Holistic Multilingual Early Learning: Lessons From Families, Educators, and Administrators in a Preschool Program

The Reggio Emilia approach, including the concept of the hundred languages that children use, offers expansive opportunities for affirming and sustaining the multilingual identities of young children (Fyfe et al., 2023). This paper counters the authoritarian culture of power (Delpit, 1988) in schooling that privileges monolingual, monomodal English as superior and dominant. We examine the intersections of multilingualism and a Reggio Emilia approach in the early childhood context. We draw on data from a study with a public, Reggio-inspired preschool dual language program in a large Midwest city in the US, created and operated in close collaboration amongst administrators, families, teachers, and staff. Through individual interviews and focus groups, families, educators, and administrators shared their perspectives on the history and the current implementation of the program’s curricula, the program structures that sustain the quality of the educators and staff, the impact on children’s development and learning, and the contributions of families and community. We analyze bilingual identity development for young children and their families in the context of dual language schooling, as well as the necessity of uplifting and amplifying multilingualism within foundation pedagogical approaches like Reggio. Finally, we identify ways that multilingual pedagogies, including but not limited to translanguaging and translanguaging universal design for learning (TrUDL) (Cioè-Peña, 2022), are inextricably linked with other seminal approaches to early learning, rather than an afterthought or appendage that must be squeezed into preexisting learning structures

Perceptions of Preschool Stakeholders on the Impacts of English as the Dominant Language in Early Childhood Education and Care Centers in Yoruba-Speaking States, Nigeria

The study investigated the perceptions of stakeholders on the assumed impacts of English as a dominant language in some selected ECECC in Yoruba-speaking states. 617 stakeholders, 247 preschool teachers, 204 School owners/heads, and 166 parents and community members across the seven states, were randomly selected for the study. Four research questions were raised and answered. A validated questionnaire titled \u27Perception of Preschool Stakeholders on the Impacts of English as Dominant Language in ECECC was used to elicit information from the respondents. Data was collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics. Findings revealed that above-average parents and community members (64%) believe that using English in ECECC will prepare children for future educational activities and global relevance. A notable number of school owners/heads (89%) opined that using English in ECECC prepares children for external examinations and competitions, 86.5% indicating that English language instruction boosts school enrollment. A significant proportion of ECCDE teachers (65%) believe that important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meanings when taught in English. And the majority (183) of the ECCDE teachers in the states indicated that only English is used for classroom activities. It is obvious that all the stakeholders who participated in the study placed a high level of worth on the use of the English language due to the assumed impacts. There is a need to re-orientate stakeholders on the fact that children have more to gain when their mother tongue is used in the preschool classroom during the teaching and learning activities

What Happened to the Creative in the Creative Curriculum?

This empirically-grounded commentary questions the basis for New York City Public Schools’ (NYCPS) adoption of the Teaching Strategies products—the Creative Curriculum (CC) and Teaching Strategies GOLD—as the mandated curriculum and assessment systems for early childhood education (ECE) programs administered by the New York City Public Schools. In an analysis shaped by our hybrid positionalities as early childhood educators, parents, policy makers, and researchers, we argue that this decision is a local case of neoliberalism’s simultaneous narrowing of educational quality and a transfer of public funding into private hands under the guise of the free market. Our commentary, which is augmented by examples from our research and practice, begins with an overview of New York City’s (NYC) ECE system, contextualized within national systems issues in ECE. This provides important framing for discussing the evolution of NYC’s ECE curricula and assessment as the city expanded its public preschool programs. We end by considering how U.S. ECE was ensnared by the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), sounding a call to action for scholars, advocates, and educators to mobilize against a (seemingly) unassailable GERM through organizing and coalition-building.

Editors’ Introduction: Engaging ECE in times of chaos and authoritarianism

Editorial for volume 12 (2025), issue

Constructivism in the Shadow of Centralism: The transformative potential of international programmes in early childhood education in Poland as an escape from authoritarianism

This study examines the role of international education the Primary Years Programme (PYP), in mitigating authoritarian tendencies within Poland\u27s early childhood education (ECE) system. Employing qualitative content analysis of legislation and media reports, the research examines how these programmes apply constructivist theory and seeks to provide an option to overly centralised education systems. The study shows that such international programmes promote active learning where the students are of great importance as opposed to authoritarian classroom cultures that often rely on pedagogical dictators. Results show that the Polish education system is gradually incorporating more topical and constructivist facets, especially in the context of early childhood education institutions, a trend that is being registered in legal reforms. The application of dual curricula within international schools is also noteworthy as it combines international and local educational requirements. This method offers an alternative approach that is less rigid and beneficial as it would not totally resist the internationalization of education. The study ends with a positive assessment of externally oriented programmes providing necessary mechanisms for educational reform in Poland in the prevailing conditions of change in the teaching environment

