Designing the Degree: Building Alternative Futures

In March 2020, the COVID-19 lockdown made visible the lived inequities of many children and their families. We experienced this inequity first hand when our UNB Children’s Centre, which had operated for 43 years, was forced to close, leaving 35 families without child care and five educators without employment. Low pay, inadequate basic and continuing education, financial instability, loss of income, and high turnover have long been cruel features of ECEs’ teaching experience. The designations of “child-care workers,” “registered ECEs,” and “teachers” reiterate hierarchies restricting our capacity to resolve educational inequities. Researchers have found that ECEs with a bachelor’s degree are more likely to remain in the profession (Akbari & McCuaig, 2014; Anderson et al., 2020; McLachlan, 2011; Urban et al., 2011, as cited in Berger et al., 2020). However, a bachelor’s degree insufficiently addresses the pay and work inequities that exist across Canadian educational landscapes. There is a pressing need to think deeply about pay equity and the provision of educational opportunities across inequitable worlds (Butler, 2022) to support children, families, and ECEs.

Within this complex landscape, we started an online asynchronous two-plus-two degree for ECEs, teaching our first cohort during the COVID-19 lockdown. To date, all degree applicants except two have been people who identify as women, non-binary, or trans persons. Many need to maintain an income to support children or care for extended family members. We intentionally designed an asynchronous degree to serve ECEs who cannot or do not want to participate in face-to-face teaching (Holmberg, 2003). As a social justice action, this degree opens a pathway for ECEs to enter or re-enter the university house (Ahmed, 2021), for many have always dreamed of obtaining a degree. It is thrilling to share that in 2025 we had 342 applicants, and in September 2025, 208 early childhood educators will be enrolled in the program. By fall 2025, we will have graduated 187 early childhood educators.

Our degree process began with an Atlantic Canada feasibility study funded by the Margaret and Wallace McCain Family Foundation and the Jimmy Pratt Family Foundation and conducted by an ECE community partner, Lynda Homer (2013). Our dean, Dr. Ann Sherman, formed a committee of five ECEs to design the degree and select the courses. Each of us had extensive leadership experiences in school systems, professional learning communities, curriculum development, and initiating and participating in action research projects. Several factors shaped the design of the degree. Our aim was to minimize the cost of tuition in recognition of the level of pay that ECEs receive. The duration of the degree was determined by three factors: expectations of the government of a two-plus-two degree, expectations of the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission, and provision of required credits, including a nine-week practicum determined by New Brunswick Teacher Certification. We split a typical university term so that students could take two courses simultaneously, completing four courses in the term and fulfilling full-time student status. This made achieving a degree while working possible and allowed ECEs to access student loans.

In the early stages of degree planning, the leadership of Dr. Sherman was significant. She met with the certification branch to determine which level of certification ECE graduates would obtain. After several meetings, and varied reiterations of the degree, the Office of Teacher Certification with the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and the UNB Faculty of Education signed an agreement confirming that graduates from the BEd program in ECE would be awarded a New Brunswick Teacher’s Certification 4, qualifying them to teach in K–3 classrooms. Trusting the credibility of a distance education degree was a challenge for many as they questioned whether provincial certification bodies would recognize our online degree. Over time, this challenge dissipated as provincial certification was achieved.

Completing the program structure, we needed to determine the courses. The first factor was to meet the New Brunswick Teacher Certification requirements. Maintaining our role as pedagogical leaders (Beaudoin, 2003), we understood the need for additional literacy courses in our provincial context, so we created the following courses: Children’s Literature, Singing, Poetry, and Performance; Multi-Modal Literacies in Early Childhood, Home, and School Literacies; and Digital Literacies in the Early Years to expand the one required literacy course, Literacy Learning in the Early Years. Recognizing that most of our learners would identify as women, non-binary, or trans persons charged with caring for and educating a diversity of children and families, we knew that a course about feminist theories was essential.

Engaging ECEs with early childhood research, we created the course Research in Early Childhood Studies. Challenging the “schoolification” (OECD, 2006) of the early years, the downward push of academic learning, we added the following courses: Observation and Pedagogical Documentation and Project Approach in the Early Years and Problem Solving with Young Children. Responding to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), we created an Indigenous Education course to be taught by an Indigenous scholar. Additionally, we led the team of instructors to include Indigenous scholars, artists, historians, activists, and writers in every course. Once the courses were selected, our program design team dissolved, and we were left to lead the design of course content.

