a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate, play-based curriculum for toddlers( Kelly 2018; Hammond 2019; NAEYC 2022).
In alignment with our commitment to an anti-bias education stance, we chose to work within a participatory design framework( Reason & Bradbury 2001; Noffke & Somekh 2009), taking a collaborative approach to meeting the needs of the educators and the children and families that they serve. We formed two working groups: The Educator Working Group and the Critical Friends Working Group. The Educator Working Group consisted of educators, center directors, coaches, and family members of children enrolled in the centers. The majority of this working group, including the authors, identify as People of Color. This group generated ideas for each of the Explorations( curriculum units) and children’ s literature and provided feedback on all aspects of the written documents, document layout, and user readability. The Critical Friends Working Group consisted of curriculum experts, toddler educators, early childhood education professors, and subject matter experts in early childhood education. This group provided feedback on curriculum documents through a critical lens, ensuring alignment with developmentally appropriate practices, current research, and anti-bias principles. All working group members received compensation for their time and expertise.
Practitioners in the working groups co-constructed the curriculum at all stages of the process, including
› Agreeing on shared values to guide the curriculum
› Conceptualizing curriculum structures
› Brainstorming individual curriculum Explorations
› Providing iterative feedback on specific curriculum materials
Frequently, this type of project is guided by a for-profit curriculum developer. We wanted to see what would happen when we undertook the process ourselves and had ownership of the entire experience.
In our research to better understand and reflect on the process, we drew on practitioner inquiry and teacher research practices articulated by Perry and colleagues( 2012) as well as Cochran-Smith and Lytle( 2009). We began by collaboratively agreeing on a research question, gathering documentation over time, and analyzing the data. Our data consisted of documentation collected from our working groups over the course of the curriculum development process. We used a thematic qualitative approach for our data analysis, which involved methodically reviewing data sources, coding to sort chunks of data by topic, and then identifying and documenting themes across the data( Braun & Clarke 2006).
Data Sources and Analysis
The focus of our inquiry is not the written curriculum itself, but rather documentation from the process of co-constructing the curriculum in working groups. We aim to share materials and actions for creating or modifying curricula that others can try in their own contexts. Our data sources included detailed meeting notes, video and audio recordings, and digital working group documents( collaborative workboards, draft curriculum documents, and shared documents) from 18 sessions with the Educator Working Group and nine meetings with the Critical Friends Working Group. Each session lasted 90 minutes and was documented by a member of the working group. To offer maximum flexibility for practitioners, meetings were conducted via Zoom, with in-person gatherings at the launch and conclusion of the project.
We( the authors) were all collaborators on the writing of the curriculum and conducted the data analysis together. We employed an iterative open-coding approach( Saldaña 2012), which
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