By the start of my junior year of college, I knew that I was going to be a teacher. I spent my sophomore summer with preschoolers walking to city parks and running through water sprinklers as part of my campus job's summer school program. It was the absolute best way to spend six weeks. The women that I worked with showed me how to be an educator who was attentive, caring, loving, and firm, and as I mimicked them in my own practice, I saw myself becoming more effective in everything from teaching kids their colors to helping them self-regulate through their meltdowns.
What I loved about education, I found, was the intellectual stimulation it provided me. Every day, I was faced with new problems in the classroom requiring solutions specific to each child’s nuanced profile. What I needed, I realised, were intellectual frameworks to inform and interpret my pedagogy. Working with kids day in and day out was equipping me with a toolkit of professional strategies around how to teach, but I lacked a research-based understanding of best practices and what made them best.
And so I decided to get to work, academically speaking. I registered for a Psychology class that placed me in a university-based laboratory classroom for toddlers, serving predominantly White and wealthy professional families living on the Upper West Side. That same semester, I also registered for an Education class where I would student teach and observe an Early Head Start bilingual classroom for toddlers, serving predominantly Latinx working class families living on the Upper West Side. Crossing the three blocks between the classrooms for four months began to feel like transversing between two worlds, both seemingly engaged in the same thing, both exceptionally well, but both, in many ways, completely and radically different.
Early childhood education (ECE) as an academic discipline that exists at the intersection of psychology and pedagogy and grounded in peer-reviewed quantitative and qualitative research, is roughly only half a century old. Studies in ECE, similar to other allied fields, tend to skew WEIRD, with the participants at the centre of research projects almost always hailing from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic societies, unless otherwise specifically noted. Thus, as a consequence, much of what we know about early childhood education and the best practices that yield effectiveness is based on the experiences of said aforementioned communities.
One of my favourite early childhood academics whose scholarship runs counter to this is Dr. Fabienne Doucet, who was born in Spain, raised in Haiti, and then immigrated to the United States. Her work centres the experiences of Caribbean, African, and Latin American families inside and outside of the United States, building on the theories of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies, originated by Gloria Ladson-Billings and Django Paris respectively. Dr. Doucet’s work provides a powerful counter-narrative to normative assumptions around ECE, from what play looks like across different countries to what parental engagement looks like across different cultures, rejecting the limited schema that dictate that early childhood exclusively looks like the cultural practices of privileged minorities.
Children are all the same. Children are also all incredibly different, influenced deeply and constantly by the racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic cultures in which they are reared, but the field of early childhood education does not reflect that. What we know about how to best serve the youngest humans is based on academic research and parenting books, and social media influencers, and teacher educators who are predominantly White, Western, and upper-middle class and spend the majority of their time working with students of similar backgrounds. How do we land at what the best practices in early childhood education are for all children, given the diversity of children? Where might some of the divergences lie in what we want for kids and what we believe they need, based on their unique identities? How realistic is the project of multicultural education in a world where what works for some families and kids might not be appropriate for others? Where do we go from there?
In the lab classroom, the most popular play involved an indoor slide, toy cars, dolls, blocks and a sand table. Teachers would move around to sit with individual students and narrate their play. “I notice you’re playing with a red car.” Whenever conflicts would escalate between children, teachers would sit near them, narrate, and refrain from intervening, unless a child close to being physically hurt. Whole class activities included sitting in a circle to greet each other, and singing songs with motions.
In the Head Start, the most popular play involved an outdoor play structure, toy cars, dress-up, blocks, and an art table. Teachers moved around to directly engage in play with students. Whenever conflicts would escalate between children, teachers would intervene by separating students, swiftly averted behaviour, and then asking what the problem was and how the students could solve it themselves. Whole class activities included sitting on the rug to greet each other and mark on a chart which students were present, and going through the date and highlighting numbers and letters.
In both classrooms, teachers referred to the students as “my friends.” Both classrooms prioritised play and joy. Both classrooms were staffed by teachers who were loved deeply by their students and their families. Both classrooms were staffed by teachers whose racial and cultural backgrounds matched those of the students’. The lab classroom prioritised teaching and learning through subtle interactions between teachers and individual students, whereas the Head Start engaged in explicit whole class and small group academic instruction. The lab classroom emphasised metacognition and helping students to recognise their behaviours, whilst the Head Start supported redirection and helping students solve their problems. The lab classroom believed in staying out of children’s way, and the Head Start believed in guiding their way. Both classrooms were led by teachers who could point to research and theory to explain their approaches. Both classrooms would be right.
