Abstract
Mara Sapon-Shevin asks ‘whose home?’. Many early childhood educators speak to the goal of making EC centres ‘homelike’. Presumably, this invocation of home is intended to conjure warmth, safety, and familiarity. The conjectured hope is that children will feel as comfortable in the early childhood centre as they are at home. But several problematic assumptions are embedded in this metaphor of home. First, it posits a homogenized home, as though all children’s homes are the same, and therefore that the same kinds of structures and policies will make all children feel at home. Second, for some children, their home is not a place of love or safety; perhaps our goal might need to be making the EC centre very different from their home. The chapter problematizes descriptions of early childhood environments as homelike, bringing to bear understandings of the visibility/invisibility of differences and conceptions of safety.
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Sapon-Shevin, M. (2023). Whose Home? Problematizing the Nature of “Homelike” in Early Childhood Education. In: Gibbons, A., et al. Home in Early Childhood Care and Education. Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43695-6_3
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