DAP Is Curricular Technology: Broadening Curriculum Problem Solving

• In Event: Early Childhood Curriculum for the 21st Century: Rethinking Developmentally Appropriate Practices

Abstract

Purpose
Prominent scholars have argued that early childhood curriculum is undertheorized (Wood & Hedges, 2016). This paper draws upon a broad overview of curriculum studies to critically appraise the implications and limitations of mainstream notions of developmentally appropriate curriculum. The paper will have two parts. The first part will highlight how NAEYC positions statements have historically breed technocratic conceptions of curriculum. The second part will advance alternative approaches to curriculum problem solving (i.e. design, development, and leadership) generated from diverse perspectives of curriculum reconceptualization.
Perspective
This paper critically appraises mainstream discourses of developmentally appropriate curriculum from the vantage point of a wide variety of curriculum theories. Traditional theories of curriculum development is used to elucidate the technocratic curriculum orientation implicit to influential DAP statements. However, prevailing approaches to curriculum design and implementation are limited “because the technical process begins with an acceptance of contemporary social values” (Macdonald, 1971, p. 197). For this reason, I also utilize key contributions to the reconceptualization of curriculum studies to advance alternative perspectives on early childhood curriculum. The practical implications of critical, existential, dialogical understandings of curriculum work are especially emphasized.
Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources
This conceptual paper puts the governing discourse of DAP in dialogue with the broad field of curriculum studies. More specifically, past and present NAEYC position statements are examined in this paper through a lens that integrates critical and aesthetic factions of curriculum studies. Examined through this lens of practical eclecticism, tacitly expressed implications for curriculum design and visions for advancing more equitable policy and practice are made apparent within notions of developmentally appropriate curriculum.
Conclusions
Though tacitly expressed, technical-scientific approaches to curriculum problem solving dominate governing discourses of “best practice” circulated by early childhood educators’ most influential professional organizations. Technical-scientific approaches to curriculum problem solving, I argue, breed overly instrumental conceptions of pedagogical practice and professional leadership. In addition, a technocratic curriculum orientation limits the scope of research on early childhood curriculum. For example, File (2020) laments that much of the extant literature addresses questions of if and how a particular program or framework “works”. By contrast, curriculum reconceptualization has been explicitly applied to appraisals of early childhood curriculum (Author 1, XXXX; Mueller & Whyte, 2020; Stremmel et al., 2020). While such appraisals have generated needed criticality, curriculum reconceptualization has often lacked pragmatic utility. As an antidote to technological determinism perpetuated in early childhood education by notions of developmentally appropriate curriculum, the paper concludes suggesting a practical and eclectic approach to early childhood curriculum leadership.
Scholarly Significance
Although curriculum studies and early childhood education have their own unique histories (Goffin, 2001; Tanner & Tanner, 2007), few matters are more consequential to what young children experience than the content of curriculum and how it is mediated in schools. This paper presentation addresses two important ways conceptions of early childhood curriculum have been limited by the sparse interaction between these two disparate fields of study and practice.

Author

• Daniel J. Castner, Indiana University