Early childhood is the most vital period in a child’s life because the essential building blocks for lifelong learning are being developed. Early childhood education programs such as child care centers, preschools, and HeadStarts are important spaces where children’s development can flourish. ECE programs are associated with academic, emotional, and well-being benefits. Unfortunately, many children don’t have the opportunity to attend such programs due to various barriers. This literature review will explore the benefits of preschool, the detriments of not attending preschool, the barriers to attending preschool, and the effects of COVID-19 on preschool attendance in the United States.

Teacher-student relationships are a key component of youths’ educational environments (Wang, 2019). Previous research shows that supportive teacher-student relationships are associated with positive youth outcomes such as achievement and school belonging (e.g., Allen et al. 2018, Cornelius-White 2007; Roorda et al. 2011). However, much of this research utilizes White or multi-ethnic samples. Latinx youth represent a significant portion of school-going students (NCES, 2021); as such, understanding how teachers interact and experience Latinx students is relevant. Therefore, this study investigated how middle school teachers describe their relationships with Latinx students. Data for this study come from a larger mixed methods study of school climate among Latinx families and teachers in the Southwest. This study utilized focus group data collected from middle school teachers (N=18) about their experiences with Latinx students. Data was analyzed using inductive and consensus coding (Hill et al., 1997; Thomas, 2006). Preliminary findings revealed themes such as positive cultural engagement. Teachers reported that they perceived students valued teachers’ efforts to honor students’ language through the proper pronunciation. For example, a teacher noted, “I was doing attendance, and a kid said, 'Oh, you said my name right! They remember that and get super excited”. However, teachers also reported themes related to language barriers, stereotyping, and cultural disconnect. Such findings indicate that teachers identify both areas of connection and support alongside challenges in their relationships with Latinx students. For the conference, implications for practice and future directions will also be discussed.

Anti-Blackness is the revulsion, disdain, and disregard for Black life that is expressed through an individual’s beliefs, actions, and behaviors that permeate the daily schooling experiences and well-being of Black students. Current research reduces the anti-Black racial experiences of Black students to individual psychological trauma, insinuating the need for social justice counter-spaces such as the Vice Provost-Initiative for Pre-College Scholars program (VIPS). Programs like VIPS counter the dehumanization Black students experience and provide the educational and emotional foundation for Black students to occupy theorizing space in higher education. However, research often minimizes the positive role these programs/counter-spaces play in the lives of Black students. Therefore, the two research questions ask: 1. How do social justice pre-college counter-spaces oppose anti-Blackness and reaffirm the humanity of Black scholars in high school? 2. How do former students conceptualize their experiences as Black scholars in academia before and after these counter-spaces? Contextualized with transformational resistance and Black critical theory, this study investigates these questions with the counter-stories of ten current UCLA undergraduate VIPS scholars about their experiences to gain insight into the impact of academic counter-spaces. Potential findings include that experiences before VIPS reflect anti-Blackness while experiences after VIPS reflect holistic healing. Anti-Blackness is endemic in academia, demonstrating the vital need for more implementations of social justice pre-college counter-spaces that see Black youth as a scholar and human, transform the current oppressive educational system, and strive for social change.

In open-ended play-based settings, children propose, adopt, and negotiate different roles and rules as their play progresses, experiencing the process of leading activities by creating the structures of their play. In prior work in this area, researchers have studied these play patterns in structured laboratory tasks and without close attention to the subtle details of how play-based interactions change over time. This proposal aims to fill these gaps by studying play in naturalistic family play settings and through detailed analyses of video data to document how parents and children negotiate changes to the roles and rules that are structuring their collaborative play activities. Through a partnership with Free Forest School, we’ve gathered families with children ages 2-4 to investigate their video submissions of their unstructured play outdoors. After selecting clips, we multimodally transcribe those visualizations into written data. Developing transcriptions derive from interaction analysis amongst the participants with their body language and verbal expression. We used interaction analysis to develop a coding scheme to capture play activities and negotiation processes. In a negotiated interrater agreement, the preliminary findings suggest that children are the prime leaders when playing. Children are constantly proposing and enacting different ideas, creating subtle variations on prior activities, instilling themes and patterns within their play, and negotiating how roles and rules change over time. This study educates those who work with children such as educators, researchers, and parents, about the importance of unstructured play to develop their leadership, interpersonal, and creative skills.