Search

In the wake of Trump’s presidency, children of color have been increasingly subjected to overt racism in and outside of educational settings. After seeing “In light of the Trump effect” or the anxi...

The field of early childhood and its teacher education programs, globally, have experienced intensified policy reforms to “professionalize” the workforce. This has had (un)intended consequences of standardizing how Latinx preservice educators in the United States have learned about engaging in early years education and care. To discuss the impact of these (un)intended consequences, we first describe the historical context around standardized testing and the policies that support their use for teacher licensure in the United States and New Mexico, where our teacher education program resides. We then problematize these policies and provide examples of approaches used to counter the (un)intended consequences of such reforms. Finally, we make recommendations for future policy reforms that rethink teacher education and licensure programs, so that they value and centralize the often-marginalized knowledge of Latinx early childhood educators and teacher educators.

On 8 November 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. During his campaign, Trump put on display long held sexist, racist, and bigoted views on women; people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer, intersex peoples, and Others. Media coverage in the U.S. and around the world was not limited to news cycles intended for adult audiences only. Scholastic News Kids Press Corps, a free online publication for and ‘by kids’ ages 10 to 14, joined the conversation in 2015. This article shares analysis of Scholastic News Kids Press Corps’ coverage of Trump’s campaign, theorized through a critical, women of color feminist lens. Major themes that emerged include teaching children how to be unbiased reporters; the importance of being part of the political process and voting; social and policy issues; and Trump’s disposition/sexism. While news content broached issues from varying perspectives, it often stopped short of providing critical reflections and historical context of the issues being reported. Possibilities are discussed for expanding how news media for and by children can be conceptualized, in addition to how educators can engage in critical media literacy with children across multiple age groups, including the early years.

Womanists and Chicana/Latina feminists have theorized about suturing our mind/body/spirit splits through energy work, meditation and accessing ancestral knowledges. These practices have not only helped women of color and the colonized heal, but they have also incited spiritual activism. Because spiritual realms are rarely discussed in academic spaces, we find it important to bring these ideas to the surface, especially as they relate to transdisciplinary feminist research practices. Theorizing with Womanist and Chicana/Latina feminist spirituality intertwines multiple women of color feminist/a onto-epistemologies, and crosses boundaries of women’s, ethnic, sociological, and educational studies. In this chapter, we first share how Womanists and Chicana/Latina feminists have theorized notions of spirituality from across disciplines and then apply these ideas to methodology. We specifically focus on how Womanism and Chicana/Latina feminism changes the purposes for inquiry, how one engages in research, and what spiritually centered methodologies can offer in terms of healing (both humans and more than humans) in an increasingly racist, sexist, colonialist, and violent world. Spiritually centered methodologies further transdisciplinary feminist research by opening dimensions and ways of engaging with/among the world that are often closed off and thought of as nonexistent, intangible, or that they should be separate from our research.

In this article, the authors reflect on Myrna’s Children’s Village, their university laboratory school located in southern New Mexico in the USA. The Village serves children from the age of six weeks to five years through an array of early childhood programs. This diversity provides a unique context, while also posing issues and concerns, such as lack of collaboration across programs, and also how the authors’ critically framed teacher education program is in many ways disconnected from the developmental philosophies that guide most of the Village’s programs. Based on their discussions as faculty of early childhood who work with the Children’s Village, the authors offer their thoughts and insights about how the Village came to be, its purposes, and who they are as faculty in relation to the Village. The authors then offer possible new directions for the Children’s Village in which greater collaboration across programs is fostered along with stronger faculty engagement. The purpose of sharing these reflections is to encourage a shift in how, as a field, university laboratory schools are conceptualized and how collaboration might be enhanced within dynamic early childhood contexts.

Global south onto-epistemologies are rarely part of bilingual and early childhood teacher education programs. Most university courses, even those that are critically oriented, remain embedded in global north conceptualizations of theory and practice. In this paper, we offer critical examinations of how global north colonialism and its latest reiteration, neoliberalism, have produced hegemonic discourses which have shaped the education of teachers in the fields of bilingual and early childhood education. We then share our pláticas about our global south approaches to teacher education. In doing so, we offer ways in which to make sense of our role as teacher educators in challenging and navigating dynamic, and often all-encompassing neoliberal systems of oppression within bilingual and early childhood teacher/education.

