A cross-cultural theoretical framework for understanding children’s perspectives of gender in early childhood education and care (ECEC) across countries

This chapter presents a cross-cultural theoretical framework that draws on a hybrid of gender, sociological, and educational theories to interpret and understand children’s perspectives of their teachers across nine countries’ contexts. We start with theorizing gender as socially constructed performances situational to individuals’ contexts. Those contexts consist of multi-level social, cultural, and political discourses in in the nine countries included in this research. We then emphasize young children’s active participation in interacting with gender(ed) discourses in early childhood education and care (ECEC) (Blaise, 2005; Xu, 2020). We employ theoretical concepts of child agency and power relations to investigate how children and adults jointly produce and/or challenge gender norms through their interactions. Finally, our cross-cultural framework places a focus on how gender performances, child agency, and power relationships are manifested in different socio-cultural and policy settings (Connell, 2007). Our book exemplifies the importance of cross-country ECE research, particularly in understanding how gender influences children’s experiences in ECE globally.