Struggling to Overcome the State's Prescription for Practice: An Action Research Study of Early Educators' Professional Development in a High-Stakes Teaching Context

• In Event: 52.040 - Reconsidering Context: An Examination of the Role of Context in Research and Practice in Early Childhood

Abstract

As the field of publicly funded early childhood education continues to be shaped by policies that expect all children to learn a standardized set of knowledge and skills (e.g., Russell, 2010), the students entering these programs are becoming increasingly linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse (LCSD). This creates a new set of challenges for early educators working in these programs. A key concern is how early educators might provide LCSD students a mandated set of knowledge and skills through instructional practices that attend to their students’ developmental, individual, and sociocultural needs (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2009).
The qualitative action-research study (Costello, 2003) reported on in this paper set out to address this issue. It attempted to offer a sample of pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) and kindergarten (K) teachers working in a large urban school district with an alternative conception of teaching in a high-stakes standards-based teaching context. It did so by first asking them to engage with critical theory (e.g., MacNaughton, 2005) in the field of early childhood education (ECE) to question the norms and practices that exist within their everyday teaching context and become more aware of the gendered, racialized, and politicized aspects of their role as early educators in the classroom (e.g., Gillborn, 2005). They were then asked to consider what it is they might do to assist their students in working through these everyday issues in the context and communities in which they live, develop, and learn (e.g., Rogoff, 2003). Then, the teachers in the year-long professional development (PD) course were presented with culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1994) to help them employ this critical knowledge through teaching, documenting, and reflecting on lessons they taught that were to help their LCSD students analyze everyday issues central to them and their community.
Findings from this study reveal that these teachers recognized the power of the state’s “general prescriptions” (Erikson, 2014, p. 3) in dictating what it is they were to do as early educators in their classrooms. Moreover, these teachers were willing to engage in learning experiences that assisted them with re-envisioning their pedagogical practices. However, most struggled with transforming this pedagogical willingness into practices that addressed their LCSD sociocultural worlds within their highly structured teaching context.
Combined, these early educators experiences bring to light how the current push towards uniformity though such reform initiatives as Common Core or Race to the Top limits the space for them and the students and families they work with to explore topics of inquiry that prepare children for success in and out of the context of school. We end the paper using such findings to examine several issues early educators, teacher educators, and those who advocate for “genuine and enduring” reform within ECE to consider when attempting to take up and implement “practice-based” (Erkison, 2014, p. 6) change within high-stakes early education contexts so that they can respond to and navigate this standardized framing of ECE in a manner that addresses the sociocultural worlds of the children participating in their program.

Authors

• Christopher P. Brown, The University of Texas - Austin

• Natalie Babiak Weber, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor