“Pour Into the Teachers:” Learning From Immigrant Women of Color Through Conversations on “Quality” in Urban Early Education and Care

by Seung Eun McDevitt and Louella Sween

In New York City, public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) is universally available in early education centers, child care centers, and Head Start programs, as well as in public and charter schools (Ryan & Li, 2020). The expansion of universal pre-K (UPK) programs to community-based centers enabled increased access to early education and care, resulting in 70 percent of 4-year-olds attending pre-K throughout the city boroughs (Barnett et al., 2016). Starting in 2017, schools and centers also started serving 3-year-olds in the 3-K for All program as part of the UPK programs (New York City Public Schools, n.d.). To support these neighborhood programs and community-based child care centers in meeting the pre-K quality standards, the New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) provides instructional coordinators and social workers for curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and family engagement and communication (Ryan & Li, 2020). Despite these efforts and the benefits young children and families reap from the citywide programs, research studies have reported significantly lower assessments of quality at sites that are situated in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and that serve mostly children of color and immigrant children (Fuller & Leibovitz, 2021; Fuller et al., 2020; Latham et al., 2020).

In this paper, we share stories from one of these early childhood education (ECE) centers located in a low-income immigrant community. The stories that follow are part of a larger research project inquiring into the narratives of immigrant women of color and their inclusive pedagogical and care practices for immigrant children and families in ECE centers in low-income communities around New York City. Here we focus on one immigrant woman of color, Esther (all names of individuals and places are pseudonyms), who used to be a teacher and is now a center director at one of the sites included in the larger study. We employed three semi-structured in-depth interviews which lasted one to two hours each, as well as one in-person observational visit to the center, to contextualize Esther’s narratives about leading her team of teachers and staff and interacting with children and families at the center. We selected Esther because her narratives and practices offer unique and deep insights into “quality” in early education and care for marginalized Others; in particular, they highlight an expanded definition of quality that she has demonstrated as a leader of the center. In sharing Esther’s accounts, we offer alternative ways of creating quality and equitable ECE practices with and for immigrant children, families, and teachers, and detail the challenges that come with resisting the status quo.