Course Curricula

Our course curricula recognized that we are all beings of overlapping multiple worlds (Butler, 2022) in which many sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others do not benefit from the privilege and entitlement that support the flourishing of the few (Braidotti, 2022). Course assignments needed to be contextualized, informed by many world views, and transformative for those learning together, adults and children, the human and more than human, and ECEs forging learning communities online. This ethic seems to be imperative in a current climate in which we witness the banning of books authored by BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ authors, resistance to non-white histories, challenges to anti-racist, anti-bias education, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the destruction of our shared planet. We recognize that educators can be positioned in a precarious role when encouraged to think and teach with a critical social justice ethic.

Within such a precarious climate of uneven childhoods and uneven worlds (Duhn et al., 2020), it becomes critical to support the responsibilities for living, teaching, and learning together by foregrounding education as a commitment to equity, well-being, and social justice. Likewise, the call for cross-disciplinary education that cultivates ECEs’ intellectual curiosity, while deepening their engagement with the responsibilities of living, teaching, and learning in an increasingly complex, endangered, and inequitable world (Berger et al., 2020), reinforces the continual need to curate course content that foregrounds “own voice texts” amplifying positive representations of diversity (Robertson, 2022). As Ahmed (2021, p. 104) writes, a “syllabus can tell you who is being valued, what is valued, who comes first, who has priority.” Course content needs to value the scholarship of diverse voices, including critical early childhood researchers, Indigenous scholars, class-conscious pedagogues, critical disability activists, radical and ecological feminists, anti-racists, and queer/trans scholars.

Pedagogical Practices

As leaders developing the online degree, we were committed to pedagogical practices that foreground the complexities of diverse world views intentionally to disrupt the hegemony of white Western content. Committed to education as social justice, we believe that learning needs to confront colonialism, white privilege, ableism, and classism, and we question many of our embodied educational practices and beliefs. Unlearning (Cochran-Smith, 2003), questioning long-held ideas, beliefs, and practices, and learning are entangled, complex, heart-and-soul processes. In a distance education online learning community, well-being needs to be foregrounded and articulated aloud frequently (in the syllabus, during Microsoft Teams meetings, and in responding to individual ECEs’ emails and texts). We need to recognize that learners’ contexts are parts of their educational spaces (Gibson 1998, cited in Gunawardena, 2013). Learners know their contextual responsibilities better than instructors do. Learners are trusted: we do not request doctors’ slips; we understand that they might have to triage their course and life/relational responsibilities. We trust them to take the time that they need to read, dialogue, and construct learning artifacts in modes of their choice.

Initially, we eliminated due dates, recognizing that learners could set their own dates in response to life’s demands, but this became an oppressive experience for some learners and instructors. We provided flexible due dates as guides, accepting assignments upon completion. We realized that university processes of extensions and grade change forms could maximize temporal flexibility. In our efforts to be ethically responsive to a wide range of subjectivities, we recognize that there are learners and learning communities that might benefit from a hybrid degree—those who experience inequitable internet access or those who might benefit from a balance of face-to-face human connection in combination with online learning choices. This can be especially true for international and Indigenous students embedded in a cultural context that cannot be understood by instructors (Gunawardena, 2013). However, as Gunawardena (2013) and Gunawardena and colleagues (2006) theorize, a wisdom community instructional design model can amplify cultural inclusivity that values the diversities that each learner brings to the course content.

As in wisdom communities, in education there are no single answers but a need to consider multiple perspectives, solve problems, negotiate meaning, and socially construct knowledge within the emerging culture of each online learning community. We recognize that within each course, each cohort, a unique learning culture is unfolding as learners dialogue, negotiate meanings and perspectives, share contextual experiences, and co-construct knowledge. The online space creates a learning community in which each learner’s voice is heard or read, amplifying diverse perspectives and experiences (Gunawardena, 2013). Our commitments are to support learning while keeping the institutional doors open to many who might have been marginalized by prior educational experiences or gendered life demands.

