Tensions as opportunities for transformation: Applying DisCrit Resistance to early childhood teacher education programs

Abstract

Efforts to “professionalize” early childhood through professional standards, licensure requirements, and standardized assessments have aimed to support effective practice and rectify the pay inequities experienced by early educators. However, such initiatives can inadvertently reinforce hegemonic developmentalism and have largely served to advance white, able-bodied norms and narrow views of teaching and learning. Teacher educators endeavoring to combat racism and ableism, therefore, can encounter several tensions that result from trying to apply critical perspectives while preparing pre-service teachers for graduation and certification in the current personnel preparation landscape. In this article, the authors employ Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) Resistance to explore these tensions and offer potential ways they can serve as key opportunities for supporting equity. They discuss how teacher educators can enact DisCrit Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Solidarity to diversify the knowledge(s) that are represented in content; center and affirm the identities and gifts of multiply marginalized teachers of color; and disrupt power hierarchies to honor relationships and interdependence.

Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics

“…Such research continues to place considerable pressures on early childhood educators to perform unrealistic amounts of maternal care and only imagines madness or experiences with mental difference or distress as a tragedy or potential for harm (Davies, 2022; Davies, Brewer et al, 2022). Important critiques of developmentalism in ECEC have emerged from queer studies (Janmohamed, 2010) and Dis/Crit studies (Love and Hancock, 2022), yet the theorizing of madness in ECEC remains limited. However, mad studies scholars are present in many helping professions, including education (Snyder et al, 2019), social work (Poole et al, 2012) and occupational therapy (LeBlanc-Omstead and Kinsella, 2018).…”