In this chapter, we call for onto-epistemological diversity in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). Specifically, we discuss the need to center the brilliance of children and communities of color, which we argue, can be facilitated by foregrounding global south perspectives, such as Black and Chicana feminisms. Mainstream perspectives in ECEC, however, have been dominantly constructed from global north perspectives, producing a normalized White, male, middle-class, heterosexual version of childhood, where minoritized children are viewed as deficit. Although there have been important challenges to the discourse of a normalized, deficit child, we argue much of this work has remained grounded in global north positionings, which separate theory from the lived realities of children of color. As such, we introduce Black and Chicana feminisms as global south visions to transform approaches to research and pedagogy in ECEC and, in turn, disrupt inequities.

Children’s access to certain knowledge, often deemed inappropriate for children by adults, has been at the core of many controversies in children’s early education. This is particularly the case in terms of the censorship associated with children’s access to what has been broadly viewed as ‘difficult knowledge’ – bodies of knowledge pertaining to sexuality, death, war, poverty, and violence, for example. In some western countries, the discourse of childhood innocence has been a powerful mediator/regulator of children’s access to knowledge and has influenced how children are viewed as active citizens in their everyday lives (Robinson, 2013). However, it is now more widely accepted that children are competent, knowing beings in and of the world, readily taking up, processing and challenging messages about a raft of uncomfortable and inequitable realities, from global warming, to sexism, to racial intolerance, to class prejudice (Osgood et al., 2016). This view of children and childhood requires that approaches to pedagogy, policy and practice around diversity and difference in early childhood education attend to children as knowers and doers in the world (Osgood, 2012; Osgood and Robinson, 2019; Robinson and Jones Diaz, 2016).

In this article we take a journey into using Chicana/Latina feminisms as one way to unearth new possibilities for critical qualitative inquiry (CQI). We start by offering a brief overview of Gloria Anzaldúa's influence on Chicana/Latina feminism, focusing on how she has inspired researching and writing from within rather than about as a decolonial turn (Keating, 2015). We then venture into new imaginaries to pose questions that would lead us to ponder about global feminista solidarity, the spirit, and the land. Our hope is that these contemplations lead us on a path of conocimiento where we can put the broken pieces of our/selves back together again.

The shooting at Sandy Hook elementary and other past and more recent acts of school violence involving guns in the United States have created considerable national dialogue about how we can prevent such horrific acts from happening in the future. In Texas, public conversation has ensued about the possibility of arming teachers, school staff, and administrators to “protect” and “defend” schools from similar attacks. Media discourses produced by the general public, right-wing political leaders, and organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA) have been instrumental in advocating for teachers and other school personnel to become armed protectors. As such, in this article, I describe the context of the debate to arm Texas teachers as portrayed by newspaper outlets across the state while problematizing the dominant discourses they produce.

Children have been governed within early childhood care and education in ways that would be heavily scrutinized if the same situations occurred within adult contexts. As such, in this article, we utilize Black feminist perspectives to interrogate and (re)examine childhood regulatory spaces. We provide readers with storied narratives that demonstrate how younger human beings are violated, controlled, and disciplined. To emphasize these points, we describe these same childhood experiences as if they were happening to adults. Examples of situations interrogated include everyday childhood routines, the use of assessment to determine ability grouping, and implementation of classroom management systems. Theorizing the narratives with a Black feminist lens inspires the rethinking of everyday (sometimes unrealized) regulation of younger human beings in early childhood care and education.

In an undergraduate families and communities course situated at a university in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, early childhood majors have used Black feminist thought combined with photovoice to generate projects that explore family and community experiences with power and oppression. As a professor, teaching assistant, and student enrolled in the course, we share our conceptualization of Black feminist photovoice, student trends and issues engaging with photovoice throughout the semester, and provide an example culminating project that focuses on colonization. By describing students’ engagement with Black feminist photovoice, we illustrate how transformative spaces can be forged in early childhood teacher education, where students critically examine the struggles and empowerment of marginalized communities, and generate possibilities to serve as agents of social justice and change.

