Ines de Pierola and Megan Pratt have produced a new annotated bibliography on the child care work force in Oregon. Content is below.
Annotated bibliography of professional development and support needs of institutionally underserved populations within the child care and education workforce in Oregon
Oregon’s child care and early learning field is sustained by a committed workforce that is increasingly racial/ethnically and linguistically diverse. Thanks to a rich history of research and evaluation projects throughout the state, much is already known about the professional development and other support needs of Oregon’s institutionally underserved child care and education workforce members. Unfortunately, the common lessons emerging from this body of work are often inaccessible to decision-makers and other researchers and evaluators, who lack the time to scour the internet for publications and synthesize across projects. Additionally, members of Oregon’s institutionally underserved communities have reported feeling that their issues and recommendations for change are going unheard as they are asked to speak to the same issues year after year for different projects.
Toward supporting increased use of research and evaluation evidence in policymaking, this Annotated Bibliography, posted on the Oregon Early Learners Facts and Findings website, serves as a tool to support the synthesis of existing evidence (what has been learned so far) and identifies where gaps in knowledge persist (what has not been asked, or where evidence is inconclusive or mixed) around the workforce needs of Oregon’s institutionally marginalized child care and early education workforce members.
The focus of this annotated bibliography is professional development and support needs of institutionally underserved populations within the child care and education workforce. Some common themes across the literature include:
(1) Increasing wages is necessary to improve retention for all child care providers, especially those from minoritized populations.
(2) Home-based child care providers in Oregon are more likely than center-based child care providers to identify as a person of color and speak a primary language other than English. Thus, training and professional development opportunities need to respond to their specific business characteristics, and cultural and linguistic needs.
(3) Valuable insights on Oregon’s minoritized ECE providers’ perspectives, characteristics, and needs were gathered in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic [eg. Sektnan & Pratt (2020), Oregon Early Learning Division (2020), Pears et al. (2021)]. However, many issues unique to minoritized providers existed before and not due to the pandemic. It is important to examine these as systemic and not context-dependent issues.
(4) Oregon-specific research is necessary to understand the particular context of institutionally underserved populations within the ECE workforce in the state.
We want to collaborate with you. This interactive spreadsheet is a living document that will grow and develop as research and evaluation efforts continue in Oregon. Please fill out this form if you would like to submit your work to be included on the Early Learners Website and included in this review document. Please contact us at OregonCCRP@oregonstate.edu for additional ideas or feedback on what would make the tool more useful for you.