‘Piecing things together as best we can’: PreK teacher enactment of hybrid policies during COVID-19

At some point during the 2020–21 school year, the majority of U.S. school districts adopted a ‘hybrid’ instructional model that allowed families to choose whether to send their children to school or keep them at home for remote instruction. Drawing on policy enactment theory, this paper traces how PreK teachers enacted hybrid instruction in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, where PreK is voluntary, controlled by local school districts, and located in both public elementary schools and private child care centers. Drawing on a mixed-methods dataset comprised of a statewide survey of PreK school district administrators and 29 qualitative interviews with PreK teachers in nine school districts, we describe how teachers modified hybrid instructional policies to meet the needs of children and maintain the developmentally appropriate play-based pedagogies that teachers value. Our findings shed new light on crisis policy enactment (Bradbury et al. 2022) by showing how material, professional, external, and situated contexts (Braun et al. 2011) shaped teacher policy enactments across different PreK settings and hybrid instructional models. In particular, we find that PreK teachers experienced COVID-19 as an intensification of the decentralized and multilayered policymaking that often characterizes PreK in the U.S.