Reconceptualizing and Reimagining Early Childhood Education

Abstract

The reform of educational systems has been taking place since the beginnings of institutionalized education. Continuing to contest, rethink, reconceptualize, and reimagine the field of early childhood education is necessary owing to the prevalent presence of dominant discourses that have a firm hold on its values, praxis, and pedagogies. These dominant discourses have emerged in times when standardization, measurability, and the economic gains of educating citizens have been the ultimate goals of education. Today, those goals are considered narrow and outdated, complexified by current discourses and practices taken up in a globalized world that starts to see itself with faults, errors, and even guilt. The so-called Reconceptualist movement launched during the 1980s as a series of events, such conferences and scholarly gatherings. Special publications were organized by critical scholars and educators who were questioning developmentalism as the core of early childhood education, recognizing the lack of diversity of pedagogical practices in the field. Scholars who were drawn to this movement started to question and unsettle modernist views that were based primarily in Euro-American privileged knowledges. By doing so, they have opened space for alternative perspectives rooted in critical feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern paradigms. The first wave of Reconceptualists were deeply inspired by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. They emphatically critiqued the dominance of so-called developmentally appropriate practices. As a response to the control of universal truths being so widely accepted and taken for granted by practices in early childhood education, Reconceptualists have responded by opposing such practices by considering them through a social-constructionist lens of understanding and interpreting the world and the human condition. Reconceptualist scholars have contested the globalization of childhood and deconstructed the idea that all children should be measured and qualitatively compared to a Western model of the developed child. Their critique of these structural and modernist ways of seeing the child is based on the lack of contextualization of childhoods: the value of culture, place, socioeconomic situation, traditions, histories, and so on. By exposing the power of narrowly understood developmentalism and the deep effects of the sociopolitical contexts in education, they proposed frameworks based in social justice and equity. This movement’s momentum continues to present times, with myriad scholars fighting for the idea of reframing and reimagining early childhood education. The following bibliography presents some of the initiators and the sustainers of the movement, along with philosophies and practices that inspired or were inspired by them.