Advancing Knowledge and Building Capacity for Early Childhood Research

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

Reframing Research in Early Childhood Education: Debates, Challenges, and Opportunities

SHARON RYAN

Rutgers University

M. ELIZABETH GRAUE

University of Wisconsin, Madison

In 2015, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) sponsored a conference designed to bring together scholars who represented different perspectives on the research, methods, and practice of early childhood education. The catalyst for the conference was recognition that while many scholars focus on early childhood, they often work in intellectual siloes, rarely interacting. Here is an excerpt from the invitational letter to scholars engaged in this area of research:

The boundaries of research communities are particularly stark between those who come from practice in early education (studying teacher education, curriculum, social context), and those who employ disciplinary perspectives to analyze the topic of early education and its effects (child development researchers, economists, and policy researchers). One consequence of these boundaries is a striking lack of symmetry between graduate preparation, research funding, and publication venues that exacerbates the lack of communication among important groups of scholars. Yet early childhood education is an interdisciplinary field requiring that researchers of different communities work together to address complex problems of policy and practice.

A multidisciplinary group met in the summer of 2015, engaging in discussions about the many ways scholars engage in topics related to early childhood education. This volume comes out of that conference. It is designed to reflect how scholarly perspectives shape the contours of knowledge generation. In addition, we hope to illuminate the invisible gaps that prevent productive interchange among scholars who value equity in the opportunities available to young children, their families, and teachers/caregivers.

To do this we include work from people who come at early education from diverse perspectives. But we go beyond the inclusion of different voices to draw attention to the ways that these various perspectives allow us to see certain things and how they obscure others. This is not a subtractive exercise. Instead, we point to limits as opportunities for scholarly attention, as places that researchers from different viewpoints might work together to form a more extensive picture of young children’s opportunities, their families’ experiences, and their teachers’ work.

In the rest of this chapter, we describe some of these opportunities by exploring questions of who and what is researched and how certain kinds of research are used to inform policy. We point to the implications of these patterns—which have produced an early childhood knowledge base with depth in some areas and underdeveloped gaps in others—in the hope that more balanced approaches to early childhood research will be found.

Multiplicity in Early Childhood Education Research and Practice

The care and education of children from birth through age 8 has been a messy space in policy, practice, and research. (Hereinafter, we will use the term early childhood education to refer to education for children in this age range.) In efforts to meet wide-ranging societal needs, researchers interested in child care, Head Start, nursery school, kindergarten, and early elementary school reflect many different perspectives on (a) the purposes of early childhood programs (e.g., the whole child versus academic instruction); (b) who should have access (targeted or universal access); and (c) who should govern programs (public or private entities). Not surprisingly, the field has developed into a multilayered and fragmented array of program offerings, and its complicated evolution continues (Kagan & Kauerz, 2012).

Despite this fragmentation, early childhood education (ECE, which also stands for early care and education) is in the policy spotlight. The attention has brought needed resources, along with increasing standardization and oversight of services. For example, all 50 states now have early learning standards, many for infants and toddlers as well as for preschool through third grade (Graue, Ryan, Wilinski, Northey, & Nocera, 2018). At the same time, there is growing recognition of the importance of the early childhood workforce, and policy makers are interested in creating more consistency and coherence across the birth-through-third-grade continuum. However, we wonder whether the research base has kept pace with the field’s many reforms. Teachers, leaders, and policy makers often lack the information they need to make informed judgements about practices that serve the needs of increasingly diverse students and families.

It is not that research on early childhood is sparse. In fact, there are more publications and ECE-focused research centers generating new research findings than ever. Rather, there are unaddressed tensions surrounding the study of young children and the programs that serve them, which contribute to unevenness in the research base that is used to inform policy and practice. The tensions concern age-old questions: Which disciplines and methods are valued by decision makers for policy and practice? What and who is researched? Whose research perspectives are heard? This chapter considers each of these questions in an effort to highlight the tensions that block conversations and synergies among researchers and programs of inquiry. We worry that the lack of interaction could be a barrier to asking the questions, doing the research, and communicating the findings needed to meet the demands of educating young children in the 21st century. We delve into each of these tensions in more depth to provide a context for the chapters that follow.

What and Who Is Researched?

