As the last post explored, the roots of the world’s most commonly established and proliferated educational philosophies, as applied to early childhood education (ECE), predominately trace back to European origins and early implementation efforts. Child-centered pedagogy, also referred to as student-centered or learner-centered instruction, emerged from the theory of “constructivism” in the second half of the twentieth century and has been consistently studied, reframed, and popularized since. This theory was written about and popularized notably by Piaget and Vygotsky, though each of the four approaches described in the previous post (in addition to American educational philosopher John Dewey) had elements of a constructivist approach in their early learning settings.
Those who promote child-centered pedagogy describe education as “an active process in which learners are sense-makers who seek to build coherent and organized knowledge” (Mayer 2004). It has been constructed in opposition to traditional teaching methods that place the teacher at the center of knowledge, which have been criticized as failing to build critical thinking skills and innovative problem solving skills in students. Influential researchers such as Linda Darling-Hammond popularized child-centered approaches in the late 1990s as a key component of a democratic learning environment and the “right to learn,” set up in direct juxtaposition to supposedly less democratic teacher-driven instructional methods.”
Rather than students needing to seek knowledge from a teacher, child-centered pedagogy imply that the student’s role is a co-constructer of knowledge through supported discovery and internal processes. However, one analysis found over forty definitions of what it mean to be “child-centered” in contemporary ECE literature (Chung and Walsh, 2000). With so many philosophical sources and a broad construction of what it means to be a “child-centered” school or teacher, a high level of variation in practice, a key critique of the approach, has inevitably followed.
As already examined, a global effort is being undertaken to develop and improve early childhood education systems in contexts around the world. However, with the popularization of Western constructivist theories and child-centered pedagogies, it has been far too easy for policymakers and international advocates for ECE to assume these approaches will be appropriate in each context globally. However, two important questions remains unanswered: What underlying beliefs about childhood might differ across cultures in ways that inhibit implementation of these approaches? Most importantly perhaps, how do pedagogies rooted in minority-world ideologies translate to majority-world contexts?
Despite the proliferation of child-centered pedagogy globally throughout the last thirty years, very little meaningful attention has been given in to educational and developmental philosophies grounded in research outside of Western contexts. Anthropological studies have acknowledged these differences, highlighting that in non-Western contexts from Tanzania to Hong Kong and Kyrgystan, child-centered pedagogies have not drawn from existing understandings and culturally-situated philosophies about development and learning, but have rather been confusingly and ineffectively pushed onto the community.
This is the story of implementation of child-centered pedagogy in many areas globally. In her writing on “A Converging Pedagogy in the Developing World? Insights from Uganda and Turkey” Hülya Kosa Altinyelken describes the reality that “CCP was perceived as the more advanced and progressive pedagogical approach” in Uganda and Turkey, and “a polarized understanding of pedagogy was present [in both contexts]…forc[ing] teachers to align with either the old teacher-centered (or subject-centered approach, or with the new child/student-centered approach.” Some key limitations of implementation also included parental fears that students were not really learning, and the outright frustration teachers experienced with “trying out foreign ideas.” While her analysis explored a primary school setting, the implications are clear for the early childhood landscape: constructivist approaches, even for early learning, must be examined before being pushed into contexts where local philosophies of learning and development differ.
Another key criticism in her analysis is the overt contradiction “between the objectives of a constructivist curriculum (e.g. the development of skills and competencies) and what is assessed during exams (knowledge acquisistion)”. A Taiwanese study on the implementation of child-centered instruction in ECE settings found this to be true in the pushback teachers received from parents, with one curriculum leader reporting “It’s not surprising to see that parents expect teachers to “teach” the textbook. One parent asked me, “How come the teacher hasn’t finished teaching the textbook? I found from my son that the teacher did not teach the paragraphs in the textbook! I wonder if the teacher did his job. If he did not finish the syllabus, how can my son cope with the examination?”
Unique challenges are also posed in ECE contexts that stand out in addition to the concerns of those critiquing child-centered at large in international contexts. In settings where the national expectation is that ECE should be delivered in a language of instruction other than a child’s mother-tongue, it is important to consider the limitations of an approach that requires inherent differentiation in communication and interactions with students. Valid and increasingly clear calls for changing this approach to promote mother-tongue instruction aside, the present realities of many early childhood educators globally prevent meaningful application of constructivist approaches at this time. Further, large class sizes, limited resources for hands-on discovery, and faulty systems for teacher preparation in many contexts where child-centered pedagogy has been hailed and promoted would all be prerequisites to change prior to a major overhaul of instructional approaches.
Another key critique is that of the reality that child-centered pedagogy in an early childhood context reduces the already incredibly threatened professional identity of educators to mere facilitators of children’s activity, as one analysis described. One teacher went on to describe her concerns over the reduction of the teacher’s role in her own ECE career:
“Rendering me invisible struck me as poignantly counter to attempts to raise the respect and status of early childhood educators and to include the teacher as an important member of the classroom community. Later, I encouraged my students in a teacher preparation programme to embrace child-centered pedagogy. Yet as we discussed the role of the teacher in child-centredness as a ‘facilitator’, and ‘stage manager’, I felt uneasy about placing a group of predominantly young women struggling with the low status accorded their professional choice ‘behind the scenes’ of an early childhood education setting.”
Perhaps most important is that center to the push for increasingly child-centered approaches is the “assumption…[of] a singular norm and homogenous universal standard” of what child development and “quality” early education really means. An examination of definition of quality across France and Japan highlights this key issue: if differing values are placed on education, and strikingly divergent philosophies about child development, child rearing, and the role of schools exist globally, can one pedagogical approach really represent “quality” across international contexts? Arguably, if global systems-building efforts in ECE forges a path that celebrates child-centeredness above contextualized and locally driven approaches, ECE will be create divisions between schools and families, and will fall victim to many of the failures of the global push for education seen in similar movements in primary and secondary school settings.
So, if not necessarily the pedagogical approach itself, what can be taken and applied to majority world contexts from these early philosophers and popularized approaches? A page could be taken from the philosophical roots of early childhood education itself. As researcher Martin Ashley describes the Waldorf approach, but could be extended to the other early learning philosophies, they have as “their ultimate goal, the development of fully free human beings, but they operate from the postulate that freedom does not exist simply by virtue of an arbitrary declaration of human rights.” This radically democratic, rights-based approach that values the agency of the child in their context would, I would argue, necessitate an equally radical level of agency afforded to communities to define their goals of education and role in the educational process.
Further, the example of these early approaches would be a good reminder for reformers of the importance of investment and context within which constructivist approaches can thrive. The Reggio Emilia community’s citywide city’s servizi per l’infanzia (early childhood services), in one analysis, “embodies previously unimagined and rarely realized potentials of children and teachers to learn together, the rights of families to participate, and the responsibilities of a community to support such collaborative engagement.” If more attention was paid in the implementation of new ECE programming globally to these factors—meaningful participation of communities in determining their own systems of education based on local values and context, and an emphasis on a system of services that could support the whole life of the child beyond the classroom—then perhaps the earliest philosophies in the field will be extrapolated in a helpful rather than harmful way in new contexts.
Resources for Further Reading
Helen Penn’s well-constructed analysis of contemporary issues in ECE philosophies globally, “Understanding Early Childhood: Issues and Controversies” (2004)
The World of the Early Years: Global Early Childhood Education 