The Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) was recently awarded a pilot vision grant from the Spencer Foundation for a project led by YCSC Assistant Professor Chin Reyes, titled “Transforming the Discourse for Equity in Early Childhood Education: Reimagining Curriculum and Pedagogies and Young Children as Capable.” The Foundation supports transformative research projects designed to reimagine education systems for equity, and Reyes heads a design group consisting of a multidisciplinary team of experts from the U.S. and Australia with the intention of challenging existing notions of quality in early childhood education.
“The planning grant brings together diverse disciplinary perspectives to design an ambitious research-to-practice project that will ultimately create proofs-of-concept illustrating pedagogies that are responsive to communities and focus on important social issues,” Reyes explains. “Building on disturbing research findings indicating that academic gains from pre-K programs are not long-lasting or are even detrimental long-term on both achievement and behavior, the project aims to explore transformative pedagogies that promote underlying foundational skills leading to optimal early learning outcomes in young children within communities that have been systemically disinvested from over many years.”
Vanderbilt University Emerita Professor Dale Farran, one of the study’s leading authors, asserts that “Pre-K classrooms of today bear little to no resemblance to demonstration programs implemented in the ‘60s and ‘70s. If we want to create the strong positive effects of those early programs, we must re-imagine early childhood programs as they are being enacted today to allow contemporary children and families to flourish.”
Pilot study co-investigator and group design member Ashley Nazarak, who also serves as vice president of program scaling and dissemination at Carole Robertson Center for Learning in Chicago, says that what she likes about the project is the co-creation process. She adds, “It considers expertise from multiple perspectives—not just from researchers but importantly, from teachers, families, and communities.”
“The project showcases the coalescing of professional backgrounds and areas of scholarship and expertise and ensures local relevance by incorporating the knowledge and experiences of children, families, and communities,” added co-investigator Luisiana Melendez, clinical professor at the Erikson Institute.
The team will also explore emerging methods to document impact. “We aim to film what these innovative pedagogies look like and make the learning outcomes explicit so that teachers can see transformative practices and will be eager to try them in their classrooms,” said co-investigator Nicola Yelland, a professor of early childhood studies at the University of Melbourne.
Reyes believes that it is important to reclaim the core principles of what makes early childhood a truly unique period in the human life cycle – one that deserves to be honored and celebrated. “If we successfully pull this off, 20 years from now, a child’s sociodemographic factors should no longer predict later academic success. It is a rather ambitious goal, prone to a plethora of challenges, but definitely worth pursuing,” she said.