Looking Away: An Analysis of Children's Learning Experiences When Classroom Quality Is Framed by Adult/Child Interactions via Quality Metrics

• In Event: 18.072 - Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: 18.072-14 - (Re)thinking and (Re)defining Approaches to Research in Early Childhood

Abstract

This paper examines three excerpts from teacher-focused, evaluative and high stakes observations in three Head Start classrooms through the lens of comic subjectivity theory (Zupančič, 2008). Using this theory, I examine how an intensifying focus on teacher/child interactions as a means for evaluating teacher practice and “quality” in early childhood classrooms overshadows the important learning of young children. Taken from a larger teacher professional development project, this paper questions the intensive focus on quality that has become a part of Head Start evaluation processes, and how a focus on conceptualizations of quality as framed through teacher/child interactions undermines what constitutes learning in early childhood settings.

Author

• Katherine Kresin Delaney, University of Toledo