DAP: NAEYC's "Green Book" of Developmentally Appropriate Practice was the focus of a good deal of critical discussion. As Leigh O'Brien put it, "In our haste to embrace DAP as an alternative to a pushed-down, academic approach, I fear we have overlooked cultural variation in teaching and learning styles." Michael O'Loughlin argued that DAP, which relies heavily on Piaget, reproduces cognitive psychology's lack of sensitivity to social and cultural factors. In sum, nobody at the conference endorsed teacher-centered, pushed-down, academically pressured early childhood curricula, but many of us are concerned that the "Green Book" may encourage an overly psychological, normatively-biased, assessment-laden conception of good practice.

Readiness and At Risk: Beth Graue and Beth Blue Swadener presented papers arguing that originally well-intentioned concepts such as "readiness" and "at risk" in practice often become labels used to track and segregate young children. Beth Graue suggests that "readiness" is not a discrete characteristic a child either has or lacks. Instead, Graue argues, it is a concept manipulated by educators to hurry some children up and slow others down. Graue's research in two neighboring communities in Colorado shows that readiness programs are used to give upper-middle-class white children an extra year to become high achievers while they are used to make poor Mexican-American children more culturally and linguistically like Anglos. Beth Blue Swadener argued that the concept of "at risk" is a diagnostic and prescriptive label which functions to lower our expectations for children and to isolate them in unequal and inevitably inferior educational environments.

Multiculturalism: Several of the participants stressed the need to make early childhood educational curriculum and practice more sensitive to cultural educational curriculum and practice more sensitive to cultural diversity. Lordes Soto discussed Puerto Rican preschool parents' notions of optimal parent-teacher relations. Monica Miller Marsh and Beth Blue Swadener discussed the development and implementation of anti-bias curricula in early childhood classrooms.

International perspectives: One way to reconceptualize American early childhood educational theory and practice is to expose ourselves to alternative approaches from overseas. Rebecca New spoke about her research in the Italian town of Reggio Emilia, which has developed an innovative early childhood curriculum which integrates emotional, social, cognitive, and aesthetic development. Sally Lubeck gave a poignant account of the rise and fall of East Germany's comprehensive childcare network in the era of reunification. I referred to my fieldwork in Japanese preschools to provide a cross-cultural contrast to American assumptions about children's sexuality.

The Researcher and the Researched: Many of us shared out discomfort with the way teachers and children appear as subjects in much early childhood research. Mimi Bloch, Bill Ayers, and Daniel Walsh presented papers which described their ongoing struggles to create genuinely collaborative, non-exploitative, mutually fulfilling research partnerships with teachers. Ayers and Walsh told about their participation in study groups with teachers of young children. Angie Love and Audrey Geoffrey called for feminist, activist research approaches designed to change practice and empower teachers and children rather than to advance the career of the researcher.

Control, Surveillance, and Children's Rights: Other papers were concerned with the rights of children in institutional settings. Robin Leavitt drew out attention to the powerlessness of infants and toddlers in childcare settings to eat, sleep, or play when or how they want to. She stressed the need to value children's everyday lived experience" instead of justifying our practices by pointing to desired long term outcomes. My presentation asked what is happening to privacy and to children's sexuality in an era where concern with sexual abuse is compelling teachers to keep children constantly in their sight. Rich Johnson reported on cultural differences in conceptions of misbehavior and in attitudes toward classroom management.