Graduation Year

2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ed.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Curriculum and Instruction

Major Professor

Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Dana Thompson Dorsey, JD, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Sophia Han, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Nathaniel von der Embse, Ph.D.

Keywords

Anti-racism, continuous improvement for equity, cooperative learning, culturally sustaining pedagogy in early education, family systems theory

Abstract

The early childhood education and childcare (ECE&C) sector in America “is a textbook example of a broken market” (Yellen, 2021) that operates as a “non-system” (Berlin, 2021). This manifests itself through the low-quality of its teaching cadre (Cassidy et al., 2019). This failure hits disadvantage families hardest (Chafouleas et al., 2016) - a reality that is particularly apparent in St. Petersburg, Florida’s Midtown neighborhoods where one out of every two children attending ECE programs are not meeting State school readiness standards (Florida OEL, 2020). In this study, I propose a culturally-responsive (Gay, 2018), culturally sustaining (Ladson-Billings, 2021c), and equity-based continuous improvement initiative (Bryk, 2010) that may positively impact families and ECE programs in the St. Petersburg Midtown community. I describe deeply competent collaborative processes and asset-based participatory pedagogical practices (Moss, 2019) that teachers can use to develop, implement, and sustain relational ECE&C co-teaching partnerships with their parents (Malaguzzi, 1994; Miller, 2019). Emergent concepts to transform ECE&C teaching praxis through the intentionality of the pedagogy of caring (Noddings, 2013) and the role of “educative play” as a central curriculum focus (Van Hoorn et al., 2015) are also explored. The resulting place-based and adaptive curriculum development framework is then assessed through a computer-aided qualitative analysis of participant dialogue resulting from a recent community ECE workshop for parents, community leaders, and teachers. This evaluation confirmed the usefulness of the adaptive shared home-school early learning curriculum and identified significant relational challenges that parents and teachers would face in implementing it. Implications for practice and recommendations for a community-led cooperative learning initiative to initiate change and support continuous improvement are discussed as are directions for future research.

Download

Share

COinS