Drawing from an analysis of responses to COVID affecting the ECCE sector in the US, including the narratives of early childhood educators, we engage with several questions. These include: How is care work with children constructed and affected by COVID-19? How might current responses and policies be understood through the lens of social citizenship and the collective/the individual? How do these issues reflect the precarity of the ECCE sector? How are embodied and emotional aspects of care work manifesting in early educator/caregiver lives in the time of the pandemic? Who is caring for the caregivers and what care may be needed? How can we re-imagine the care of ourselves, and in relation to an ethics of care for the other?
This article is a commentary developed by three early childhood teacher educators who are concerned about the negative consequences of contemporary policy trends in the United States. The commentary critically examines the influence of quality improvement in early childhood as it relates to environmental rating systems and the use of teacher performance assessments, more specifically, the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale and the Teacher Performance Assessment. The article concludes with a potential vision for early childhood scholars and practitioners—building solidarity to function as an emerging, powerful, ethical community of early childhood curriculum workers that thrives without consensus.
The Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) has been widely adopted in schools of higher education across the United States. Different state education departments have set policies, to varying degrees, that determine the outcomes for passing the edTPA, with some requiring a passing score to obtain licensure. As a result of the high-stakes nature of the edTPA, teacher education programs are taking steps to support teacher candidates as they navigate this process. The adoption of edTPA, however, is not without obstacles and has become complicated in the process of implementation. The purpose of this study is to report on a policy analysis of the edTPA in special education using a Critical Practice Approach. Researchers sought to find answers to the following questions: (a) What were the negotiations, decisions, and actions taken by special education teacher education programs in their efforts to appropriate the edTPA policy? and (b) To what extent did the appropriation process foster or empower “participation agency in the democratic production of policy?” Data were collected through in-depth phenomenological interviews with special education teacher educators in three different institutions. Findings suggest that teacher educators at each institution engaged in three general types of appropriation activities that were central to their efforts; embedding, co-opting, and reifying. This critical practical policy analysis helped to identify ways in which the edTPA policy appropriation process was and was not democratic and participatory; a process that recognizes contributions, expertise, and experience of local appropriators as well as factors that characterize the local context.
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