As Morrison (2020) states, there is a need for “a teaching praxis rooted in universal design—a teaching focused on a much broader kind of accessibility and inclusion for all rather than accommodations for individuals.” This means that course descriptions, processes, contents, and assignments are modified prior to and during the online course in response to learners. As leaders, meeting with a team of instructors, we intentionally present alternative perspectives, challenging the hegemonic constructions of learners and learning, striving to enact online pedagogies and a focus on social justice. We also do this intellectual, affective, and reflective labour for each other, disrupting embodied dominant discourses such as the deficit, individualizing constructions of learners, and loosening rigid practices. Pedagogies and assessment practices are anchored in learning the strengths and passions of each learner. Assessment practices are formative, providing learners with specific conversational comments, questions, and suggestions that feed forward into learning, just as we hope that ECEs will enact with children.

As leaders of this degree, we commit ourselves to sharing course contents, assignments, the learning management course shell, and each syllabus as we co-design or co-teach with new instructors. In turn, instructors adapt and share additions or modifications to courses. We model and encourage co-teaching to support well-being since we recognize that the provision of individualized feedback to classes of 30 or 60 ECEs is a necessary but demanding part of teaching online (Holmberg, 2003). In designing the online course content, we invited ECEs to choose from a list of activities that might have the same learning goals as we enact and cultivate a social obligation to call in and support each other (Gunawardena, 2013) through sacred problem solving (Richardson, 1997). Morrison (2022) invites online instructors to share responsibility for course curricula with learners. Shared responsibility frees instructors to engage more in meaning making with learners through social connection, individualized feedback, and problem solving. Reflecting on collective meaning making between learners and instructors, and attempting more co-construction of course content, we created two modest discussion areas within the course shell, one where learners could choose to contribute content and another where they could share completed assignments with each other, providing another feedback loop for them. We recognize that there is room for growth here.

Dis-Ease and Discomfort

So much of what we have achieved conflicts with university timelines, grading policies, and workload responsibilities. As women faculty members, we struggle and often feel silenced in our attempts to discuss the complexities and unsupported commitments beyond our own team. Raising questions to university leaders and in faculty meetings, we experienced dis-ease and discomfort since our words seemed to be inadequate. With the failure of our words, we are left with difficult lived experiences, such as an email sent to our dean questioning the abuse of two new faculty members, defences of intellectual freedom rather than discussions of online pedagogies, and a challenge to the provision of our cell phone numbers on course syllabi for immediate responses to students’ course and assignment questions. Other struggles included answering questions directed at who is qualified to teach in this online degree and addressing faculty resistance to discussing workload using traditional criteria (e.g., number of students served, number of programs, development of new course content, consideration of face-to-face and online courses, and so on).

We hoped for a critical discussion of how class size might be unique to various programs and how the absence of transparent university budgeting constructs walls against difficult collaborative conversations in which we might collectively “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) to imagine universities otherwise. Within these moments, the implications of our gender and classed histories are most felt, provoking a retreat, back to our team. Retreating does little to trouble the inequities of university policies, practices, and gendered inequalities of teaching and learning in online spaces. How can we engage in conversations that open doors within this institution rather than shaming, silencing, and individualizing uncomfortable truths?

Lessons Learned and Critical Insights

We recommend that degree initiatives that respond to societal needs and the goals of women and children need to be supported through recognition that centres our collective well-being (Morrison, 2022) while dismantling existing structures or modifying existing sets of arrangements (Ahmed, 2021) to invite many others through the university doors. Lessons learned in designing and implementing an online asynchronous degree might support both online designs and pedagogies as well as opening the doors of the university to many more people by creating spaces for sacred problem solving to forge communal solutions and possibilities through uncomfortable truths across programs. Such a space could focus on learning about online pedagogies and how learners and instructors co-construct online wisdom communities.

Prioritize faculty learning about the uniqueness of each online program and reflect on how created structures and processes unique to the program might be necessary to support the learning of specific communities of learners. Examine how leaders and colleagues call in and support every faculty member. Examine processes to hear the diverse voices and perspectives of instructors and learners in online programs. Can universities invest in supporting new program initiatives with university funding rather than deans and faculty members having to seek funding? Explore how we might support the early days of intellectual, affective, and reflective labours of designing and implementing an online degree especially for new faculty members. Consider university practices, such as graduation, which might need to change in support and recognition so that learners who choose online programs are just as valued as those who attend face-to-face programs. Consider consulting learners in online programs when designing online degrees. Finally, ask which communities in our province might we as a faculty serve or invite through the university doors.

References

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