Global Education Review (Mercy College, New York)
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Passionate About Early Childhood Education Policy, Practice, and Pedagogy : Exploring Intersections Between Discourses, Experiences, and Feelings...Knitting New Terms of Belonging
No full textWe are five early childhood researchers, from across Canada, thrown together amongst a series of alarming discourses, where developmental, economic, and neuroscientific rationales for ECEC drown out alternative theoretical perspectives, as well as personal experience, values, subjective knowledges, and the fierce passion we feel for our work. In the midst of this “throwntogethness” (Massey, 2005), how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? How do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the Canadian ECEC field as we knit together alternative ways of being, doing, and acting, figuring out what resonates in localized situations (Osgood, 2006)? To begin to answer these questions, we think with feminist theory (Bezanson; 2018; Langford et al., 2016; Prentice, 2009); the politics of the event of place, (Massey, 2005) and relational and spatial networked discursive entanglements (Massey, 2005; Nichols et al., 2012; Ingold, 1995; Haraway, 2016) as we untangle three vignettes related to advocating for a competent universal public ECEC system; writing post-developmental curriculum frameworks; and weaving productive relationships between university researchers and early childhood practitioners. These vignettes illuminate our struggles to “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) suggests, stubbornly hanging on to the hope of producing new terms of belonging (Burns & Lundh, 2011) as a form of resistance, allowing us to open up spaces to imagine, tell alternative stories (Moss, 2014), and create real change within our local contexts
More than Words for Working with Children and Families
Full text linkIntrodiction to the special issue, "More than Words for Working with Children and Families.
Researchers Experience Multiple Embodiments in a Cross-Cultural, Intergenerational Event to Support Girls Challenging Gender-Based Violence
Full text linkMany challenges exist to conducting participatory research and consultation with young people, especially with those considered vulnerable or at risk. Beyond respecting the safety and wellbeing of young research participants, researchers must be aware of barriers to youth engagement and be attuned to the many forms of youth resistance. As young people are seeking more control over their lives, traditional knowledge hierarchies between adults and youth are shifting. In July 2018, an event entitled Circles Within Circles brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous girls and young women from South Africa, Canada, Russia, Sweden, and Kenya to learn from each other’s participatory art-making and create a network for challenging gender-based violence (GBV). This article provides insight into the often-invisible experience of the “supporting cast” in events like Circles Within Circles. The co-authors are doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who contributed to organization and acted as facilitators, notetakers, and participants. The co-authors conduct participatory analyses of journal entries they wrote throughout the event, and jointly reflect on the activities and their feelings about their roles. Reflecting, for example, on gut feelings about young participants’ use of voice and silence during adult-led activities, the co-authors discuss their reading of girls’ demonstrations of resistance. This embodied knowledge, further cultivated by attuning to shared experience, is explored in this collaborative auto-ethnography. Examining the complexities of this cross-cultural and intergenerational event, the co-authors contend that when supporting girls and young people subverting dominant narratives of GBV, researchers’ embodied reflexivity is crucial for positively contributing to girl-led change
Designing for Complexity in Mother Tongue or First Language (L1)-Based Multilingual Education Programs
Full text linkMother-tongue or first language (L1)-based multilingual education programs are necessarily complex and may require a more nonlinear approach to program design. These programs operate within and act upon a range of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociopolitical issues that include language structure and literacy assessment, language policy and politics, and cultural and social behavior change linked to literacy expansion. The broad use of one-size-fits-all outcomes-based design approaches for L1-based multilingual education programs often result in designs that are retrofitted to new country settings and ill-suited to the context in which they are implemented. This paper looks at some of the many features that can be used to inform the development of L1-based multilingual education in the context of early literacy programming. Specifically, it examines the use of alternative approaches in the development of flexible theory of change design that integrate early literacy and L1-based multilingual education program design frameworks to more suitably address the sociolinguistic, sociopolitical, and psycholinguistic assumptions underpinning multilingual education approaches
Focusing on Actors in Context-Specific, Data-Informed Theories of Change to Increase Inclusion in Quality Basic Education Reforms
