De/Humanization in Kindergarten: A Case Study of Classroom Environment in a Neoliberal Context

Background: This study examines the impacts of neoliberalism and its accompanying policies, structures, and narratives on a teacher and her students during the first five weeks of kindergarten—that critical, foundational period in which young children enter the system of schooling and immediately begin to construct their identities as students and form long-lasting ideas about learning and school. Situated within a public school in a midsize city in the U.S. Midwest, this study follows a kindergarten teacher—a white woman teaching predominantly Latine children—who hoped to create a humanizing classroom environment where her young students felt safe, cared for, and joyful. Unfortunately, the context of U.S. schooling makes work like this particularly challenging, as deeply entrenched neoliberal values of efficiency, order, independence, and accountability all have material, daily impacts on teachers and children in their classrooms. This study attends to some of those challenges and explores their impacts on one teacher and her kindergarten class in a neoliberal school context. Research Questions: How does one white female kindergarten teacher navigate her neoliberal context as she works to construct a humanizing classroom environment at the beginning of the school year? How does this work impact the teacher and children in the classroom? Research Design: For this qualitative case study, I observed in a kindergarten classroom twice a week throughout the first five weeks of school, collected more than 25 hours of classroom video, and conducted semi-structured interviews with the teacher and multimodal child-centered interviews with kindergarteners that included drawing, playing with emoji bean bags, photo elicitation, and pretend play. Finally, I collected and analyzed photographs, documents, and other artifacts from the classroom. Conclusions: Findings indicate tensions between the teacher’s whole-child, relational intentions and the neoliberal threats of testing, accountability, curriculum, order, and efficiency that impacted her practice. The study highlights the complexity and contradictions involved in the work of constructing a humanizing classroom environment amid today’s neoliberal pressures and argues for shifts in educational policy and practice that will support the important work of creating more humanizing spaces for children and their teachers in schools.