A call for a moratorium on damage-centered early childhood teacher education: envisioning just futures for our profession

ABSTRACT Calling for a moratorium on damage-centered early childhood teacher education, in this article, I urge U.S. early childhood teacher educators to envision and commit to a just future for our profession through desire-centered early childhood teacher education. An antidote to damage-centered early childhood teacher education, which problematically centers the harm inflicted or trauma caused to individuals and families of Color, cross-generationally, desire-centered early childhood teacher education interrupts the construction of young children, families, and communities of Color as broken. A desire-centered early childhood teacher education subscribes to an assets-based, justice-oriented approach that centers the ingenuity, knowledges, powerful legacies, rich values, and sophisticated practices of communities comprised of Black, Indigenous, and other persons of Color. After contextualizing the need to disrupt damage-centered early childhood teaching and teacher education, I offer colleagues a letter that considers the history and language of early childhood education with respect to race, racism, and in/justice. Blurring personal and shared processes of creative engagement and reflexivity, I seek to contribute to much-needed and long-overdue conversations about key early childhood teacher education issues, attending to how we might take action in the pursuit of justice as a profession. I then offer a second letter in which I outline a compelling path toward more just goals, approaches, and norms for our profession – toward a future in which early childhood teachers and teacher educators collectively revisit and problematize the past while committing to the active pursuit of more equitable and just futures for all members of all learning communities.