Professor Corey Shdaimah and with Professors Linda Houser (Widener) and Jessica Kahn (Lehman College) co-edited a special issue of Social Work and Society on Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC).
The special issue includes an introduction by the editors and seven articles that examines various aspects of ECEC including leave policies, the impact of minimum wage increases on child care provision, and a ranking of work-family policy across OECD countries. Professor Shdaimah is also co-author of one of the articles, with Professor Elizabeth Palley of Adelphi University (UMSSW MSW ’97), Provider Perspectives on Child Care in the United States.
As a collection, the articles address ECEC through a social work lens in several ways. They draw from social work values, such as social justice, equality, and self-determination; they elucidate the value of using a holistic, person-in-environment orientation to analyze and develop the many aspects of early education and care; and they explore the ways that ECEC work tends to be essentialized, naturalized, and gendered , despite the fact that such work requires skill and has, as its focus, the well-being of future generations. Taken together, these articles demonstrate the need for advocacy from social workers and our allies to find common ground to improve the systems and daily operations of early education and child care.
Links to the special issue and all of the articles can be accessed here: www.socwork.net/sws/issue/current