Embracing Alternatives to Homework in Early Childhood

Research and Pedagogies

Angela Eckhoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000608069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation de la petite enfance

Providing readers with a robust, practical understanding of how young children build knowledge, this book offers a critical examination of the ways traditional homework fails young children, and how alternatives can better build collaborative engagement with families while supporting learning across all content areas.

Grounded in culturally sustaining practices, the first section breaks down the pedagogies that support deep learning, while later chapters emphasize the role of critical and creative thinking, project-based learning, and student choice in the development of engaging, personally relevant home learning experiences.

Embracing Alternatives to Homework in Early Childhood is a critical text for anyone seeking to reimagine homework practices as both equitable and agency-building in PreK-3.

1 Understanding the Social, Cultural, and Familial Contexts Influencing Development

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213376-2

Introduction

School, family, and community partnerships are based upon the idea that the school, family, and community are all important spheres of influence on the child (Epstein, 2019). In collaborative partnerships between schools, families, and communities these spheres of influence overlap, which can positively impact children. As such, effective partnerships invite families to contribute to schools and to children’s education in many ways including shared decision-making and expertise (Francis et al., 2016). Such collaborative efforts are characterized by trusting relationships between school faculty, family members, and community members with mindful attention to open communication, respect, and attention to issues of power (McAlister, 2013; Haines et al., 2015). Strong partnerships take time and effort by everyone involved and early childhood educators play a powerful role in developing family engagement practices that encourage and support family engagement in schooling and learning.

When schools and families form authentic, collaborative relationships, they can build strong connections that reinforce students’ learning in school and out of school. Parents, families, and caregivers are a child’s first teachers, and have a wide variety of understandings and expertise to share about the child’s development, cultural experiences, and learning needs. An influential strength realized within the field of early childhood education is the long held understanding that it is important to engage the family in their child’s educational experiences. The focus on family engagement through school-to-home learning experiences in this text necessitates an interactional foundation based upon meaning and respect. When educators meaningfully engage with families, they are demonstrating respect for children’s out-of-school lives. A powerful, but often underrealized, benefit of supporting meaningful outreach practices with families is the teacher’s own exposure to a diversity of beliefs, actions, strengths, and needs gained through the willingness to view such work through a lens of affirmation and appreciation. Building strong relationships with families requires early childhood teachers to value each student’s familial histories, traditions, and knowledge and seek pathways to promote school-to-home connections.

Childhood is viewed as both a period of time and a state of being within society. It is uniquely set apart from adulthood as children have their own activities, cultural interests, and spaces for activity. Adult interactions and actions with children are guided by both societal understandings of childhood and individual experiences with children in home, school, and community contexts. This text will invite you to critically examine what you understand about children, childhood, schooling, and families. As an ongoing process, critical reflection is both descriptive and analytical adding depth and breadth to teaching. Taking an inventory of your beliefs at the start of this chapter will allow you to begin the process of critical examination and illuminate those areas where your beliefs are in alignment with contemporary, research-based understandings. By responding to the prompts presented in Figure 1.1, you will begin to critically examine the beliefs you hold about children’s life worlds.

Figure 1.1 Reflecting on Beliefs

Ecological Systems Theory

The individual child is positioned in the center of this model surrounded by the microsystem. The microsystem includes the interactions between the individual child and the immediate environment, such as the child’s experiences engaging in activities and relationships (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). The next closest system surrounding the child is the mesosystem which consists of “the interrelations amongst major settings containing the developing person at a particular point in his or her life” (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, p. 515), and includes interactions that can take place between two or more of the child’s settings (e.g., school and home setting interactions). Surrounding the mesosystem is the exosystem, which encompasses the links or interactions that occur between two or more settings. In the mesosystem, the child is not actively involved in at least one of the settings, but events occur that influence the child’s life and experiences (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). Surrounding the mesosytem is the exosystem, which incorporates influences from the broader culture and patterns of social exchange on the child’s experiences. Next, the system encompassing the exosystem, the macrosystem, involves government and public policy and, as such, influences the nature of interaction within all other systems. For example, state and federal public education policies inform the day-to-day practices of schooling for young children. The system furthest from the individual is known as the chronosystem, which captures the time element of development. Time is an important consideration in an individual’s development as it directs our attention to occurrences in both the past and present timeframes of children’s lives. As such, this theory provides a useful framework for early childhood educators as they work to understand the various influences surrounding an individual. Often, a particular phenomenon or challenge in children’s lives can be placed into context by identifying the locations and happenings of various factors that have an influence on an individual’s experiences and development.

Applying Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory to homework and family engagement demonstrates that school procedures, as well as the decisions, actions, and experiences of individual students, families, and teachers, are impacted by a range of systems. This approach rejects the view that the decisions and procedures surrounding family engagement occur in isolation; rather, they must be viewed within their broader context, or systems. Relatedly, this framework allows educators to take a dynamic, ecologically informed approach to conceptualizing the planning, implementation, and evaluation of family engagement procedures, as impacted by a myriad of dynamic, intersecting internal and external systems. The various systems and the interactions between those systems can have both a direct or indirect impact on the experiences of the child within the school, home, and community environments.

