Melissa Sherfinski

After Arthurdale: Place-based education and early childhood in West Virginia

ABSTRACT This case study explores how opportunities for critical, place-based education can be eclipsed by the decontextualized curricula and pedagogies inherent in neoliberal, standards-based early education reforms such as universal pre-kindergarten that contain some progressive elements. Following Schwab (1973), we explore the roles of teachers and place in crafting curriculum and pedagogy. Specifically, we present both contemporary data and historical facts in order to document and analyze how educators in the Arthurdale, WV, area have used teacher lore (Schubert & Ayers, 1992) to “lighten” curriculum and pedagogy away from the dark funds of knowledge of local children and families. Dark funds are the knowledge and epistemologies that do not match with middle-class curriculum standards for success in schooling, but that reflect the realities of local children, families, and communities (Zipin, 2009). By tracing the racialized development of teacher lore in the past and present, it becomes clear that critical place-based educational activities such as natural and social histories and action research cannot be sustaining without an interrogation of how White identities have been constructed and perpetuated through teacher lore and other means over time. We use these findings to make several suggestions for reconceptualizing the roles of teacher lore in place-based education while creating curricula and pedagogies responsive to the local early education context.

Disturbing the data: looking into gender and family size matters with US Evangelical homeschoolers

This qualitative study draws on the theory of feminist physicist Karen Barad to examine how gender matters in Evangelical homeschooling families of various sizes, with an emphasis on large families. The two-phase data collection includes interviews with 18 participants and observations of several participants over one year. We use a Baradian analytic process called diffractive analysis to read the messy borders between the discursive and material for mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, and elements of homeschooling environments. We find that materiality intra-acted with gender in complex and sometimes surprising ways but that gendered possibilities in homeschooling are steeped in the terrains of politics, history, culture, economics, and environment. In addition, we see possibilities for using this method of analysis as a way to more carefully and complexly read data in the micro.

Culture matters: a comparative study of teachers’ views of universal pre-kindergarten in two state regions

ABSTRACT This multi-case analysis uses video-cued multi-voiced ethnography in two culturally distinct regions of a Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) U.S. state with high levels of accountability to explore how cultural and demographic differences within state borders might impact how teachers view UPK curriculum and standards, how they teach, and how they view one another’s language and literacy practices. The report focused on pre-kindergarten teachers in P-5 public schools. The pre-kindergarten teachers carried out unique processes of emplacement. Emplacement in this case was the process of pre-kindergarten becoming part of the P-5 public schools while remaining uniquely aligned with early childhood. Fields of care and domains of commonality are two major themes from the fields of anthropology and geography used to organize the findings. The findings have implications for thinking about the role of culture in P-5 education. This study shows promise for using video-cued methods in state-level research and associated professional development contexts.

Playing the Festival Queen in Appalachia: Exploring the Influences of Local Culture on Classroom Play

ABSTRACT This case study using ethnographic methods addresses how teachers shape cultural processes related to girlhoods, and the roles of children’s play in this dynamic. Poststructuralist theory of the carnival was used to analyze gendered, classed power dynamics within two rural Appalachian preschool classrooms influenced by a popular local festival. The findings indicate that the “feminist” approach to cultivating “good” girls for the community—those who could go to college to gain the capital to support men if needed (and thus the turbulent extractive industries)—did not always have “feminist” effects of equalizing gender roles. It masked a status quo that supported the domination by men and young boys over women and girls, including the classroom teachers and girls in this study. In addition, it supported the myth of the meritocracy and the role(s) of extractive economies in its construction, a narrative that continually excluded the working class from middle-class girls’ play spaces. The research suggested that place-based education and teachers’ understanding of classed, raced, and gendered tensions related to local community life are important ways of thinking about carnival in the classroom that may support possibilities for shifting power dynamics in play relations.