Peer-reviewed article

Early Childhood Education in Canada During a Pandemic

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Susan Prentice · 25 Oct 2021

Abstract

In Fall 2020, we circulated a call for papers for a special issue, "COVID and Beyond: Reconfiguring Early Childhood Education in Canada for the 21 st Century." In seeking submissions, we noticed that the COVID virus had thrown the issue of childcare, as well as the fragility of the early childhood education system, into sharp relief.We sought theoretical and/or empirical papers that reflected on the current moment and imagined a reconfigured future.We were met with an enthusiastic response from the field, as authors proposed articles from research and ideas from practice.The seven articles assembled in this issue suggest the breadth of the myriad ways the pandemic touched the field.Collectively, the papers address curriculum, policy, licensing, Indigeneity, families, children, and more.Read as an assemblage, they illuminate the wide range of complex and varying effects the pandemic has generated across Canada.Martha Friendly, Barry Forer, Rachel Vickerson, and Sophia Mohamed provide a detailed inventory of COVID and childcare in Canada, tracking a "tale of ten provinces and three territories." They undertook the valuable work of documenting closures, shifting policies, and the sudden pivots that occurred from coast to coast to coast to manage the public health needs of children, staff, and families while also serving essential workers.Among other important lessons, the detailed review makes plain the varying capacities of different jurisdictions, a function of their diverse policy architectures.Quebec's more mature childcare policy framework meant its response differed from the rest of Canada.Sophie Matthieu unpacks how policy paradigms developed and shifted through the first and second waves of the pandemic.Since English-readers have little access to the details of Quebec, this paper does much to explain Canada's (and North America's) most developed childcare system.Equally compelling, Brooke Richardson, Alana Powell, and Rachel Langford use a gender lens to critique policy responses, showing deep connections between the needs of mothers, children, and early childhood educators.In a field that has, for strategic and other reasons, sometimes sought to downplay the role of gendered stratification, this paper reasserts the necessity of a gendered lens.Alongside systemic policy at the macro level, scholars addressed how the pandemic affected relations with and between educators and children in their everyday experiences in early childhood settings.Marie-Anne Hudson and Lori Huston advocate for inclusion of diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being in early childhood environments in order for the early childhood field to authentically be "all in this together." Also calling for inclusion, Kathryn Underwood, Tricia van Rhijn, Alice-