Black feminisms are diverse and have been birthed from a range of lived, corporeal experiences of Black women globally. Although each perspective is unique, all share the collective vision of elevating and legitimizing Black women's knowledges. Importantly, Black feminisms aim to bring about social justice for all who experience oppression. A distinctive facet of Black feminist thought and other women of color perspectives is that theory is born from the flesh. When theorizing based on the lived experiences of women of color, and the many intersectional identities we each possess, power hierarchies, or what Collins conceptualizes as matrices of domination, are revealed. Black women have herstorically rallied collectively to resist matrices of domination, finding ways to heal while interrogating injustices. Coalition building brings strength to movements, and pushes back against neo-liberal, individualistic methods of resistance. A Black feminist approach to health, safety, and nutrition has prompted a focus on having students explore what it means to craft a "wellness curriculum.".

Black feminist scholars have theorized ways in which power permeates our everyday lived experiences. The authors of this article, a university faculty member and a grassroots community activist, share their collective Black feminist activist efforts to find spaces of resistance and empowerment within oppressive conditions in the city of New Orleans.

This article discusses the broad-based use of bricolage to examine the neoliberal childhood policy discourses and forms of implementation that are currently practiced in the United States. Diverse, traditionally marginalized understandings such as Black feminist thought, Chicana feminism, and feminist analysis of capitalist patriarchy are combined with a Deleuze/Guattarian critique of capitalism and qualitative methods of situational analyses. We do this to identify childhood assemblages within the childhood public policy behemoth in the United States and compare these assemblages to capitalism more broadly, including how neoliberal practices are facilitated.

Modernist assumptions have created universal notions of childhood that have given more power to adults and have made what has been defined as ‘children’ as one of the most subjugated and marginalized groups in societies globally. As such, many younger human beings have been forced to live with the everyday realities of abuse for which they are often situated as victims. In order to problematize victim discourses, using Black feminist thought as a theoretical lens, this article juxtapositions lived experiences of childhood sexual abuse with moments of resistance and empowerment, experiences that that the author argues cannot be separated. The article concludes with critical questions we might consider to resist reifying dominant views of children as those without agency and ways that we might rethink social and institutional structures that uphold power for adults and allow for the continued exploitation of younger human beings.

In this paper, I propose that Gloria Anzaldua's philosophy offers pedagogical and epistemological tools for social justice and human rights education and theory. I propose that Anzaldua's conceptualizations are helpful to re-thinking Western based human rights frameworks by including indigenous worldviews. In this vein, I examine how conceptualizations, such as Nepantla, Spiritual Activism, and New Tribalism, can inform the development of transformative pedagogies for social justice education and praxis. Their significance lies in their ability to offer multifaceted examinations of multiple forms of oppression and agency. At the same time, Anzaldua provided us with innovative tools to work across differences. I argue as well that the methodology of testimonio is helpful in this process because it offers tools to work in solidarity with different communities and voice multiple perspectives. I conclude by offering pedagogical strategies for social justice education and praxis.

We find an absence of many methods of support for critical qualitative scholars in the changing academic climate, especially under contemporary neoliberal conditions that include the privileging of academic capitalism. Currently, we find that we have plenty of advice for our former early career selves, which led us to imagine what it might be like if our future selves could talk to our present selves and provide needed mentoring. We anticipate that our future selves would give us comfort and strategic advice, and challenge our ideas about our place and role in the academy. In this critical dialogic narrative, we reflect on what the “future” tenured Michelle would tell the “current” untenured Michelle and what the “future” full professor Penny might tell the “current” associate professor Penny to increase motivation and risk taking, and further challenge the neoliberal practices within the academy.