No full textThis article describes an actor-focused approach to creating a theory of change that is context-specific, grounded in an understanding of local historical, cultural, linguistic, and social realities, and inspired by a commitment to social justice in education reform. In 2019, the authors completed a research evaluation of the Government of Cambodia’s inaugural Multilingual Education National Action Plan designed to increase inclusion of Indigenous children in basic education. The project mandate included constructing a theory of change. Using the participatory approach of Outcome Harvesting, data were obtained about behavioral changes among actors implementing and affected by the plan. Qualitative data analyses identified 115 behaviors distributed across 15 categories of actors in the education system, and uncovered assumptions and experiences of change processes and relationships. The authors created a generic theory of change mandated by the commissioning body for the evaluation. It was unidirectional and institution-centered, focused on objectives, strategies, outputs, and outcomes. To provide a more nuanced, inclusive, context-specific and potentially useful representation of change processes, the authors drew upon the behavior change data to construct a second, actor-focused theory of change. Additionally, the authors constructed a third theory of change showing education strategies in the current context compared to internationally accepted best practice in multilingual education. This study illustrates a focus on manifest behaviors and relationships among actors in theories of change. Actor-focused frameworks that describe situationally specific, participatory action and reciprocal learning can promote inclusive, sustainable, systems-level change toward children’s right to meaningful quality basic education
Complicité: Resisting the Tyranny of Talk
Full text linkThis article is based video data from a project called SALTMusic, for young children diagnosed as having “language delay.” The interdisciplinary action-research project was co-delivered by speech and language therapists and early childhood arts practitioners, with children and their parents. Addressing a concern that children’s lack of words places anxiety, guilt, and stress upon families, SALTMusic explored ways of engaging with children using minimum words, by focusing on playful encounters of bodies responding to a range of materials, objects, and sounds. In this paper, we consider two filmed events from this project. We explore these events through the theme of this special issue, with its emphasis on the “complex intermingling of knowledges” between children, their families, early years’ arts practitioners, and speech therapists. We wish to think more deeply about what happens when adults talk less, and instead use space, sound, materials, and bodies to converse with toddlers. In particular, we turn to the dramaturgical notion of complicité in order to enlarge our understanding of communication and conversation towards a mutually transformative sense of unfolding collective action. In particular, we ask what the potential of the concept of complicité might offer early years’ practice in an era of accountability, where the professionalisation discourses of early childhood education are creeping into and infecting parenting discourses. We ask if the concept of complicité might help adults working with young children to resist the domination of word-oriented discourses that eclipse implicit, bodily, and materially attuned ways of relating to the young child
Policies, Impacts, and Global Issues
Full text linkReview of “Privatization and the Education of Marginalized Children” edited by Bekisizwe S. Ndimande & Christopher Lubienski (Routledge, 2017
Context-Based Approaches to Developing Theories of Change in Basic Education
Full text linkIntroduction to Special Themed Issue: Context-Based Approaches to Developing Theories of Change in Basic Education 
Early childhood education in Tanzania: Views and beliefs of stakeholders on its status and development
Full text linkGlobally, there is consensus among education stakeholders that early childhood education sets a foundation for children’s development, learning, and future life achievements. While global perceptions of early childhood care and education (ECCE) have been broadly explored in other parts of the world, little is known about ECCE in Tanzania even though it is ideally a compulsory part of formal basic education for every child before joining grade one. This study investigated the status of early childhood education (ECE) in Tanzania by critically analyzing the views and beliefs of stakeholders on its status and development. The study recruited two policy makers, 14 ECE college principals, 34 preprimary college tutors, and three ECE academics using a homogeneous sampling technique. Employing a phenomenological research design, the study used questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions (FGD) and documentary analyses in collecting the required data. Findings revealed that while in the policy and curriculum documents ECE holds equal status with other levels of education, it holds extremely low status among education stakeholders, resulting in ill-prepared preservice ECE teachers and limited parent-school engagement. To improve the quality of ECE in Tanzania, stakeholders suggested improvements in the quality and quantity of preservice teachers, including detachment of preprimary classes from primary schools and establishment of an integrated ECCE policy, guidelines, and practices to be completed by an ECCE joint taskforce. Further, in-service training for ECE college tutors and principals is critically important, as is concentration of limited resources in few selected teachers’ colleges
Narrowing the language gap for Africa\u27s learners: A pathway for change model
Full text linkEven a quick glance at international data reveals something troubling: There is an increasing economic and educational gap between Africa and the rest of the world. If we look just a bit deeper, we find that economic and educational stagnation may simply be the inevitable outcomes of broad educational failure for millions of rural African children. Behind that educational failure is a “gap,” a chasm that most African learners must leap in order to succeed academically to benefit the entire continent. I suspect it is linguistic to its very core.
This research follows a backward trail all the way from university level to the point of entry for early grade teaching across Africa. It asks three questions: 1) Why isn’t L1 reading instruction giving students success in the primary school years? 2) Why are students not gaining adequate oral L2 for use as medium of instruction beyond primary? And 3) How might a reading transfer curriculum close the final gap, providing meaningful access to L2 textbooks for all African students? As these questions are answered by current research, the findings suggest solutions. I propose a series of three language-related strategies aimed at closing the education gap—a yawning chasm—for all African youth