Chapter 4: Promoting Empathy and Social Democracy in Early Childhood Teacher Education: An Autoethnographic Journey of Three Early Childhood Educators

In this chapter, we examine how we teach child development theories to early childhood teacher candidates and our efforts to make teaching more culturally sensitive. As one of the required courses that all early childhood teacher candidates take at our college, the child development course functions as a gateway to the profession of teaching, where teacher candidates are introduced to several theoretical and practical tools to understand child development. We focus our inquiry using the following two research questions:

In the era of globalization, teacher educators’ responsibility in preparing future teachers has become more complicated because teachers need to successfully navigate visible and invisible cultural differences in classrooms to meet student needs (Erickson, 1987). As early childhood teacher candidates need to bridge the knowledge of child development theories and their praxis in rapidly transforming classrooms and local communities, the task of promoting cultural sensitivities in a child development course has become more critical.