Education is not a science. There is no way to say that one single move we make as teachers will result in one intended outcome. What we have instead are best practices — techniques, procedures, and strategies believed to be tried, tested, and effective. But, what works for some children doesn’t work for others, both individually, but potentially culturally too. Some communities believe in treating children like adults and engaging with them as such, through play and conversation. Some families believe that play should take precedence over academics, and thus reject worksheets and flashcards and other traditionally formal markers of a classroom. To some, students should be told what to do and to others, they should be asked, whether it’s what students want to eat for lunch, or if they want to clean up after playing. Given the diverse wants and needs of students based on the contexts within which they are being raised, best practices are not those that work best for all children, but are rather the best reflection of the cultural identities of the families being served.
Of course, there are many problems to this approach, the first obvious one being that even diversity is diverse, and any and all claims that one culture has one approach to child-rearing ignores all other intersections of identity, such as ethnicity or socio-economic status. Furthermore, not all cultural practices and norms are inherently positive or should to be sustained. And lastly, culture is never fixed but, rather, is always evolving and responsive pedagogical approach would need to be fluid to reflect change. Nevertheless, ECE should be less reliant on the lores of best practices that are almost exclusively WEIRD, and should instead be responsive to the values that individual families are bringing forth based on the diversity of their experiences. This would also saliently disrupt hegemonic systems that use the early childhood classroom as a space where children are taught to act White and upper-middle class, with punishment implemented for children who fall short.
We believe in multicultural education as the manifestation of our democratic values. The idea that students of all colours and creeds can come together and receive the same education alongside one another is a dream still nascent and unfulfilled, yet we hope for it one and the same. What it will require, though, is a debunking of a faux neutrality in the conceptualisation and co-construction of what an education is. An education means different things to different people. What makes an education, and more importantly, what makes a good education, is a commitment to the expectations of all families and communities, which requires at the bare minimum, a respect of all said families and communities. As of right now, we’re not there yet.
Those months ended up becoming years in which I was figuring out what kind of educator I wanted to be and why. From the lab classroom, I was learned about the power of play and how impactful play-based learning was be for the youngest students. From the Head Start, I was seeing how independent students could be and how empowered their independence made them. I was able to take from these experiences and meld them to chart my own approach, grounded in my own observations and the research shared by the amazing educators I shadowed.
In this time period, I also reflected on how my own cultural upbringing as a Black, upper-middle class African was influencing the type of educator that I was. I grew up where, from an early age, young children are encouraged to try on their own first, and as such, I found myself as an educator asking kids to try first whenever they would ask me for help. As a kid, the adults around me showed me and told me how much they loved me, but they were not going to go back and forth with me on certain issues because they needed me to trust that they knew best, and I started to hear myself echoing the same sentiments to my kids. Finally, language was so important to me growing up, where adults would constantly speak to children through “real” conversation and I would do the same, communicating in the classroom with my kids as I would in other spaces with my peers.
One of my teacher friends years later would remark upon leaving my classroom that she realised that she had to reverse code switch with my kids. As two Black women who had been trained in the same predominantly White, Western and affluent teacher education program, so much of what we learned about being educators ran counter to what came natural to how we acted, spoke, and moved in the world, but I found that as a teacher, finding my own identity and my own best practices that were reflective of myself and my kids was what was going to work best. What was best for others wasn’t what was best for us. And what was best for us, in my mind, that was always going to come first.
"As a kid, the adults around me showed me and told me how much they loved me, but they were not going to go back and forth with me on certain issues because they needed me to trust that they knew best, and I started to hear myself echoing the same sentiments to my kids." This observation really sticks out to me. I think so much of parenting/teaching philosophy in white, progressive contexts is about a lack of hierarchy, and sometimes I find that freeing, and sometimes I find it a bit ridiculous. Wisdom can be found in the young, of course, but age does bring a knowing that should be revered and designed around IMHO.
Also did you hear the Integrated Schools podcast episode of Gloria Ladson-Billings and her daughter? Pure intergenerational delight.