Community Voices - March 16, 2026

For decades, the child care industry has faced persistent challenges in workforce supply, diversity, and competence. Despite government recognition of child care’s economic importance, addressing systemic barriers in compensation and professional development remains costly and difficult.

Consequently, workforce development strategies often reflect two distinctive paradigms or modalities. First: child care—“the workforce behind the workforce”—is often positioned as a wraparound service that enables other professionals to work, rather than as an industry in its own right. Second: child care employers are often siloed and work separately from the workforce and training agencies. This means that employers spend a significant amount of time on hiring and training staff. For smaller programs in particular, this role usually falls to directors who struggle to find time to review candidates’ resumes, interview, and onboard new staff while also overseeing the day-to-day operations of the center.

Is there a way forward? To transition from traditional approaches, we need to consider how to truly transform the landscape for child care educators.

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Through this view that documenting affords us, our image of the child is strengthened as their competencies, brilliance, innovation, and creativity become amplified through these lenses. We begin to see the everyday ordinary and mundane moments for the extraordinary events that they are through the eyes of the children.

Following this introduction you will encounter a mini story, told through a series of photographs, about an encounter between an infant and the many faces of light. Following the mini story you will encounter the interpretative meaning the teachers extracted from the photographs to gain a deeper understanding of the infants’ experience and see the world through their eyes. –Jen Selbitschka

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Then, in a brief, unintended moment, another child ran past and brushed against it.

Crash.

The tower scattered across the floor in a burst of color. For just a second, the classroom went silent, the kind of silence that appears right before a storm. Then the words flew out, sharp and final:

“You’re not invited to my birthday!”

It wasn’t really about a birthday. There was no guest list being discussed. No cake. No party in that moment. What the sentence truly meant was something deeper and more emotional:

You ruined something important to me. Now I am trying to protect myself.

Beneath the frustration and the broken tower was something fragile and developing, a young child who did not yet know how to manage big feelings, protect personal space, express disappointment, or repair a moment of hurt.

And this is the real story unfolding in preschool classrooms every day. It is not simply a story about misbehavior or unkind words. It is the story of how children learn to navigate conflict, develop emotional language, and discover what it truly means to belong.

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