Souring palatable formations in DAP: Toward unfamiliar relations with child development in early childhood teacher education

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon Ahmed’s (2006) analysis of how institutional documents become nonperforming, this article argues that teacher education must create opportunities for emerging educators to grapple with the pedagogical consequences of understanding the fourth edition of Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs (2022) as a nonperforming text. I contend that as DAP works to moderate universalising developmental knowledges in the name of fostering social justice, DAP reproduces taken-for-granted epistemological relations and hierarchies that maintain dominant understandings childhood and early childhood education. First, I position DAP as a nonperforming text and articulate a mode of nonperformance specific to early childhood education: palatability, built of a rhetoric of childhood innocence and a politics of niceness. I then show how two of DAP’s formations of child development enact nonpeformativity through palatability, illustrating how DAP reiterates status-quo connections between child development and early childhood education. To conclude, I propose souring palatability as a proposition that emerging educators might speculate and experiment with while engaging with DAP.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• postdevelopmental pedagogies
• nonperformativity

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 When I refer to DAP in this article, I am speaking to the fourth edition of the Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs: Serving Children from Birth to Age 8 document (National Association for the Education of Young Children 2022).