Hypercapitalism in the United States and globally has created neoliberal conditions that have reinterpreted notions of the public good as an entrepreneurial endeavor. In this current context, critical qualitative methods such as situational analysis combined with theoretical perspectives like Black feminist thought can provide activist methodological tools to expose and reenvision privatized constructions of the common good. In this article, we describe possibilities for using critical situational analysis to examine a broad range of complex conditions and provide examples of situational mapping from a study focusing on disaster capitalism and the privatization of the public education system in post-Katrina New Orleans. We then offer possibilities for using situational analysis to create new imaginaries for critical qualitative inquiry.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has had profound and lasting impacts on early childhood education both in the public education sector and in preschool contexts. In light of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the newest iteration of NCLB, I first trace the history of NCLB's influence on early childhood, which has resulted in placing greater emphasis on assessments for young children, creating early learning standards, and universalizing corporate notions of quality. I then examine several of the new and modified aspects of ESSA, which encourage alignment of early childhood education with K-12 education and across early childhood programs, increased assessments for emergent bilingual children, and the expansion of early childhood education through market-based reforms. With unprecedented emphasis on young children, ESSA will likely have instrumental impacts on early childhood education for years to come.

Early childhood as a field, historically, has been informed by the perspectives of white men from the global north (Burman 1994). This has resulted in the universalization of development discourses, producing rigid constructions of childhood/s, and Othering those who do not fit into dominant identity constructs. The reconceptualist movement has been instrumental in uncovering regulatory discourses and opening spaces to reimagine and rethink childhood/s (Bloch et al. 2014). Still absent, however, in early childhood studies are the perspectives of women of color. As such, this chapter calls for a more prominent presence of theories from the margins like Black feminist thought (Collins 2008). Specific examples are shared that illustrate how Black feminist thought can provoke the telling of lived experiences, unveil social and systemic power hierarchies in both methodological approaches and in teacher education, and inspire activism. The chapter concludes with a discussion on why Black feminist thought is essential to the field.

This chapter explores the dilemmas facing qualitative researchers as people struggle to come to grips with the new dynamic. Mainstream qualitative researchers have been active in making changes to ontological and epistemological approaches to research and tools for data collection and representation. Thirty years after the initial development of Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS), qualitative researchers now stand on the brink of a global technological revolution in the form of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The next quarter century of qualitative research history represents five moments in Denzin and Lincoln's framework, during which qualitative researchers struggled with issues of representation, social justice, and reflexivity. For qualitative researchers being raised in the new era, not using available digital tools is not an option. If qualitative researchers are to meet the challenges of global contexts, they must have digital tools that provide support for this new, challenging, and complex environment.

In this article, we examine our own testimonios inspired by Chicana and Black feminisms that have not only informed our research and teaching but have also helped us to make sense of our lives. We offer our testimonios related to theory, identity negotiations, and pedagogical concerns with teaching multiculturalism as a way to recognize and acknowledge that as academics, researchers, and teachers, we must continue to learn language from, and create new language for, our theoretical spaces that help us to express and navigate the complexity and multiple locations of struggles and resistance. Collectively, testimonios facilitate crucial lessons for examining the interconnectedness between Chicana and Black feminisms through the lived experiences of those living in or on the margins. They also provide critical self-reflection that is needed to unlearn oppression that exists within each of us.

The authors of this article provide multiple stories of capitalist violence within and outside of higher education as facilitated by patriarchy and evidenced by the recent stories of abuse and power embedded within college football at Pennsylvania State University. Acknowledging that the constructs patriarchy and feminist(s) have been heavily contested, the authors argue for resurrection of examinations of patriarchy, and specifically capitalist patriarchy, in contemporary analyses of power.

The articles in this special issue of JOLLAS center on critical methodologies in educational research. As Chicana/Latina scholars have reimagined pedagogical spaces, so too have they reinvented the methodologies needed for such rearticulations. Each of the authors in this special issue provides ways in which to navigate methodological landscapes and offers discussions on the critical conversations necessary to forge a space for Chicana/Latina feminist perspectives in qualitative research. In particular, the scholars focus on anticolonial conversations, critical ethnography, theories and methods of the flesh, critical reflexivity, and Chicana feminist film-making methodologies as well as urge us to consider the global North/South divide by decolonizing conocimiento and forming global alliances.

This special issue of JOLLAS is a reflection and extension of Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies (CLFEs) in education. Using the work of Gloria Anzaldua and other Chicana feminist educators, such as Dolores Delgado Bernal, in conjunction with concepts of nepantla, testimonios, and Chicana feminist-third space, the contributors exemplify how CLFEs are embodied in education research in order to provide new pedagogical understandings and visions.