Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/what-lies-ahead-for-our-field/5025630/
It has almost become cliché to note that we are living in uncertain and anxiety-provoking times as the coronavirus endangers the financial viability and service capacity of early childhood education programs, imperils the field’s programmatic future, and impedes the workforce’s employment prospects. Simultaneously, though, the field’s commitment to confronting the damage incurred by COVID-19 is on full display. The field’s loyalty to children and families clearly has not diminished, despite the financial and emotional havoc being experienced.
So what, you might ask, would lead us as authors to write an article that asserts the ECE field should add to its present burden by using this moment in time to rethink the field’s developmental trajectory toward improved educator competence, increased consistency in quality across ECE sites, and a more equitable future for children and the ECE workforce?
ECE’s Future Is in Our Hands
We wrote this article because we feel compelled to highlight that the current crisis can be a time of opportunity for imagining a different future for ECE as a field of practice. If viewed through a lens of hope, the current disruption offers openings intrinsic to this moment to ponder how fixes devised for the present can ...