The Case for Professional Objectivity in Early Childhood Education: A Position Paper and Proposed Model

By the time a prospective early childhood educator arrives at a teacher preparation program, they have already accumulated over 3,153,600 minutes of family-system conditioning. This figure represents the cumulative eight hours of waking, at home exposure per day, multiplied across the 18 years preceding adulthood. These millions of minutes are not neutral. They embed within each candidate the values, biases, and survival strategies of the family environment—an inheritance that includes the funds of knowledge and, for many, the lingering weight of various levels of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). When these candidates are then placed into early learning environments as observers and teachers, they do not arrive as blank slates. They

bring with them the imprint of their own upbringing.

ECE preparation programs, however, proceed as if this prior conditioning is irrelevant. Unlike social work—where the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) explicitly requires students to develop self-awareness, identify personal biases, and regulate their own affective responses as a core professional competency—ECE programs have no comparable mandate. Instead, ECE curricula emphasize child development, play-based learning, and assessment tools, while largely assuming that professional training itself will neutralize personal bias. This assumption is untenable. Empirical research on ACE’s, experiential blindness, and teacher identity formation demonstrates that unexamined personal histories profoundly shape how early childhood educators interpret children's behavior, often leading to mislabeling developmentally appropriate actions as disabilities or deficits.

This omission produces teachers who misinterpret developmentally appropriate behavior as pathology, collapse impairment into disability, and bring experiential blindness into observation and documentation practices. The result is inequitable assessment, over-referral and instructional environments that perpetuate rather than interrupt cycles of inherited ignorance.

To address this gap, the paper proposes the establishment of an Associate of Applied Science in Early Childhood Observation & Assessment (AAS-ECOA) as a standalone track. The specialization would include:

1. A required inventory of ACEs and bias awareness upon entry.

2. Continuous coursework in objectivity, inattentional blindness, and experiential blindness each semester.

3. A structural distinction between teachers (instruction) and observers (objective documentation), creating professional partnerships that reduce cognitive overload and increase accuracy.

This paper positions the omission of self-awareness in ECE as not an oversight but a willful structural choice—one that preserves institutional convenience but undermines children’s developmental outcomes. By comparing ECE to social work, journalism, law enforcement, and court reporting, the paper argues that objectivity is a professional skill, not an innate trait, and must be scaffolded, practiced, and institutionalized.

In this way, the paper seeks to reframe early childhood education around a neglected, but essential question: if social workers cannot ethically practice without examining themselves, why do we allow preschool teachers to? Click the link below to download the paper. See ya next time.

Citation

Brown, M. A. (2025). The Case for Professional Objectivity in Early Childhood Education: A Position Paper and Proposed Model (1.0, 1st ed., pp. 1–16). MABMA Enterprises, LLC. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16934643

Preschool teacher with children. How is she trained to see these children?