Popular culture is often a site of contestation in preschool classrooms. A multisited ethnographic design revealed preschools employed varied strategies to limit popular culture. Teacher and children's actions were considered through Michel de Certeau's (1984) concepts of tactics and strategies. Interviews and observations revealed children were well aware of rules limiting popular culture and agentively engaged in tactical resistance in order to insert their voices into the preschool curriculum. [popular culture, social class, resistance, preschool] It is a sunny, winter morning in an upper-middle-class, socially progressive Montessori preschool in the southwestern United States. A five-year-old girl arriving at school wearing a Minnie Mouse headband with large mouse ears and a bow begins playing on the playground. When she moves into the teacher's sight, she is met with a stern look of disapproval. The teacher walks up to the young girl and instructs her to "take off your headband and put it in your cubby. Those are not allowed at school." The young girl complies with the teacher's direction and returns to the playground. Ten minutes later she slyly sneaks back to her cubby, pulls the headband out, and, smiling, places it back on her head.
This study was an investigation into the ways in which two classes of six-and seven-yearold children in Hawaii talked about the media. The children were shown video clips from a variety of media and asked to respond both orally and in writing. The qualitative data gathered in this study were researcher notes, video and audio-taped focus group interviews with the children, and their written responses to open-ended questions about the media clips they viewed. The results suggest that these children were more media savvy than commonly assumed, and already grasped basic understandings of key media concepts. Drawing upon Foucauldian theory, we argue for the need to move from the dominant model of developmental stage theory in media education, based on a deficit view of the child, to a strengths-based approach that recognizes and validates young people's varying experience with and knowledge about the media, and their agency when interacting with it.
Child-centeredness is a pedagogical approach common in US early childhood education, one that advocates young children should direct their own learning and excercise individual choice in activitites. This approach is reflected in national US Head Start policy. Using multivocal, video-cued, and traditional ethnographic methods, this study presents an analysis of interview data collected from three focus groups with American Samoan teachers to argue that the child-centered approach in newly adopted performance standards may not actually be child-centered, particuarly when ignoring the knowledge base and cultural expectations for children in culturally diverse communities. Analyzed through post-colonial theory, which recognizes the erasure of indigenous approaches to educating young children, we focus on Samoan teachers’ understanding of child-centeredness. Results indicate Samoan teachers had drastically different understandings of child-centeredness, instead pointing to optimal pedagogy as collaborative, community-oriented, and structured, and stressing the value of learning from each other. In forgrounding the voice of Samoan educators, we complicate the existing and pervasive binary positioning of child-centered and teacher-directed instruction in early childhood curriculums, to offer another alternative, an expanded notion of child-centeredness that is contextually bound and locally determined.
This article describes how, in our research with Head Start teachers in American Samoa, we combined video‐cued multivocal ethnographic method (VCE) with traditional ethnographic approaches to understand our interlocutors’ perspectives on curriculum and pedagogy, and the contrast between them and mainland US teachers using the same federally endorsed curriculum. We provide illustrative examples of how the inclusion of VCE allowed for meaningful dialogue among informants and researchers, revealing Samoan teachers’ cultural sustainable approaches to curriculum. [Policy, Head Start, multivocal video‐cued ethnography, post‐colonial theory]
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