Navigating Early Childhood Policy Mandates: What We Can Learn from Teachers in Tanzania and the U.S.

• In Event: What can we learn from ECCD policy and policy planning?

Abstract

Purpose: In recent years, the international community and education reformers in the U.S. have increasingly turned their attention to early childhood education (ECE) as an effective intervention for mitigating enduring issues in education like the achievement gap. In the literature ECE is also positioned as a mechanism to promote national and economic development through investment in young children; it is purported to yield social and economic returns to society at large. While the literature on child outcomes associated with ECE is extensive, less is known about how ECE policies are taken up by classroom teachers.

In this paper, I analyze what policy does as it comes into contact with teachers’ existing practices and beliefs about ECE, asking: How do teachers make sense of and implement ECE policy in their classroom? Specifically, I investigate how prekindergarten (preK) teachers working in different institutional contexts in Tanzania and the U.S. negotiated policy mandates to use play-based and learner-centered approaches in their classrooms. Drawing on qualitative data from four classrooms, I examine how teachers’ professional identities, pedagogical beliefs, and institutional contexts shaped their sense-making and implementation of these policies.

Conceptual Framework: This study is framed by scholarship in critical policy studies and the anthropology of policy (Shore & Wright, 1997; Sutton & Levinson, 2001). I conceptualize policy as something that is political, infused with power, and almost always contested (Ball, 1994). Policy is more than a text—it shapes and is shaped by the people who implement it, which is why understanding what goes on in classrooms is so important. Furthermore, policy implementation does not occur in the linear way policymakers imagine it might (Honig, 2006); as the policy intersects with structural realities and individual and institutional ideologies, it is reimagined and reinterpreted.

Research Design: In addition to analyzing relevant policy documents, I conducted qualitative research using ethnographic methods in U.S. and Tanzanian preK classrooms over the course of an academic year and a summer, respectively. I observed in classrooms and conducted interviews with teachers and administrators in order to understand how new ECE policies shaped daily life in preK classrooms. As I analyzed the data, I focused on how policy mandates intersected with three analytic categories: pedagogical practices, professional identity, and institutional context/structure.

Findings: My analysis shows that, even in the same school district, preK teachers responded to a single policy in different ways, constructing diverse classroom practices. On a superficial level, teachers’ ability to implement policy mandates was related to their access to resources. Teachers in both the U.S. and Tanzania who had the greatest constraints in terms of resources were least able to implement learner-centered or play-based ECE.

Even in well-resourced institutions, pedagogical approaches differed. How teachers viewed themselves as professionals contributed to this; teacher’s professional identities informed how they thought they should be educating the children in their care. For example, in two of the cases, the teacher’s prior elementary school teaching experience resulted in a preK classroom that resembled elementary school more than ECE; their classrooms did not foster the play-based approach envisioned by the policy.

In other cases, where teachers had prior experience in ECE settings and worked in an institution with a strong early childhood mission and philosophy, teachers came to view their preK practice as separate from policy mandates. Although their practice aligned with policy mandates, they viewed themselves as implementing their school’s philosophy, rather than the policy.

Significance: The findings from this study point to the importance of place—even in one country or school district context, the way people took up a policy differed dramatically. This has implications for policy-makers and international development initiatives that use ECE tool to leverage change because it shows that ideas about early childhood education relevant to one setting do not necessarily transfer seamlessly to another. If ECE is to be a space for positive social change, we must understand how policy can both enable and constrain this process in order to foster more thoughtful policy-making that accounts for the diverse contexts in which ECE occurs.

Author

• Bethany Wilinski, Michigan State University