A bioecological systems view of child development highlights the two-way process known as, bidirectional influences, within the microsystem where there is direct child involvement. These bidirectional influences within the microsystem suggest that young children are influenced by the actions of others but they also, in turn, directly and indirectly influence the actions of others with whom they encounter. Figure 1.2 illustrates the bidirectionality and unidirectional influences surrounding the familial, social, and cultural influences impacting a child’s experiences with homework. It is important to note that the child’s influence on their own learning is primarily located within their most immediate interactions within the school, home, and community contexts. These immediate contexts hold the potential to encourage and support children’s agency and decision-making in their own learning. Early childhood educators that recognize children’s agency in learning in- and out-of-school contexts create learning experiences that encourage children some degree of choice-making in where, when, and how they will explore content understandings and thinking skills. School-to-home learning experiences can promote agency in ways that might be constrained in the school classroom.

Figure 1.2 Ecological Systems as Related to a Child’s Interactions with Homework

Children’s Agency

Bioecological systems theory helps us to understand how children’s own actions impact their experiences within the microsystem. Agency is being able to make one’s own choices and decisions to influence events which, in turn, can have a direct influence on interactions, actions, and outcomes in the microsystem. Children’s agency is an important consideration when exploring their familial, school, and community experiences. Understanding agency as an important component of children’s development stems from initiatives that stress children’s visibility and position in society which require the adults in children’s lives to respect children’s opinions and ideas and provide a space for children to have a say in matters that affect their lives (Lundy, 2007). Listening to children’s voices, that is, their meanings, experiences, opinions, and perspectives in relation to their life worlds, creates opportunities for educators to learn about children and their out-of-school lives which can serve to support their holistic learning and well-being. Researchers have suggested that weaving children’s voices into the educational process promotes educational equity and opportunity (Kumpulainen & Ouakrim-Soivio, 2019).

Within schools and classrooms, agency is most often defined as a student being able to influence and make decisions about what and how something is learned in order to grow and develop skills and abilities (Adair, 2014). The structure of schooling reflects a relational interdependence between a child’s agency and the social context of school including its norms, values, and expectations. In school settings, we can conceptualize children’s agency as socially constructed; resulting from dynamic interactions between the child’s past experiences, prior experiences, and the social context of a given activity (Valsiner, 1998). Examples of young children using their agency in the classroom include children being able to engage in experimentation and open-ended exploration; choose and plan their work on projects of interest; ask questions and apply those answers to generate new avenues for study; and express their interests and connect to their existing understandings. When children are encouraged to understand and use their agency in their learning, the possibility for deeper, personally meaningful learning arises. Adair (2014) offers three principles of agency in the context of early schooling that operationalize the agency of young children within the context of schooling: (1) agency is defined and justified by capability expansion, not just testing scores; (2) agency requires movement away from single indicator systems; and (3) agency has cultural variation. Connecting these three principles of student agency to school-to-home learning can help to support meaningful engagement for children and families. Each principle and its connections to school-to-home learning experiences are discussed below.

1. Agency is defined and justified by capability expansion, not just testing scores. This principle underscores the importance of child agency in the development of the whole child, rather than thinking only in terms of academic achievement. Inviting and supporting children’s agency offers opportunities to build children’s abilities in the present moment and on into the future. By building agency and choice-making into the classroom and school-to-home learning experiences, young children gain valuable experiences that can expand their own understandings of what they are capable of doing, what they are interested in, and how they understand their own patterns of thinking and learning.
2. Agency requires movement away from single indicator systems. The push-down academic climate (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009) in many early childhood and early grades classrooms provides challenges for teachers seeking to facilitate the development of content knowledge, child-centered learning experiences, and children’s agency. Most often, the push-down climate has led to a principal focus on early literacy and mathematics in learning for young children. Much emphasis is placed upon testing and tracking student progress in these content areas to the minimization or exclusion of other skills, abilities, and capabilities that are important for holistic development, growth, and learning. In terms of traditional homework for young children, mathematics and literacy assignments are often conceived of rote-learning or repetitive experiences where children work through problem sets or prescriptive writing/reading ta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding the Social, Cultural, and Familial Contexts Influencing Development
• 2 Recognizing How Young Children Come to Understand and How Traditional Homework Practices Fail Them
• 3 Drawing Upon Community Resources to Support Learning Outside the Classroom
• 4 Building and Strengthening Student Understandings
• 5 Extending Learning Opportunities for Engagement and Reflection Through Project Work
• 6 Learning by Design: Early Engineering and Tinkering
• 7 Promoting Choice-making and Children’s Agency
• 8 Connecting Critical and Multiliteracies to Family, Home, and Communities
• 9 Advocating for Supportive Homework Practices for Young Learners
• Concluding Thoughts
• Index