Feminist Praxis and the Gaze in the Early Childhood Curriculum

ABSTRACT Traditional approaches to curriculum development in early childhood education derive from modernist developmental understandings of the child. The article argues that such understandings of the child can support patriarchal gender relations by skewing the teacher's gaze and that reconstructing the teacher's gaze is central to feminist pedagogical praxis in early childhood education. One early childhood teacher's struggle to reconstruct her gaze via feminist readings of the child is used to explore the possibilities and challenges of working for feminist reconstructions in the early childhood curriculum.