Gender and early childhood education: a critical feminist analysis of teacher practice and preschool play in Montreal schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2001, an educational reform took place in Québec and resulted in the introduction of the Québec Education Program (QEP). For preschool education, the QEP highlights the importance of play in early learning. As research has shown gender differences in children’s play, this study seeks to examine the ways in which preschool teachers make use of play in their classrooms specifically as it relates to gender. Using a critical feminist lens, the study investigates how teachers’ use of play and their gender perceptions may enable or constrain gender inequality during preschool play. The data collection methods include two semistructured interviews and a photo elicitation interview that were carried out with each of the four preschool teachers. Twelve participant observations also took place during their students’ play periods. Results reveal two overarching themes of the passive child and normality that have emerged in examining teacher practices and understandings of play and gender. Informed by the dominant discourses of early childhood education that privilege child development theories, teacher practice during play may then work to silence gender as it is not perceived to be an integral part in childhood. As such, girls and boys were seen to be treated equally in the classroom. While the equal treatment of children is well intended, it does not necessarily ensure fair treatment. Overall, this study highlights the contradictory messages put forward by educational policy, where child-centeredness is mandated, yet gender, a significant part of children’s lives, is absent from dominant discourses in early childhood education.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".