Kindergarten in the United States has fundamentally changed. It is the new first grade where children are taught increased academic content and experience more standardized testing. There is much debate among education stakeholders about these changes, but such discussions are often siloed— making it difficult to know whether these changes reflect these stakeholders’ understandings of kindergarten specifically or public education in general. This explorative video-cued multivocal ethnographic study addressed this issue by examining how local, state, and national education stakeholders made sense of the changed kindergarten. Such findings provide insight into what it is they viewed driving these academic and instructional changes, what opportunities for further reform exist, and whether these stakeholders will work to support and/or alter such changes.

An important factor that may be missing from recent attempts to counter, resist, and/or reconceptualize the neoliberal framing of the early education process is the actions of children, particularly those that reinforce the neoliberal assemblage of schooling they learn through their interactions with their teacher in school. This article begins to address this issue by employing Foucault’s conceptions of governmentality to examine how a teacher and students in a kindergarten classroom located in the USA give voice to and make choices that reflect the dominant neoliberal discourses of schooling. Such an analysis creates the opportunity to consider what needs to be done to assist both early educators and the children themselves so that they can live in the presence of each other within their neoliberal classrooms otherwise.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract