Sue Novinger

In the USA, many young children are being subjected to a largely irrelevant, fragmented, meaningless curriculum in the name of school reform and meeting state and/or national standards; it is the authors' view that teacher educators also increasingly have to endure the same. The authors use their own recent experiences with licensing and accrediting bodies, the New York State Department of Education and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education respectively, to argue that everyone is being subjected to a disempowering, regulatory (and potentially punitive) gaze in the name of higher standards. Drawing on their own and others' stories, they raise some issues to ponder, as well as posit possible courses of action linked to the notion of teachers as social justice activists. They address why resistance to the standards movement is so crucial, and share their ideas regarding the forms their resistance has taken and might take in the future. They try to articulate a hopeful path of possibility despite the very real costs that challenging the nearly monolithic power structure brings, and encourage other early childhood teacher educators to join in resisting the ‘regulatory gaze’.

At the beginning of the school year, Mrs. Underwood's second graders could work with groups of tens or groups of ones, but they did not consider the relationship between the numerals in the tens and ones places. For example, to add 25 + 19, children added the numerals in the tens place, then counted on by ones. First, they would add 20 and 10 to get 30. Next, they would count on by ones to add 14, instead of adding 5 and 9 to make 14, then partitioning 14 into 10 and 4, and adding all the tens and all the ones. To subtract 35 – 17, not surprisingly, students explained that 3 – 1 was 2 and that 5 – 7 was 2 to derive an answer of 22.