A Corpus-based Study of the Conceptualizations of Childhood in the Iranian Culture and their Implications for Early Childhood Education

This study investigates the conceptualizations of childhood in the Iranian culture through a linguistic analysis of three Persian lexical items for a child (bache, kudak, tefl) and their implications for Early Childhood Education (ECE). Employing a corpus-based approach supplemented with ethnographic insights, the study investigates how the Persian speaking members of the Iranian culture understand childhood as a cognitive cultural concept. The findings highlight a divergence between traditional and modern conceptualizations of children, where a traditional, socially determined, non-chronological definition coexists with an age-based definition. It is shown that the concept of ‘evil’ child as understood in Western societies is absent in the Iranian culture. Diverse cultural conceptualizations of childhood are identified, including children as a source of joy, playful and mischievous, innocent and vulnerable, naïve and simple-minded, compliant subordinates and, in some cases, out-of-control beings, who also attempt to negotiate their agency. The study highlights the heterogeneity of Iranians’ conceptualizations of childhood that are shaped by ongoing negotiations between tradition and modernity. This heterogeneity has direct and vicarious implications for ECE, which highlight both the role of parents and educators in dealing with children and educational materials

Juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in English-dominated language landscape

This paper presents a collaborative effort between a Head Start lead teacher and an educational scholar, focusing on a Head Start classroom in a non-traditional migration area in Pennsylvania. The joint initiative, called Juntos, was undertaken to support children\u27s bilingualism in a context where English is the dominant language. The classroom is located in a semi-rural region, a historically White-dominated area that has undergone significant demographic changes in recent decades. These changes have led to cultural, economic, and linguistic tensions between original residents and new immigrants. Such tensions are evident in the Head Start classroom, where approximately 95% of the students come from Spanish-speaking households. English has historically dominated this region, shaping both the educational system and societal perceptions. Despite the growing Spanish-speaking population, these structures have not adapted to accommodate this shift, resulting in English remaining the primary language of instruction, with Spanish-speaking students often placed in ESL programs. Consequently, school readiness has become synonymous with English proficiency. In this local context, a bilingual lead teacher strives to foster bilingualism among her students while ensuring they meet school readiness criteria, even though her classroom is not designated as bilingual. Her efforts, in collaboration with a researcher, have resulted in students becoming proficient in both English and Spanish. This ethnographic study documents her resistance to the hegemony of English as the language of education and seeks to amplify and advocate for the voices of bilingual early childhood educators in linguistically diverse regions where language dominance persists, with the goal of empowerment and representation

‘They have tried to silence me.’ : Beyond policy bordering: early childhood educators forging activist identities in the borderlands

The roles of early childhood educators in England have been marked, in recent times, by prescriptive occupational standards, surveillance, and responsibilisation. Over the last thirty years, early educators have been discursively positioned through workforce policy in multiple, competing, and everchanging ways. In addition, ideal professional identities have been institutionally shaped and bounded by qualifications criteria, regulatory requirements, and by intersections with broader (and at times, authoritarian) policy reforms. This constitutes a process of policy bordering (Archer 2022), which delineates professional identity territory, creating a space for a particular version of professional identities whilst closing down others. In response to this bordering process, a more dynamic, generative perspective recognises spaces for expressions of educator agency. Analysis of empirical data suggests such borders are, in fact, permeable with educators expressing their individual agency through these boundaries. Early childhood educators appear to be exploiting cracks and fissures in the borders to disrupt authoritarian demands upon them and exercise their personal power (Gallagher, 2000). Drawing on professional life story interviews of educators (n=18), this paper offers novel conceptualisation and analysis of borderland narratives, revealing how early educator agency and activism are asserted in interstitial spaces. By considering the role of borders (conceptual or otherwise) as sites of struggle, where the right to become is contested and negotiated, the borderlands concept illuminates the spaces of political possibilities (Brambilla, 2014), in which alternative professional subjectivities are enacted

The Making and Remaking of the British Elite: “Born to Rule” by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman

A review of Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedma