Structural Forces at the Playground: An Interview With Dr. Hirokazu Yoshikawa Yuyi

Early childhood education is key to supporting children’s development of emergent numeracy and literacy skills, socialemotional skills, and motor abilities (Rey-Guerra et al., 2022). However, vast racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities affect access to and quality of early childhood education, resulting in starkly different long-term outcomes (Chaudry et al., 2021). In order to better understand what defines high-quality early childhood education and address the barriers that prevent each child from being given equal access, Dr. Hirokazu Yoshikawa, the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, as well as the Co-Director of the Global TIES for Children Center at New York University, was interviewed. Dr. Yoshikawa is a community and developmental psychologist who examines the effects of poverty reduction policies and early childhood programs on children’s development. He has also authored several books on early childhood education policy and immigration reform, and served on current President Joe Biden’s Unity Task Force on Education in 2020.

What inspired you to work in early childhood education?

In one of my first psychology classes, I just happened to come across an article that was a 10-year follow up of an early childhood program, and it had affected some parents’ economic well-being and their kids’ development. I thought it was interesting that a program early in life could have 10-year follow up effects so that got me into this whole field. It led me to get a research assistant position on a project with Head Start programs in Staten Island and write a Master’s thesis that was related to the topic.

What do you think is the key ingredient to educate and engage with a child?

Fostering kids’ excitement, agency, and motivation. Essentially, making learning fun is the key task for teachers of kids this age, [as well as] supporting kids’ enthusiasm and engagement in learning and play-based activities in the classroom. Through these activities, kids can learn many skills that could be social, early language, [and] early quantitative [reasoning].

Given your work on family engagement in early learning opportunities in home settings and in early childhood education centers, what are your thoughts on how family engagement and early childhood education work hand in hand to support a child’s emergent numeracy and literacy, social-emotional functioning, and motor development?

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I think all the adults and older kids involved in young kids’ lives can really make a difference. And I wouldn’t leave out peers either, because kids are learning a great deal from their peers and friends at this age. Families, childcare centers, preschools, and larger communities need to be working together to enrich opportunities for this kind of learning. We also have to think about the larger stresses that affect families whether they be experiences of poverty or discrimination. We need the kinds of structural interventions to support families to support their kids. And that means reducing the larger structural forces that create inequality in families’ economic lives as well as their interpersonal and social lives.

How can childhood programs be adapted to fit the needs of a child based on their cultural background and social situation?

Culturally-responsive teaching is one place to start in the classroom. I think that teachers should reflect the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the families they’re serving so we should have a diverse teaching workforce. That means also that they should be well supported both in terms of things like compensation, so that they’re not economically struggling themselves - we know that many in the early childhood workforce are actually struggling to make ends meet - but also supporting their ability to serve diverse children and foster, for example, multilingual development, recognizing that kids comes from multiple language backgrounds in classrooms. I think that also goes for kids of varying skill levels and ability levels and so we need to train teachers to be able to engage in inclusive teaching practices of kids of varying ability levels. Teachers should be really getting to know the communities and the families of the kids they serve, and that can mean doing things that might be a little unorthodox. This might be home visits to families to really get to know them from the perspective of their own neighborhoods and communities, making sure that communication is two way reciprocal forms of learning, that teachers are understanding the kinds of socialization, practices, and knowledge that the households have, that the respect for cultures of the families can be reflected in teachers’ curiosity and learning about the kinds of ways that children are learning at home. All of those approaches are examples of culturally-responsive practices.

[In response to how teachers cater to a large classroom filled with different students of different needs], some people say it’s harder to teach preschoolers than to teach older kids, because kids are just figuring out various fundamentals about how to interact with other kids and how to understand other kids’ motivations and preferences and working out things like building friendships. I think that one key is that the class size shouldn’t be too large. That’s why we have standards in the U.S. and other countries that try to keep class sizes to a manageable level. Many other countries I work in, sometimes those class sizes are way too large so those are things we should try to pay attention to. Working with kids in small groups can often increase that ability to engage with individual kids, so one common practice is that you’re not working with the entire class at the same time all the time, but you’re often splitting kids up into pairs or allowing them to engage with other kids freely in small groups when they’re working on something like a construction or a game or an activity. Those are the activities that make it easier for teachers to pick up on individual kids’ needs, their opinions, their preferences, their ideas, allow each child the agency to have some form of control and autonomy over how they learn. And once teachers learn that that form of agency is really important, I think that can change their world view of how they teach in the classroom.

How can adults help children reconcile with and understand social inequalities?

