Background/Context: Early childhood education joined the standards movement in 2002 with the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative (Brown, 2007), with advocates arguing that standards were a tool for creating more continuity and coherence in PreK systems (Bowman, 2006; Kagan 2012). Critics posed concerns about a perceived poor fit between…

In this article we explore an effort to rethink curricular decision-making with a group of public pre-K teachers working in a context of curriculum escalation and commitment to play-based pedagogy. Through a professional development program designed to support developmentally and culturally responsive early mathematics, we examine how teachers…

This article describes how early childhood teachers engaged in a public preK professional development program. We examine how developing teacher identities mediated engagement with the discourses of developmentally appropriate practice, early mathematics, and funds of knowledge and how they connected present practice to an imagined future. We…

Recently a school district colleague recounted a conversation with a young kindergarten teacher that had shaken her to her core. The kindergarten teacher (let's call her Ms. Post) said that nobody talks about developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) anymore--everyone is way past that. The author and her colleague, two mature early childhood…

The traditional kindergarten program often reflected a rich but generic approach with creative contexts for typical kindergartners organized around materials (manipulatives or dramatic play) or a developmental area (fine motor or language). The purpose of kindergarten reflected beliefs about how children learn, specialized training for…