Data Embargoes as a Tool for Emplacement and Displacement of Young Children

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Creating Holistic and Renewed Spaces for Early Learning (Table 3)

Abstract

Data embargoes constrain teachers’ understanding of children by
withholding and/or coding particular information on children’s attainment
and/or identities. Data embargoes may mask children’s identities in ways
that influence their rights to belong in early childhood programs and may
construct White positivist childhoods by maintaining the belief that
individual children’s bodies can, whether in the present of future, be
subject to objective measures of human learning or intelligence used for
comparisons that uphold Eurocentric positivistic sciences and neoliberal
accountability. By comparing children’s experiences in two racialized and
socio-economically denied policy contexts, we show how data embargoes
are implicated in sustaining inequities.

Authors

• Melissa Beth Sherfinski, West Virginia University

• Gilbert Ansah, West Virginia University