For much of its history, the field of early childhood education in the United States has used the child as the starting point for practice, learning, and programming. Since the second half of the 20th century, knowledge of young children’s development has been used as the primary source for decision making on curriculum and instruction (Silin, 1995). One example is the field’s reliance on concepts of developmentally appropriate practice (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009) for determining best practices. An understanding of developmentally appropriate practice guides teachers to base instruction on knowledge of children’s individual needs and cultures as well as on professional understanding of child development at particular ages and stages. Therefore, much of the research focus in early childhood has been on images of the child and children’s learning and development and not necessarily on content and early childhood pedagogy (Genishi, Ryan, Ochsner, & Yarnall, 2001). As a result, with a singular focus on the child, key aspects of curriculum and teaching have been overlooked.

Consider the case of teachers and teaching in the early childhood research literature. Research on teaching has been a line of inquiry in K–12 education since the 1960s, yet it is only in the past 15 years or so that teachers have become a focus in the range of settings comprising the early childhood field. Genishi et al. (2001) traced chapters in Virginia Richardson’s (2001) Handbook of Research on Teaching, noting that most of them focus on early childhood programs such as Head Start (e.g., Beller, 1973; Stallings & Stipek, 1986) or on research methods for observing teaching (Gordon & Jester, 1973), and not specifically on what teachers do or believe. To be sure, for some time teacher characteristics such as education and years of experience and other workforce features have been a central variable in analyses of program quality and its impact on child development (e.g., Helburn, 1995; Whitebook, Howes, & Phillips, 1990). However, these studies limit their analyses of teaching young children to a finite set of characteristics and provide little insight into what teachers do with children on a daily basis, what knowledge shapes teachers’ decision making, and how context mediates teachers’ words and actions.

The in-depth and descriptive research on early childhood teaching that has been conducted over the past decade has come from a handful of qualitative researchers interested mostly in teaching in state-funded preschool programs (e.g., Brown, 2009, 2010; Graue, Rauscher, & Sherfinski, 2009; Graue, Ryan, Nocera, Northey, & Willinsky, 2016; Graue, Ryan, Wilinski, Northey, & Nocera, 2018; Wilinski, 2017). Interviews with teachers and observations of their practice on a regular basis illustrate the complexities of this work and highlight how teachers’ work is often mediated by the leadership in the teachers’ professional settings and by public policy. In other words, it is not just the teachers’ education and experience that shape their work. However, this small volume of research, because of its up-close and in-depth approaches, cannot provide straightforward answers to questions about program effects and the like. The findings are always multiply contingent, which is unsatisfying to those seeking to generalize findings. Unfortunately, few studies combine qualitative portraits of early childhood teaching with quantitative data on program quality and child outcomes. As Ryan and Goffin (2008) have argued, in much of the research base on early childhood, teachers are still missing in action.

There is still much to be learned about the many roles that support early childhood programs. We do not know much about teaching assistants, program leaders, and others providing the infrastructure (Ryan & Whitebook, 2012) that supports those who work directly with young children, as well as those who work at the policy level. Similarly, little is known empirically about teacher education. While early childhood teacher educators have built up a predominantly qualitative research base on their practices, few larger surveys have been conducted on the content of teacher preparation programs and the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of those who deliver these programs. Yet there is an ever-increasing emphasis on the preparation of qualified and certified teachers of young children.

Researchers have compared the effects of specific curriculum models (e.g., High Scope, Creative Curriculum) on children’s learning and development, but we are only now seeing work that examines how subject matter other than literacy is taught in settings serving young children. A window on teaching was provided in the many analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-B and ECLS-K; e.g., Bassok, Latham, & Rorem, 2016; Engel, Claessens, Watts, & Farkas, 2016), using large-scale representative databases to explore the relations among children’s entry skills, instructional practices inferred from survey responses, and children’s outcomes. As a result of research investments focused on early math (e.g., DREME [Development and Research in Early Math Education] and the Early Mathematics Collaborative), there is a growing knowledge base related to mathematics teaching and learning, with strong efforts to translate knowledge into materials for practice. While some of that work has been curriculum focused, much has explored building teacher knowledge.

Similarly, because most studies of curriculum have been comparisons of the impacts of different models, we know much less about instruction—the day-to-day interactions between children and teachers around subject matter. Our knowledge base is very shallow when it comes to how early childhood educators teach key concepts. This kind of information is crucial when young children’s education is considered a way to ameliorate the effects of poverty.

In summary, an emphasis on young children’s development has channeled research into particular areas. As a consequence, a lot is known about how young children develop cognitively, socially, emotionally, and physically, but much less is known about curriculum and teaching in early childhood settings.

Which Disciplines and Methods Are Valued?

