Dr. Allison Henward

I am an educational anthropologist, an early childhood education (ECE) specialist, and core faculty in the comparative and international education program at Penn State. I apply comparative, ethnographic, and qualitative research methods to study how culture and class impact and shape ECE programs. I examine what is taught (curriculum), how it is taught (pedagogy), and how this takes place in classrooms that differ in geographic location, class, culture, and language to show how and why local context matters. 

I am conducting a comparative ethnographic study of the Head Start policy in four cultural communities in the United States. I aim to understand better what happens when federal policy is implemented across sites and how this policy impacts teachers and children in various cultural and linguistic contexts.