Teachers Conceptualizing Childhood: Implications for Positive Change in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 96
  In Roundtable Session: Revisiting Social Historical Constructions in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Research on early childhood teacher beliefs has traditionally focused on practice beliefs. In this study, I bring a different attentiveness to teachers’ beliefs through focusing on childhood as a discursive formation. Using the lenses of the sociological study of childhood (James and James, 2008), curriculum studies (Pinar, 2004) and film studies (Powrie, 2005), I conducted focus group sessions with experienced early childhood teachers. I presented the teachers with fictional representations of children as prompts to generate shared understandings of childhood. A main finding was how the teachers used memories and identifications with the child characters to cross normally disconnected boundaries between adulthood and childhood, and between the past, present and future. Implications of these findings for teacher education are discussed.

Author

• Sandra Chang-Kredl, Concordia University