28th International RECE Conference
Bethlehem, Palestine 6-10 October 2020 (This conference has been cancelled)
Equal Rights? Partnerships and Community Engagement in Early Childhood Education
The reconceptualist movement draws from an array of critical, feminist, postcolonial and postmodern perspectives. Reconceptualist scholars, like those in other fields, question the belief that scientific truths could be “discovered” about any individual or group of children and then applied to all children, no matter the culture, language, belief structure, or physical life circumstances. In other words, the early work from reconceptualists in our field questioned the promotion of universal prescriptions for “best practice” and other “grand narratives” which continue to dominate our field. Many of us were doing anti-bias or cultural and gender-focused research that seeks to appreciate and support diversity in people, ideas, and ways of being. We share a concern about privileging particular sets of beliefs or forms of knowledge (or “grand narratives” that typically reflect western or Eurocentric values), which can create power for certain groups of people and oppress others.
More information about the 2020 conference