‘This is Your Class’: Theorizing What Syllabi Say about Relationships between Instructors and Students in Early Childhood Teacher Education Classrooms

In this article the authors discuss the relationships in college classrooms from the perspective of feminist teaching. With attention to power dynamics, they analyzed 17 early childhood course syllabi in order to elucidate those relationships. The authors present examples from the syllabi of course content, class experiences, and syllabus language that demonstrate how students presumably will acquire knowledge of early childhood education, of themselves and others, and of the professor. The authors found that the way in which professors write about their teaching in their syllabi serves to build relationships between themselves and their students. Yet tensions remain to be continually negotiated, tensions between the roles of gatekeeper and coach, between challenge and comfort, and between the social expectations that professors and students hold of themselves and each other.