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Paper short abstract:

An anthropological perspective on early childhood education quality challenges the assumed universality of global measurement tools and reveals nuanced differences across key stakeholder perspectives on quality, which has implications for policy and teachers' work lives.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside global efforts to increase access to early childhood education (ECE) is a concomitant focus on developing tools to measure the quality of teaching and learning in ECE settings. For example, in response to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2, which calls for ensuring all children have access to quality preprimary education, UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Brookings Institution developed the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) tool. Although universalizing measurement tools like MELQO assume that ideas about ECE quality are applicable regardless of context and local conditions, research has shown that ideas about what constitutes quality in ECE are far from universal (Tobin, 2005; Tobin et al., 2009; Yamamoto & Li, 2012). In this study, I paired video-cued ethnography (VCE) (Adair & Kurban, 2019; Tobin, 2019) with the comparative case study (CCS) approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) to interrogate the presumed universality of the notion of quality embedded in the MELQO tool. Through a new, virtual approach to VCE, developed in response to the conditions of COVID-19, I explored the perspectives of Tanzanian preprimary teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers vis-à-vis good teaching in preprimary. By bringing an anthropological perspective to the question of preprimary quality, my analysis illuminated important within-country differences in ideas about quality that have implications for preprimary teachers' work lives. My findings also challenge the relevance of a tool like MELQO in Tanzania, where pedagogical norms and the sociocultural context differs dramatically from Global North countries that MELQO's notion of quality reflects.