Education is an interdisciplinary field. Yet, for much of the history of early childhood education, psychology has been the primary discipline through which young children’s education has been considered (Bloch, 1987). Without this psychologically informed work, we would not have Head Start or the Cost, Quality and Outcomes Study (Peisner-Feinberg et al., 1999). More recently, economic analyses have entered discussions about policy and practice. Cost-benefit analyses (e.g., Barnett & Masse, 2007) that show the long-term savings of a high-quality early education have been used repeatedly by policy makers and advocates to argue for increased investment in programs for young children. Adding to this research are a number of longitudinal evaluations of small-scale experimental preschool programs (e.g., Heckman & Karapakula, 2019; and, specifically about the Perry Preschool Program, Schweinhart et al., 2005) and, more recently, state evaluations of public pre-K (e.g., Barnett, Jung, Youn, & Frede, 2013; Lipsey, Farran, & Durkin, 2018). These evaluations look at programs using various quality measures (e.g., Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale [ECERS], Classroom Assessment Scoring System [CLASS]) in relation to child outcomes, and in the case of longitudinal studies, follow-up surveys and other data to determine the long-term impacts of high-quality programs. We have learned a great deal from these analyses, which have been used to make compelling arguments for the importance of high-quality child care and for public pre-K programs.

However, this work has not given us insight into what early childhood programs look like in action, nor do they provide a sense of how programmatic elements come together to produce a high-quality education for young children. While the predominant question posed has been Does it work? we know much less about how programs are implemented, or how context and culture mediate program enactment. The K–12 education system has embraced the interpretive work of scholars who seek to understand actor sense-making (e.g., Cynthia Coburn or James Spillane); the early childhood community has been less welcoming of research that examines the tangled path of policy on its way to practice (Graue, Wilinski, & Nocera, 2016). Research like this provides a context for work on student outcomes, so that we are more likely to be able to understand why a policy or a curriculum does not work as expected. There is much we could gain if more resources went into this kind of scholarship.

At the same time, there is an ever-growing research base of examinations of early childhood programs using critical and sociocultural theories that are typically not part of policy and practice debates. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as on insights from linguistics, feminism, and so forth, this research not only focuses on practice and policy-in-practice but also troubles some common assumptions about early childhood education. It has shown how much of our developmental understanding is based on studies of White, middle-class children (e.g., New, 1994), raised awareness of the gendered nature of early childhood programming (e.g., Blaise, 2005), and shown how Western notions of early childhood are colonizing (Grieshaber & Ryan, 2018) and what programming looks like in other countries (Cannella & Viruru, 2007). Adair (2010) made a compelling argument for the power of ethnographic knowledge to inform early childhood policy, suggesting that early childhood policies and programs can have location-contingent outcomes. Though being told, It depends, is unsettling if you are looking for a clear and simple answer, we think that the questions posed in early education require multiple tools, questions, and perspectives to build a robust foundation for practice.

When we think about the knowledge base and methodological approaches that informed the creation of well-known early childhood programs, it can be challenging to apply their lessons to teaching young children in the 21st century. Children and families have become more culturally and linguistically diverse, and new technologies are making knowledge more available and changing the way children learn. Globalization has made early childhood education more international; program participants and their teachers come from every corner of the globe, as do ideas, curricula, and methods that might be used to inform ECE programming. For example, most countries have signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, leading some researchers to research with, not on, children and to seek marginalized children’s input into programming (e.g., MacDonald, 2014; Ritchie & Rau, 2013; Smith, 2013). Expanding the disciplinary and methodological lenses used to study and understand early childhood education has the potential to ensure that programs remain responsive to changing demands and that our efforts are inclusive of all children, families, teachers, and communities.

Whose Research Perspectives Are Heard?

As we have noted, the field of early childhood education attracts attention from researchers with diverse interests, perspectives, and tools. These researchers study practice, human development, policy, economics, curriculum, critical perspectives, teacher education, sociology, anthropology, and so on. They work to determine precursors, facilitators, and barriers to learning; to design programs that level the playing field for children with very different opportunities; to determine thresholds for ECE investments; to describe and analyze power relations that marginalize some children and families and normalize others; and to critique the discourses embedded in common ECE practices. This diversity on almost every dimension could predict a robust literature that potentially addresses any problem or issue.

However, a critical stumbling block has been the question of what counts as evidence in building knowledge or advancing policy decision making. Often, quantitative researchers looking for generalizability to a given population are not compelled by the rich accounts of experience created through case studies or interpretive research; qualitative researchers resist the certainty implied by surveys of large numbers of teachers or randomized controlled trials of curriculum effects. As a result, the question of what counts as research—a definition that should be settled in an introductory course—persists and prevents us from fully benefiting from the work and perspectives of peers interested in many of the same things.

