Dialogue 1: Cultivating Relationships with and Between Young Children

• In Event: Beyond Histories of Compliance in Early Childhood Education: Centering Disability and Cultivating Freedom

Abstract

What might it mean for young children with disabilities to experience freedom and belonging from their earliest moments in school? This dialogue will trace present-day narratives surrounding young children’s pandemic learning loss (e.g., NY Times Editorial Board, 2023) and pressures to increase interventionist approaches (e.g., Al-Hendawi et al., 2025; Fuchs et al., 2023) to ableist histories. Recognizing the historical and foundational ways ableism has operated in perceptions of the child opens liberatory possibilities for how teachers and young children might relate to one another. Contributors will first present (a) Examples from archival research of 20th century United States educational practice and culture that demonstrate historical manifestations of ableism (e.g., age-based Intelligence Quotient testing, Better Babies Contests at state fairs) and their relationship to present-day early educational reforms (e.g., developmental milestones, anchor charts for classroom management); and (b) Observations from an ethnographic study in a Brazilian public school in which a Deaf, Autistic 7-year-old child strategically and agentically responded to the school’s imposed developmental goals for her. Participants will not only bear witness to the ways eugenic histories show up within adult-child relationships and expectations for compliance but consider what might be learned about existing norms, practices, and educational models from young children with disabilities themselves, particularly those that are marginalized by intersecting oppressions.

Standardization and demands for compliance imply that there is a singular and known answer to the questions that come up in early childhood research and practice (e.g., there is a “right” way to learn or to teach), and that both adults and children should universally and unambiguously follow that answer (with “fidelity”). When children do not comply with said norms—whether they be labeled as “unready,” “at risk,” or having a disability—the work presented and discussed in this dialogue demonstrates how they are subject to increased surveillance and restrictive expectations for how they relate to adults and other children. Children’s expressions are “stifled by our narrowed understandings of the world” (Yoon & Templeton, 2019, pg. 59). And yet, as societal commitments to compliance with normalcy deepen, multiply-marginalized young children continue to express themselves as whole beings, enact their cultural and linguistic identities, and boldly play. In this dialogue, participants and contributors will consider ways of speaking back to narrow understandings of adult-child relationships that limit children’s expressions and imagine ways to create space for children to experience a sense of belonging with their peers without expectations of conformity. We will reckon with histories of ableism that pressure early educators to spend most of their days teaching academic skills in the name of school “readiness”—and imagine how we can resist relationships of compliance with children that are based on notions of normative development. Further, this dialogue will provide opportunities for contributors and participants to imagine new ways of relating to children, ones that reject narrow notions of ability and prescriptive educational approaches and instead honor each child’s gifts and insights.

Authors

• April Coloma Boyce, University of Washington

• Malcom L King, University of Washington

• Bárbara Silveira Baptista de Oliveira, Pennsylvania State University

• Ana Luisa Borba Gediel, Federal University of Viçosa