(Re)Centering Quality Intersectionally: Design Principles for Racial, Cultural, and Linguistic Justice in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 58
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Scholarship: Confronting Forms of Oppression in Early Childhood Pedagogies

Abstract

This review of literature offers a critical intersectional analytical perspective of quality in early childhood education, moving away from a singular “best practice” while centrally addressing the issues of inequality that it fosters. We employ intersectionality as “an analytic tool...to solve problems” (Collins & Bilge, 2016, p. 2). Drawing on the intersectional analysis of critical race theory, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, and trans/languaging, we offer three design principles for transforming quality in early childhood education. The design principles we outline are central to the enactment of an intersectional framework of quality in early childhood education, which foregrounds the interconnectedness of multiple aspects of identity, offering a more complex ontology that rejects reducing people to one category at a time.

Authors

• Mariana Souto-Manning, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Ayesha Rabadi-Raol, Sonoma State University