Deconstructing “child development knowledge” and “teacher preparation”

Authoring Professional Identities: Immigrant and Refugee Women's Experiences in an Early Childhood Teacher Education Program

“…In the context of child care, practical knowledge emerges out of one's personal experiences, beliefs, values, and relationships with children. Reconceptualist scholars have long problematized this authoritative discourse for proposing a universal and essentialized childhood whereby all children progress through the same developmental stages irrespective of the familial, social, and cultural contexts in which they live their lives (e.g., Cannella, 1997;Lubeck, 1996;Ludlow & Berkley, 1994;Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 1999. In spite of this critique, culture is still largely appended to the existing discourse (Fleer, 2006).…”

On Reassessing the Relevance of the Child Development Knowledge Base to Education

“…A key premise of this outlook is that science should properly be viewed as a social action, as socially constructed and socially derived. Since scientific knowledge is viewed as humanly constructed rather than as the revelation of an abstract truth, scientific statements are regarded as reflections of the contexts in which their underlying observations were made as well as the motives of their authors and those who choose to promulgate them [Lubeck, 1996;Usher & Edwards, 1994]. Scientific statements command as much attention for the effects they have on the social order as for the specific information they convey.…”

“…A key feature of this viewpoint, then, is to close the distance between science and political reality. Whereas these realms were once viewed as disconnected, as guided by different cognitive and value perspectives, they are now seen as closely interrelated, as different aspects of the same interactive system [Fine, 1995;Kessler, 1992;Lubeck, 1996].…”

“…Although the connection between child development (along with its home scientific base of psychology) and education is in many ways becoming ever stronger, there are at the same time strong sentiments of skepticism, disillusionment, and in some cases outright rejection, directed at this well established alliance [Bloch, 1992;Goffin, 1996;Lubeck, 1996;Katz, 1996;Stott & Bowman, 1996].It is ironic to find the psychological base of educational practice disputed so near the close of a century that might well be termed the era of enlightenment with respect to the role of the dimension of the psychological. It has been a time when the intangible realm of psychology was finally subjected to explicit and systematic study and when the psychological level of analysis has become a salient feature of how we think about the world and of our experience in it.…”

Early Childhood Educators' Perception of Oregon's Professional Development System: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study

“…The education system was designed to create measurable child outcomes, in the form of performance measurements on test and other formal survey tools. However, the realities of early childhood environments are grounded in interactions between and among children, and early childhood educators, which is very different from the K-12 education system (Barrett, 2011;Lubeck, 1996). The very complexity of early childhood education reveals learning through the discovery of serendipitous moments found in the multiplicity of the early childhood environment (Mozére, 2012).…”