About
The ECRC is a community of practitioners and scholars dedicated to the study of contemporary issues that relate to young children, their families, their communities and their education.
The ECRC is a community of practitioners and scholars dedicated to the study of contemporary issues that relate to young children, their families, their communities, and their education. Practitioners and researchers who work together through the ECRC embrace a range of innovative evidence-based practice and research methods to increase understanding about children's development and learning within diverse sociocultural contexts.
For over 20 years, the Early Childhood Research Center has brought together interdisciplinary scholars dedicated to leading research initiatives to better understand the lives of young children and their families, educators and communities.
As you peruse our website, be certain to check out the overview of our current research, upcoming research and previous research efforts spanning two decades!
We hope you will bookmark our site and follow us on Facebook and Instagram as we work to offer new resources that will make research, theory and practice accessible to families, teachers and the community. Watch for our Faculty and Staff Spotlights, Research Highlights and Community Features
As the University of Louisville moves through a process of developing a 2023-2025 strategic plan, it is our goal to align our work with University of Louisville’s as a great place to learn, work, discover, connect and honor diversity, equity and inclusion throughout all that we do: teaching, research, and service.
With that end in mind, we need your help! If you have ideas how the ECRC can support you, please let me know. You can reach me by email at jon.lee@louisville.edu.
Thank you for visiting our page. We look forward to continuing to develop this website so you will return again and again to learn about current research related to how young children learn and how we can all work to support their opportunities to learn, grow, develop and thrive.
-Dr. Jon Lee
The Interdisciplinary Early Childhood Research Center (ECRC) was established in 1999 by the College of Education and Human Development to conduct and disseminate research about the development and education of young children. It was originally named, "Interdisciplinary Center for Research on Early Childhood Initiatives and Innovations"; however, over the years, it has simply become known as the UofL ECRC.
From the beginning, the ECRC was designed to be a gathering space for a group of interdisciplinary researchers to explore challenges and solutions in the education of young children as well as an ongoing effort to engage in original and collaborative research endeavors to better understand the lives of children..
The ECRC has benefitted from the leadership and guidance from many prolific scholars in the field of early childhood education and development. The ECRC was under the direction of the Ashland-Nystrand Endowed Chair, Dr. Victoria Molfese (1999-2011), followed by Dr. Kathryn Whitmore Barten (2012-2017), then Dr. Lori Norton-Meier (2018-2020), and Dr. Ginevra Courtade (2017-2020). To explore the two decades of work in the ECRC, follow the Research section of our webpage. To receive updates on our current studies, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
We work closely with the Early Learning Campus (ELC) to create a state of the art research and teaching and teacher learning facility where children, parents, teachers and researchers contribute to the research process and dissemination of research findings.
Our mission statement from the conception of the ECRC is this:
The Center's mission is to encourage research activities by faculty within the CEHD and in departments from across the university and the nation with complementary research strengths in areas such as early and middle childhood education, family therapy, music, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, public policy, speech pathology, social work and teacher preparation.
Our work takes place on campus as well as in the community. Our primary location on campus is located in Room 120 of the Porter Education Building.
The refurbished space for the Early Learning Childhood Center is a multi-purpose learning environment for adults working to understand how to best support the learning of children. This space serves as a physical location for researchers to come together and conceptualize, implement, analyze, interpret and disseminate their work.