Social Justice and Equity in Early Childhood Education
摘要
In this chapter, I explore tensions engendered by Eurocentric ways of understanding children and childhood that center the dominance of White, middle-class norms, through post-colonial and feminist filters that challenge early childhood educators to deconstruct and reimagine pedagogy, education, and research when working with historically marginalized children and families. I discuss how it is essential to center anti-discriminatory education in the field of early childhood by inviting multiple perspectives such as Indigenous, Black, and Chicana feminist approaches, to enable the construction of situated knowledge of young children of color via relational worldviews. Eurocentric theories in early childhood education contribute to the perpetuation of a single story, that of normalized and universal ideologies and practices, which discriminates against children of color and their experiences by placing them within a deficit framework. These dominant hegemonic beliefs reflected in early years education through discourses and practices, for example, school readiness and word gap, perpetuates a culture of continued colonization in Canadian contexts, through centering language and practices that generate multiple centers of oppression for young children of color and their communities. This chapter explores ethical and transformative ways of approaching this complexity to empower young children of color, their families, and early childhood educators to negotiate and resist dominant Eurocentric deficit conceptualizations. By inviting multiple perspectives from diverse scholarships and worldviews, for example, feminist, post-colonial, and Indigenous scholars, I explore strategies to center anti-discriminatory beliefs, pedagogies, and practices in early childhood education. Finally, I posit that it is essential for early childhood educators to adopt beliefs and practices that resist dominant discourses to work toward transformation in order to advance social justice and equity within early childhood education.