Children are learning about the patterns of inequality in society from these micro level interactions in classrooms to later understanding that in schools, kids with certain backgrounds are overrepresented in certain contexts, and so they start learning what we would call societal inequality and how that plays out in settings like schools, but also in their neighborhoods and homes. What you raise is a huge issue that we have to tackle from a lot of different directions. We have to tackle the larger issues such as racism, white supremacy, and segregation in order to ultimately tackle how these factors affect parents, adults, kids, and youth. These factors play out in where people live, whether they can accumulate assets in their lifetime and not keep struggling economically, affect the stress levels that people experience and children’s development. We have to tackle these structural forces in order to then think about how to support family well-being and children’s development. One thing I make a pitch for is that students in applied psychology learn about issues in inequality from all the other social sciences because anthropology, economics, social psychology, political science have a great deal to say about what are these structural forces, how do they affect neighborhoods, communities, family, housing, healthcare, education, and ultimately child and youth development. I myself learned a lot from other disciplines and used those perspectives in my work when I think about inequality and child development because inequality forms from the structural level all the way down to the child level.

What do you think still needs to be improved in terms of access to early childhood education now?

One relatively ignored factor in early childhood education is the role of racism in affecting children’s opportunities in this earliest phase of education. The anthropologist Jennifer Adair has written a good book called Segregation by Experience that outlines how Black and Brown children are often denied the autonomy of having some say in how, with whom, and with what they learn in a classroom. Their bodies are more subject to control in the name of behavioral management or discipline or classroom management. She’s observed across multiple preschool systems that Black and Brown children are more often have to deserve free play and display certain kinds of behaviors to then receive a reward of free play rather than thinking about opportunities for playful learning as being things that they can have some from freedom in, as micro as choosing who you can work on something with, or you can go on to another group to tell them how excited you are about a particular idea or about something you’re making. Those kinds of choices are restricted more for Black and Brown children. This notion of children’s agency and how they can be stifled because of these larger structural forces like racism are not understood well enough in the early childhood space. [We] may perhaps be ignoring the fact that Black and Brown kids are more likely to be expelled or suspended from a school classroom, but also that the everyday interactions between students and teachers can be greatly impacted by these forces. And so I think that poses this notion of how all children should have access to high quality learning experiences. That is one of the biggest challenges where structural forces are actually affecting kids at an everyday level within classrooms.

Conclusion

In this interview, Dr. Yoshikawa discusses the benefits of early childhood education for children’s development, while acknowledging the underlying structural forces that affect the quality of education and extent that children benefit from their education. That is, the degree to which children benefit from early childhood education varies according to their demographics, including race, gender, and socioeconomic status. For instance, children of color are more likely to be denied time for free play and subject to exclusionary school discipline (Skiba, 2002). Not only does this limit their time in the classroom to reap the benefits of early childhood education, but these patterns of differential treatment may lead children of color to internalize harmful societal narratives about themselves (Wolf & Kupchik, 2017). Dr. Yoshikawa is a proponent of culturally-responsive pedagogy in early childhood education programs. In other words, curricula and pedagogy should be tailored to children’s needs to foster their excitement, agency, and motivation to learn (Chaudry et al., 2021). This, in turn, can strengthen higher-order thinking skills within learning content and enhance warm, responsive teacher-child relationships - two important components of quality early education (Yoshikawa et al., 2013).

Early childhood education has the capacity to boost children’s development through nurturing and maintaining positive peer and teacher engagement in learning spaces. Although quality of and access to this education may be hindered by larger structural forces, research has shown that such barriers may be addressed through culturally-responsive teaching and policies, along with providing more support and assistance to familiessuch barriers may be addressed through culturallyresponsive teaching and policies, along with providing more support and assistance to families (Fass, 2009; Gay, 2000). Given positive impacts of high-quality early childhood education, it is important that such policy and interventions be adopted to enable equal access and support at the playground and beyond.

References

Chaudry, A., Morrisey, T., Weiland, C., & Yoshikawa, H. (2021). Cradle to kindergarten: A new plan to combat inequality. Russell Sage Foundation.

Fass, S. (2009). Paid leave in the states: A critical support for low-wage workers and their families. National Center for Children in Poverty, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. NCCP. https://www.nccp.org/ publication/paid-leave-in-the-states/

Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Rey-Guerra, C., Maldonado-Carreño, C., Ponguta, L. A., Nieto, A. M., & Yoshikawa, H. (2022). Family engagement in early learning opportunities at home and in early childhood education centers in Colombia. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 58, 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ecresq.2021.08.002

Skiba, R. J., Michael, R. S., Nardo, A. C., & Peterson, R. L. (2002). The color of discipline: sources of racial and gender disproportionality in school punishment. The Urban Review, 34(4), 317–342. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1021320817372

Wolf, K. C., & Kupchik, A. (2017). School suspensions and adverse experiences in adulthood. Justice Quarterly, 34(3), 407-430. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2016.1168475

Yoshikawa, H., Weiland, C., Brooks-Gunn, J., Burchinal, M., Espinosa, L., Gormley, W. T., Ludwig, J., Magnuson, K., Phillips, D., & Zaslow, M. (2013). Investing in our future: The evidence base on preschool. (ED579818). ERIC. https:// files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED579818.pdf