This leads to a cascade of effects. We live, think, learn, and communicate in siloed communities, making it unlikely that we will produce synergistic questions or solutions. Our students are educated in programs with little appetite for ventures across different perspectives; they are socialized into a way of seeing the world that can preclude other points of view.

Policy makers and funding agencies are more likely to rely on the expertise of researchers who work with large data sets, hoping that the noisiness of the local will be quieted, increasing the certainty of their decisions. And there is much to be gained from big data. But overemphasizing this approach also makes it likely that policy-oriented researchers will not interact with researchers interested in examining practice more closely, and likely that policy makers and funders will not have access to information that can help with effective program implementation. Implementation science researchers (e.g., Halle, Zaslow, Martinez-Beck, & Metz, 2013) argue that mixed methods approaches to studying early childhood initiatives can account for contextual factors that may influence implementation. In addition, this work may identify levers that can support early program implementation at all levels, from system-wide to the local level. Limiting analyses of implementation to fidelity to program intentions and protocols ignores the many ways that local actors adopt, adapt, and even reject reforms.

This fragmentation means that the architects of early childhood policies, practices, and programs may not know the full range of possible approaches to better understanding early education. For example, it seems that publications create self-referencing communities that focus on particular types of research and are invisible to other research communities. The standards of evidence and the discourses promoted in Early Childhood Research Quarterly are quite different from those in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, and even more different from Early Years. Scholars who present for one of the AERA SIGs related to early childhood, or elsewhere in the association, are not very likely to interact with the Society for Research on Child Development or the American Psychological Association. Knowledge of early education is dispersed across different communities, and much of the research is generated in isolation from different perspectives and methodologies.

One consequence of this fragmentation is that qualitative and practice-based researchers rarely interact with those who do large-scale policy capturing studies of programs, and rarely do leaders get to see the possibilities of these conversations for improving programming for young children. At the same time, without efforts to include the voices of those who do the work or those researching from critical perspectives, we may be stuck in the same debates about the purposes of early education, who should participate in its programs, and the key program components. This is a waste of considerable intellectual capital and quite short-sighted when the communities and circumstances in which early education operates continue to become more complex.

Conclusion

In this introduction, we have tried to articulate the social conditions that have fashioned the knowledge production of different research communities and that ultimately shape knowledge use informing policy and programming for young children. We have chosen to take this approach rather than describing authors’ contributions to the volume—they more than adequately represent their thinking and we could not do them justice. We hope this context-setting will serve as a window to the field as you read the rest of the book.

As we look back on the conditions that prompted us to propose the conference in 2015, we are both grateful and curious. We are grateful for the opportunity to bring together a group of smart, engaging scholars who are not often in the same room, at the same conference, or in the same journal, for several days of exchange. We are grateful to those who agreed to write chapters and completed them for this book.

But we are also curious about whether we were able to disrupt the social structures that reflect the intellectual separations that prompted our proposal. Let’s look at the evidence. The book originally had three sections: (a) children and families, (b) curriculum and teaching, and (c) systems, cultures, and contexts. As the book began to take shape, we found that the chapters did not speak to each other. Rather than add a section to try to knit the conversations together, we opened up the organization of the book. This was our first lesson, in early childhood parlance, that one playdate does not cement a friendship.

Reviewing the chapters, we think that for the most part, authors stayed in their disciplinary lanes, using their considerable expertise to write about their topics. We benefited from this in many ways, as the discussions had coherence and depth. As a result, the volume reflects state(s) of the field rather than discipline-defying acrobatics.

None of this is to say that the experiment was a failure. We see it as a first step in a long process of dissolving whatever it is that impedes cross-fertilization of ideas in early childhood education research. The different perspectives you will see here reflect a field that is complex, messy, and very much alive with ideas.

In presenting these chapters, we hope that new lines of inquiry will be identified that bring different methodologies and disciplines together and encourage partnerships across research paradigms and communities. We hope that in the many ideas presented here we might find ways to think differently about how we conceptualize young children’s education and how it is researched.

