What is CUPID?
The Collaborative for Understanding the Pedagogy of Infant/ Toddler Development (CUPID – the ‘T’ is silent) is a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) effort to better prepare and support the infant/toddler workforce through improving teaching in higher education. We are more than 60 scholars, across more than 40 US institutions of higher education and professional development. CUPID works together to learn how to improve teaching of infant/toddler development, care, and education in higher education. Our ultimate goal is to improve practice in the field of infant/toddler care and education by improving our own teaching.
Why Focus on Infants and Toddlers and Their Educators?
Infants and toddlers get lost in higher education! The critical knowledge and skills needed by educators of our youngest learners typically gets buried in coursework on lifespan development with no extension to practices that support development, or gets little attention in courses on pedagogy in early child education.
We must focus intentional effort on preparing the practitioners who will work with infants, toddlers, and families for two reasons: First, the first three years of life are unparalleled for both the pace of human development and dependence on others. It is a time of high vulnerability and great opportunity to affect lifelong outcomes. Professionals working with babies birth to age 3 must understand complex and fast-paced developmental trajectories, and the influences on them so they can support optimal development. Infant/toddler practitioners must be uniquely prepared for the necessarily relational nature of this work, which comes with intense physical and emotional demands. Not only is the relationship between the individual baby and educator crucial, but the necessity of daily coordination and communication between parents and educators makes establishment of adult-adult partnerships essential as well. This requires infant/toddler practitioners to be specialists in working with adults as well as children. Second, the infant/toddler workforce is under-professionalized. This work has been considered akin to babysitting, and the workforce is chronically under-paid, under-valued, and under-supported. Given the challenging nature of this work, the lack of respect and low pay, and the rampant poverty of the workforce, many have started to consider the infant/toddler workforce to be oppressed, and increasing support of the workforce to be a matter of human rights. Although CUPID works mostly within the context of higher education, we are sensitive to the reality that most infant/toddler practitioners have little higher education, and few have college degrees in their chosen field. Many people working to professionalize the field of early child education believe there is little value to a higher education degree for infant/toddler practitioners because the most relevant content gets such little attention or is taught poorly. CUPID is working within higher education to change that.
What We Do and How We Work Together
First, and foremost, we learn together, collaboratively and reflectively, then put what we learn into practice in our own work, and share it with others so they can do the same. This generation and sharing of knowledge takes our collective reflective practice and turns it into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Some ways that this takes place include:
- Developing and sharing a set of comprehensive competencies for infant/toddler educators (learn more on our page about the Competencies)
- Studying our students, their learning, and our teaching (learn more on our page about Ongoing Research), and publishing our results
- Writing policy- and practice- relevant articles (learn more on our Publications & Presentations page)
CUPID meets monthly by phone in order to set goals and priorities, manage our tasks, and reflect on our practices and our learnings. Sub-committees form as needed to accomplish specific time-limited tasks, such as developing new research methodologies, investigating funding mechanisms, aligning the competencies with other frameworks, writing specific papers, etc.
