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The following scene took place in an English nursery school, where two four-year-old boys and their teacher were playing with Legos.
Sean: Miss Baxter, show your knickers [underpants], your bum off. Take all your clothes off, your bra off.
Terry: Yeah, and take your bum off, take your wee-wee off, take your clothes off, your mouth off.
Sean: Take your teeth out, take your head off, take your hair off, take your bum off. Miss Baxter the paxter knickers taxter.
Miss B: Sean, go and find something else to do, please.
(Walkerdine 1990, 4)
Those of us who teach young children probably sympathize with Miss Baxter, the teacher in this classroom scene. Teaching young children is a complex endeavor, and when young children challenge our authority in personal ways, as Sean and Terry do with Miss Baxter, it is not always easy to decide on the spur of the moment how best to respond. Many of us in early education tend to turn to our knowledge of children's development and learning; however, in some cases, this knowledge may not be enough.
We live in a global, postmodern society where culture, trade, and people move around the world (Burbules & Torres 2000). As a consequence, children in early childhood programs come from a wide variety of backgrounds and family circumstances (e.g., step, immigrant, lesbian/gay, interracial, single, homeless). At the same time, accessible and increasingly sophisticated technologies like the computer and the Internet are transforming social relations and the ways children communicate and learn. Because of these social changes, children enter our classrooms with a range of experiences that often cannot be addressed through knowledge of children's developmental patterns alone (Zimiles 2000).
While the early childhood field has responded to these social changes by revising definitions of developmentally appropriate practice to incorporate theories that consider culture and context (e.g., Vygotsky's sociocultural theory), a group of researchers continues to argue that a developmental knowledge base is inadequate to the task of teaching children in current times. Using critical theories to deconstruct the values and methods of developmental psychology (Burman 1994; Cannella 1997) and developmentally appropriate practice (Lubeck 1998; Hatch et al. 2002), these scholars raise two concerns with a developmental focus. First, they question whether teachers can implement...