To teach young children, Wren Veatch says, you have to stay in the present.
“You can’t be in the future or in the past when you’re in space with a child,” Veatch, a teacher at UMass Amherst’s Center for Early Education and Care, says. “You have to be very present, because they call you back to the moment that you’re in. It’s almost like a meditation practice because children always keep you in the current moment.”
However, to understand the roots of child care policy, Veatch adds, it’s exciting to read about the past, as Veatch is doing as a student in UMass Amherst’s Child Study & Early Education master’s degree program. A key part of that past? When the Lanham Act created a universal childcare program that allowed mothers to work in factories during World War II to support the war effort. But once the war ended, the funding dried up.
“I was reading the testimony of citizens—just regular people in 1941—about the importance of child care, and I was so taken by the things they were saying. I thought, here I am reading this more than 80 years later, and seeing that the legacy of public voices still exists. That’s really meaningful.”
Veatch kept reading and reached 1971, when President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created federally funded child care centers.
“It was like reading a novel: I was just crushed to see what had happened to policy that I cared about, that affected my life as a mother and an educator. After that, I found out about the Advocacy Network,” Veatch says.
Now, as a teacher, a graduate student, and an advocate, Veatch is weaving past, present, and visions of the future together to ensure that young children have the systems and support they need to thrive.
Practicing relational care
Veatch has what could be considered a recipe for teaching. In no particular order, it’s:
Listen. Observe. Follow the child. Practice relational care.
“I’m interested in relational pedagogies and relational care practices. The idea is that we’re prioritizing classroom relationships between the teacher and the child, and between the child and their peers,” Veatch says.
“We prioritize relationships, because often teachers are the first relationship outside of the family for a child. For some children, most of their waking hours are spent in a classroom setting, so teachers become a big part of the way they develop early relationships.”
“If we’re prioritizing letters and colors and numbers over relationships, we’re missing a big opportunity to help children understand their place in the world and how valued they are.”
Building a relationship-based approach, Veatch says, means eliminating power hierarchies and implementing equity-based practices that keep children’s voices in the mix with the voices of teachers, administrators, and policymakers.
Using a course she’s taking on educational research methods as a springboard, Veatch is thinking about developing a study, starting with interviews or focus groups, to understand what prevents teachers from prioritizing relational care in their classrooms.
“We have to be able to trust children to tell us what they need, and we have to believe them when they tell us. Children and teachers can co-create the learning environment. My hope is for children to be able to teach adults as much as adults teach children about what each one needs to grow and learn and respect each other.”
A key step toward success, Veatch says, “would be professional development programs that break down walls and allow us to reimagine the early childhood field in a context that stops holding people in place and allows them to step into their role as changemakers.”
Adult communities of care
For her Advocacy Network project, Veatch has launched a monthly, hour-long Zoom meeting for early educators, or as she calls it, “a reciprocal care network.”
“It’s important for more folks in jobs like mine to understand how much support there is out there and how many people are fighting for us. I also want everyone to know that we can fight for each other.
“It’s always really comforting to me to meet another early childhood educator who experiences things the same way I do: the frustrations, the quirks, the joy, and the challenges. And it’s inspiring to find folks who are in the same job but think in ways that I’ve never even considered.”
The group is called the Western Mass Early Childhood Educators meet-up. And Veatch hopes it will provide mutual aid, resources, education, upcoming events, and comfort.
“Our job can be isolating, so I want the group to share all the things that would make our jobs feel sustainable in the long term, so that we feel seen and heard.”
This exchange can also help with professional development, especially for teachers who don’t have the time to observe other classrooms and get ideas from their colleagues.
“I want to know what’s going on in your classroom in Ludlow, and you should know what’s going on in my classroom in Amherst. I want to know what your challenges are in Springfield, and in what ways can I support you from where I’m sitting.”
Veatch also wants colleagues to know what she learned from an Advocacy Network meeting with State Senator Robyn Kennedy and a 9:30 Call featuring Attorney General Andrea Campbell.
“I was really moved by both of them. They both have high profile jobs, quite different from my every day work, and they were both so enthusiastic to be speaking with us. They understand the issues we face in the early childhood field, and they clearly wanted to connect on a human level, not based on hierarchies or prestige. Our work is important to them. I felt that.
“So when we show enthusiasm, and we want to be involved in their work, they turn around and they’re ready to support our work, too.”
To other policymakers who are eager to jump in, Veatch extends an invitation.
“Come and talk to us. Teachers are in classrooms all day, with little time or space to be seen or heard by folks who are making choices on our behalf. We’re the direct care providers. We’re the changemakers. We want to co-create this culture, and we want to be part of the conversation.”
Foundations for the future
Ask Veatch about the future she’d like to see for early childhood, and in her answer she braids her ideas and experiences together.
“I emphasize listening to children because there are so many ways that we forget to do (or are trained out of doing) that. In our society, people with the most power are given the most air time.
“As direct care providers, we can step back and show children how important their voices are. We can shift that narrative from the start.
“Any future where I would want to live—and where I would want my children to grow and thrive—involves inquiry and critical thinking. We have, however, been trained in our culture to understand that a big part of education is learning to be obedient to authority and shut out inquiry and criticality. Obedience means shutting down the part of us that knows, something isn’t right; something is unjust when an authority figure tells us that what we feel or know isn’t true.”
“Relational care isn’t the answer to all of our problems, but it does mean expecting the same self-reflection from adults that we ask of children. Why are we making the choices we are making? Who does it serve? Who does it harm?
“What inner understanding are we asking children to shut out when we play referee or judge and jury instead of honoring their agency through care and concern? How do teachers learn this skill when we have not been taught the very thing that we are trying to teach the children in our care? And how can focusing on relationships fill the gaps that this lack of criticality is creating?
“Relational care helps to do this by humanizing the children in our care. By seeing children as fully human and not as people to mold, shape, and train. We have to understand that children come with the very tools that they (and we!) need to create a future that includes a voice for each of us. We have to erase the hierarchy in the classrooms so that children’s voices have a chance to rise up and be part of the conversation. This is the co-creation.”