Jennifer Keys Adair

Examining Whiteness as an Obstacle to Positively Approaching Immigrant Families in US Early Childhood Educational Settings.

This article examines whiteness at the intersection of immigration and early childhood education as it was made visible during interviews with 50 preschool teachers in five US cities as part of the Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study. Findings show whiteness acting not only as a construct of privilege but also as an idea that manifests itself in ways that affect schooling, even in early educational settings like preschool. Whiteness is made visible through a combination of multivocal ethnographic methodology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and post-structural analytical tools all used within a comparative framework to understand whiteness from the perspective of white teachers responding to newly arrived immigrant families and subsequently from the counterexamples of immigrant teachers working in cities with longer histories of immigration. Findings suggest that the logic of whiteness used to respond to immigrant families includes blaming them, distancing from them and charging them with responsibility to change while at the same time being grateful for their presence in the school. Whiteness was found to prevent teachers from responding in engaged and positive ways to immigrant families and the manifestations of whiteness revealed by the white teachers in this study mirror larger societal tensions around immigration and race.

Developing qualitative coding frameworks for educational research: immigration, education and the Children Crossing Borders project

The Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study is a polyvocal, multi‐sited project on immigration and early childhood education and care in five countries: Italy, Germany, France, England and the USA. The complicated nature of the data pushed us as a group to expand our methodological resources to not only organize the data but also to make it searchable, and thus comparable, so that we could understand more deeply the perspectives and desires of immigrant parents and preschool teachers on education. This article uses examples from the CCB project to show how coding frameworks can be created to support large‐scale collaborative projects that seek to amplify the voices of marginalized groups in educational qualitative research. We argue here that creating qualitative coding frameworks depends on a balance between etic/insider and emic/outsider knowledge, decisions about interpretation and practical compromises about labels and meanings. These three elements play out in necessary debates and disagreements as part of the creative process and are critical for large‐scale projects looking for a coding framework and a coding process that is both useful and meaningful.

“I’m Just Playing iPad”: Comparing Prekindergarteners’ and Preservice Teachers’ Social Interactions While Using Tablets for Learning

In this article we share descriptive findings from two qualitative, grounded theory (Glaser, 1978, 1992, 1998) studies on how two distinct groups of learners—prekindergarteners and preservice teachers in early childhood education coursework—used touch-screen tablets in their playful, discovery-based learning processes. We found similarities across both contexts as prekindergarteners and preservice teachers engaged in social interactions, gathering ideas from each other while exploring open-ended tablet apps. In addition to descriptions of learners’ talk and actions alongside one another, we offer strategies for teacher educators seeking to provide dynamic learning experiences (particularly with tablets) for preservice teachers. We also offer suggestions for app selection that might allow discovery-based learning opportunities for both preservice teachers and the young children they hope to teach.

My Teacher Is Going to Think They're Crazy: Responses to LOPI Practices in U.S. First-Grade Classrooms.

This chapter explores how children and adults have been responding when they watch first graders in the United States using their agency in classrooms that value and permit children to Learn by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI). First, I explore how video-cued ethnography helped to capture on film practices in classrooms that support LOPI through the Agency and Young Children Project. Then, I detail what happened when I showed these films to first-grade (age 6-8) children of Latina/o immigrants, elementary school administrators, teachers, and parents as a means to elicit ideas, perspectives, and concerns about the early education of young Latina/o children of immigrants. Findings from the initial analysis indicate that deficit views of immigrant families in the United States may prevent teachers and administrators from supporting LOPI.

Civic action and play: examples from Maori, Aboriginal Australian and Latino communities

ABSTRACT Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children’s schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as political time and space that make such civic action possible in the everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common (and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.