Early Childhood Education in India and Traces of Colonial Regimes: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Globalization and postcolonialism, as fields of inquiry, are vast, interdisciplinary, and marked by a diversity of concepts. These domains, while distinct, exhibit significant overlap and complementarity (Gupta, 2020). It can be argued that colonialism catalyzes globalization, disseminating and influencing human existence through Eurocentric knowledge (Bhatia, 2020; Hanson et al., 2018). Within the expansive scopes of globalization and postcolonialism, this research centers on specific conceptual ideas with a particular emphasis on their relevance to early childhood education in India. As such, the research proposed here employs a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of various global ECE texts, government documents, and national standards to understand how they influence the construction of ECE in India. More specifically, critical discourse analysis is used to deconstruct the discourse of global agencies such as the World Bank, the United Nations, NAEYC Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP), and the New Education Policy of India (NEP 2021). Given the continued dominance of DAP in majority-world countries, the critical discourse analysis research proposed here will be used to examine the colonial discourses within ECE texts and documents from India (i.e., a postcolonial country). The overall research question asks: How do colonial discourses influence ECE texts and documents in India? Research sub-questions to guide data analysis will be determined once we do the first round of open coding of the documents selected (See Table 1).