Teaching Preschool is Hard: Embodiment, Ideology, Fallibility and Futurity

Abstract

This dissertation examines adult-child relations in a way that challenges prevalent understandings of adult power in childhood studies. It aims to examine preschool teachers’ experiences under the same lens as children, as prescribed within childhood studies paradigm -- which is to say, to extend them the same openness to their experiences and perspectives in the research. The goal is to provide a more balanced picture of adult-child interaction, where adult actions that many childhood scholars might obscure or interpret as always-already oppressive are considered from more positive angles. The author writes with an eye toward re-valuing adults’ interactions alongside children both in the subfield and the broader culture.

Combining insights from childhood studies and feminist scholarship, the author explores the particular embodied skills entailed in the labor of teaching preschool, as well as the ideologies to which teachers themselves subscribe and the theories that inform and are reflected in them. Research was conducted at a preschool serving exclusively at-risk children. The primary methods employed were ethnography and in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Interviews were conducted with all eleven of the teachers at the field site, as well as with the director of the preschool. Participant-observation occurred in four of the six classrooms over a period of thirteen months. Rapport between the researcher, teachers, and children developed concomitantly, while the researcher’s own embodiment, especially her pregnancy, lent emotional weight to the project, the work, and the rapport between herself and the research participants.

The first chapter provides a descriptive account of the unique embodied skill sets that the preschool teachers developed through repeated interactions with a “large N” of preschoolers. The author describes these skills as “embodying the ideal preschooler,” which entails the enactment of exaggerated friendliness and passive openness to children’s interaction initiations, play preferences, and usages of adults’ bodies. The second chapter explores how such practices map onto gender. The author aims to correct the tendency in childhood studies, and especially childhood ethnography, to disappear and devalue the feminine, caring aspects of adults’ everyday interactions with children. She suggests ethnographers take up the "ideal carer role," which better accounts for how adult interactions with children are gendered. The third chapter explores three key theoretical moments in childhood studies over the last 40 years, in particular their approaches to understanding power and agency in adult-child relations. The author examines the relatively rare moments of adult coercion of children at the preschool in order to show which aspects of popular theories are reflected in, and thus best inform, these experiences. She concludes by suggesting that childhood scholarship utilize theories that most adequately explain the experiences of adults’ everyday interactions with children, with special attention to their reflexivity and fallibility.