates a cultural model of U.S. ECE including philosophical, socio-political, and social science contributions to what drives us as a profession. The figurative elements of this landscape are limited to brief sketches of enduring practices and professional discourses guided by ideological foundations. The contemporary portion of this composition includes cracks and shifts in the terrain, evidence of the weight of socio-cultural and political change. The chapter concludes with an unfinished image of a radicalized EC teacher education as a creative hybrid of some of our field’s long-held values and traditions, re-invigorated with imagined possibilities better suited to children growing up in a new world.

Cultural Models of Child Development

To understand U.S. ECE requires recognition of cultural roots beneath the surface of the more visible landscape. Cultural influences on adult ideologies and child-rearing patterns have been demonstrated in decades of anthropological research (LeVine & New, 2008). The cumulative impact of this work has informed new theories of the cultural nature of human development (Rogoff, 2003) and the central role of parental belief systems (Goodnow, Miller, & Kessel, 1995), drawing attention to the role of the environment, as “developmental niches” (Super & Harkness, 1986) that support culturally desirable behaviors and competencies (Harkness & Super, 1996). Current scholarship continues to challenge universal theories of development—processes and outcomes—in learning and cognition language development, attachment, and socio-emotional development, highlighting the subjective nature of concepts of competence, deviance, and developmental disorder (Lancy, Bock, & Gaskins, 2010).

Psychological anthropologists interpret culturally diverse parental goals and child care practices as mutually supporting components of cultural models of child care (LeVine et al., 1994). The concept of cultural models is understood as a core set of values and beliefs that guide decision making, made “visible” through social traditions, discourses, and norms of behavior and development. Scholars highlight the importance of cultural values and beliefs, describing them as a “moral direction” (LeVine et al., 1994) or, more recently, as a “moral imperative”—a “permeating light under which adults guide and children develop” (Li, 2012, p. x). Of special relevance to this chapter is the strength of a given cultural model as evidenced by the unquestioned acceptance of the moral direction and its resistance to change across boundaries and generations.

The concept of cultural models is useful in interpreting differences in other nations’ approaches to non-familial care and early education. EC researchers working in the tradition of psychological anthropology have demonstrated relationships between cultural values, national policies, and EC services in such diverse nations as: Italy, Japan, and China (Edwards & Gandini, 2001; New, Mallory, & Mantovani, 2000; Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989). These studies include ethnographies of infants and toddlers napping and playing outside in cold and inclement weather; teachers who allow children to sharpen knives and climb trees and boulders without adult supervision; and preschoolers seriously engaged in solving complex math problems, negotiating social and physical conflicts, and debating the ethics of child labor. These diverse cultural practices defy age-based expectations of attention spans, stage-theory interpretations of cognitive or moral development, standardized measures of “quality” EC environments, and universal conceptions of “developmentally appropriate” practices (New, 1999).

Cross-cultural research on child care and early education suggests children are highly motivated to learn what they need to know and do in order to be competent participants in family and community settings. Evidence of the wide range of potential child development “outcomes” highlight the limits of socio-cultural goals for children (“moral goods”) associated with any cultural model, such that child care practices like encouraging compliance to adult authority, are unlikely to co-occur with the purposeful promotion of autonomy or creative thinking. Further, this “packaging” of a society’s hopes for and expectations of children—reflected in routinized parenting, child care arrangements, and institutional supports for early learning—is embedded within the larger socio-cultural-political context. A cultural model of ECE in a pluralistic U.S. society is inextricably linked to legal and political perspectives on children’s rights, the place of families within society, and the meanings and means of achieving equity and social justice. The following depiction of a U.S. cultural model notes this complex array of socio-cultural and political relationships and directs attention to changes and continuity across the EC landscape, including images of children, families, and EC professionals, and the ideological rationale for an early education.

