Unsettling the unimaginable: a genealogical counterstory of early care and education in the United States

ABSTRACT

A critical reappraisal of the origin story of early care and education (ECE) in the United States, this article unsettles dominant narratives by investigating the carceral foundations and liberatory strategies that characterise the emergence and sociopolitical evolution of ECE. Integrating Foucauldian counter-historical genealogy and counterstorytelling, a tool from Critical Race Theory, this article advances a genealogical counterstory that (1) traces the carceral foundations of ECE across three sites typically exiled from public memory and origin storytelling: plantations, off-reservation boarding schools, and incarceration camps; and (2) describes three emergent themes of womanist anti-carceral praxis evident across the sites: redefinition of educational philosophy, creation of educational third spaces, and fortification of culturally relevant epistemologies. Confronting dominant narratives of ECE origins, this genealogical counterstory illustrates tensions and transformations indicative of the complexity and contradictions of American ECE philosophy and pedagogy. This article also attends to the sociopolitical significance of ECE rendered through genealogical counterstorytelling, as well as relations to pressing contemporary equity issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Early care and education
• childhood
• genealogy
• counterstory
• womanist anti-carceral praxis
• history
• critical theory
• Critical Race Theory

Acknowledgement

I wish to acknowledge and thank my mentors and the Tensions and Transformations Research Group for spurring me onward. I am also grateful to the reviewers for their encouraging and thoughtful feedback. Santa Clara University and the city of Santa Clara occupy the unceded and ancestral territory of tribal Thamien Ohlone, the successors of the Verona Band recognised today as the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Collections referenced include the Digital Public Library of America, the National Japanese American Historical Society, the Densho Digital Repository of Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

2. Consistent with Keenan (2018), I use the term ‘Native Americans’ to refer to Indigenous peoples of the US and the term ‘Indigenous’ to refer to Indigenous peoples of the world.

Additional information

Funding

This work was completed without external funding.