Power Relations in Early Childhood Education: A Case Study of Perceptions, Space, and Place
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shifting philosophical and pedagogical stances in early childhood settings have resulted in two binarized positions, where philosophy and pedagogy are frequently understood as either child-centred, or teacher-directed practice. These stances have ontological and epistemological implications for the power relations between Early Childhood Educators and young children. Drawing from multiple theoretical frameworks, including reconceptualist theory in early childhood education, children’s geographies, and the work of Michel Foucault, in this qualitative three-phase case study I explored how power relations are enacted within one preschool classroom in Southern Ontario, and how power relations are affected when viewing the environment through the lens of place and space. Using semi-structured interviews, classroom observation, and reflective journaling with a teaching team of two Early Childhood Educators, this study sought to answer the following two research questions: first, what are the ways in which power relations are enacted within one early learning environment? Second, how do educators’ perceptions of the environment as place and space contribute to the ways in which power relations are enacted? The findings from this study suggested that power was enacted within one early childhood setting in a multitude of ways. The findings are organized under four key themes: interrelational power; regulatory power; power and temporality; and power, space, and place. The findings suggest that power is a negotiated entity between children and Early Childhood Educators, and that viewing the environment as place may encourage a reconceptualization of traditionally hierarchical power dynamics between educators and young children.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".