U.S. ECE: A Cultural Model for the Century of Childhood

EC teacher education is deeply embedded in the history of ECE, and some of the earliest advocates of children became leaders in designing teacher education programs. Other historians (e.g., Barbara Beatty [1995] and Blythe Hinitz [see Chapter 2]) have provided detailed and fascinating descriptions of the evolution of EC and teacher education within the context of a rapidly growing, turbulent, and far-from-child-centered society. For the purposes of this chapter, the following discussion highlights three features sustained over our shared histories: (1) an image of young children as needy recipients of compensatory services or eager learners; (2) the dominant role of developmental science in establishing norms of competence and deviance in child development, parenting, child care, and education; and (3) the continued resistance to public support for children and families in our increasingly diverse and wealthy society.

ECE to the Rescue

Beginning in the early part of the 19th century, U.S. ECE was primarily a form of social activism characterized by religious and philanthropic efforts on behalf of children and families living in poverty. Ideas from Western Europe—notably those of Locke, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Montessori—spurred the conviction that children were not just small adults and could be taught to take care of themselves and be socialized to be more like middle-class children, albeit with the aim of becoming more capable workers and productive citizens if provided the right materials and environments when young.

These ideas were compelling to those committed to the 20th century’s “modernist project” of building a new American society through social progress (Lubeck, 2000). Some early leaders were inspired by John Locke’s writings on the child’s malleability to environmental influences. More progressive EC educators sought out more “modern” sources of inspiration, setting up an eventual competition between those convinced of the merits of Froebel’s educational toys-in-the-form-of “gifts” and those who rejected his rigid pedagogy in favour of Montessori’s self-correcting materials.

Throughout the early 1900’s, many of the most widely known ECEs and advocates focused on poor and minority families, in part due to a lack of social services. Gradually attention shifted from charity kindergartens to the benefits of these out-of-home programs for middle-class children. As the availability of tools for standardized measurements of “normal” intelligence began to take hold of the American imagination, EC educators began to explore Dewey’s ideas about child-initiated and play-based activities and project-based curriculum (Dewey, 1926). Classroom teachers became increasingly dedicated observers of children’s behavior, sometimes inviting mothers to join in record keeping. These early beginnings contributed to dual images of young children as either eager to learn and ready to benefit from out-of-home early education or in urgent need of compensatory experiences to make up for what lacked in the home.

As interest grew in more standardized developmental assessments, university child study institutes were established and trained observers began to replace mothers and teachers in collecting and comparing data on children’s early behavior and development. Emerging theories from the social sciences inspired researchers to design and implement their own studies on child development, often distancing their efforts from (and potential relevance to) real children in actual classrooms. EC professionals were eager consumers of this growing body of research. It is notable that the first national organization dedicated to EC professionals (National Association of Nursery Educators—precursor to NAEYC) was formed in the same year (1922) as the National Research Council’s endorsement of Child Development as a separate discipline. It is hardly surprising that EC educators increasingly turned to studies conducted by scholars as a basis for working with children and families both in and out of the classroom or child care setting. This shift away from classroom-based child studies (precursor to teacher research) to an objective science established a knowledge base for the EC profession (Bloch, 1987) and bolstered an image of child development as an applied science (Rutter, 2002). This marriage of early childhood and developmental science was also deemed necessary to protect children from “rash, unwise, and potentially damaging policy decisions” (Sherrod, 1998, p. 3).

As knowledge grew about the pace and processes of early learning and development, these understandings also generated new questions about the contributions of early experiences to subsequent development. Parents and EC caregivers concerned about spoiled children welcomed Skinner’s demonstrations of the power of positive reinforcement and behavior management strategies. Erikson’s interpretation of healthy psycho-sexual development influenced interpretations of “normal” child development and raised anxieties about the consequences of unresolved stage-ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Frances O’Connell Rust
• Introduction by Leslie J. Couse and Susan L. Recchia
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Context, History, and Public Policy of Early Childhood Teacher Education
• PART II The Knowledge Base of Early Childhood Teacher Education
• PART III Models/Approaches to Early Childhood Teacher Education
• PART IV Pedagogical Approaches that Prepare Teachers to Support Diverse Learners
• PART V Contemporary Influences in Early Childhood Teacher Education
• List of Contributors
• Index