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Chapter 2

Fostering Equitable Developmental Opportunities for Dual-Language Learners in Early Education Settings

BRYANT JENSEN

Brigham Young University

EUGENE E. GARCÍA

Arizona State University

The first language of a quarter of U.S. children is other than English (E. E. García, Jensen, & Scribner, 2009). Research in recent decades confirms that young children have an impressive capacity for acquiring two or more language systems simultaneously (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2017). They do so naturally, through regular activities and social interactions (E. E. García, 2017). Some research shows that young bilingual children demonstrate cognitive and communicative advantages over their monolingual peers (e.g., Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010), which boost their academic development in early education. Yet high levels of linguistic competence in two or more languages, as with young monolingual children, require exposure to rich and diverse lexical, syntactic, and grammatical structures in daily interactions in and out of school (e.g., Hurtado, Marchman, & Fernald, 2008). Thus, language competencies vary among children learning English as a second language—by immigrant generation, socioeconomic status, language ideology, and community resources (NASEM, 2017).

The labels educators assign to young bilingual children have evolved over recent decades (August & Shanahan, 2006), and today we often refer to these children as dual-language learners (DLLs). This label is preferred to English language learners (ELLs) because it highlights first language practices as a resource that is critical in the process of teaching and learning in early education programs (Barnett, Yarosz, Thomas, Jung, & Blanco, 2007; Castro, Páez, Dickinson, & Frede, 2011). Effective teachers of young DLLs integrate first and second language practices and afford opportunities for children to do the same (Gumperz, 1982; Hakuta & García, 1989). Translanguaging (Gort & Sembiante, 2015) affords instructional opportunities (Cazden, Michaels, & Tabors, 1985) and strengthens social relationships in classrooms (E. E. García, 2005, pp. 27–29). Teachers cannot teach in all languages, but they can employ strategies to support the maintenance of the first language and the development of the second language for young DLLs (Espinosa & Magruder, 2015).

We know from meta-analytic studies and research syntheses that bilingual instructional programs¹ in early education and in the elementary grades tend to be better at producing academic development (in English) than English-only programs (e.g., Rolstad, Mahoney, & Glass, 2005). Research syntheses also show that quality of instruction is more important than the language of instruction (Cheung & Slavin, 2012, p. 389). Young DLLs benefit from consistent exposure to both their first and second languages in early education settings, but the research on this subject is limited with regard to the specific supports needed for optimal language learning and academic development. We need to know much more about how early education programs can draw on the social-behavioral assets of young DLLs to enhance their academic development (Jensen, Reese, Hall-Kenyon, & Bennett, 2015). The developmental assets of young DLLs include, yet go beyond, language (e.g., Fuller & García Coll, 2010).

One suggestion is for early educators to conduct regular home visits in order to (a) communicate the value of language and literacy development in the first language as a basis for developing English proficiencies (Castro et al., 2011), and (b) acquire specific information about individual dual language learners’ backgrounds, including their early language learning opportunities, family cultural values, and prior knowledge, so [the educators] can individualize instruction and services (NASEM, 2017, p. 199). Although educators have been encouraged for several years to conduct home visits to integrate the sociocultural/developmental assets of DLLs and other minoritized² children into their teaching (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Souto-Manning, 2013), we need more research on how. Specifically, we need studies that (a) specify sociocultural aspects of teaching, (b) demonstrate how activities like home visits develop early educators’ cultural knowledge in/for teaching, and (c) examine how sociocultural aspects relate with other teaching qualities that affect young DLLs’ learning and development (Jensen, Grajeda, & Haertel, 2018).

In this chapter, we review the sociocultural context of young DLLs’ development (Rogoff, 2003) and make practice and research recommendations to enhance equity in early education. We take the case of Mexican American children because it is illustrative and because these children are the largest ethnic subgroup of DLLs (Crosnoe, 2006). We define equitable developmental opportunities as the intersection of high-quality and culturally meaningful interactions in classrooms and other early education settings (Jensen, Mejía-Arauz, Grajeda, García, Encinas, & Larsen, 2020). We assert that establishing the body of evidence necessary to foster equitable opportunities for young DLLs at scale requires scholars to move beyond entrenched epistemological and methodological camps (Yoshikawa, Weisner, Kalil, & Way, 2008). It is necessary to develop new measures and to design and test teaching principles that involve examining the cultural assumptions behind dominant practices in early education.

Young Dual-Language Learners

One in four young children in the United States speaks a language in addition to English at home (Child Trends, 2014). This large number is due to increases in immigration flows beginning in the late 1960s, as well as high fertility rates among immigrants relative to the general U.S. population. Hundreds of languages are represented among DLL children; three in four speak Spanish (Capps et al., 2005). Beginning in the 1990s, immigrant families and their DLL children dispersed in large numbers from concentrated enclaves in large cities and in the Southwest to nontraditional communities in