Scholarship
Alex was the recipient of the American Educational Research Association’s 2021 Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood Education Dissertation Award for her ethnographic case study of an inclusive, bilingual Universal Pre-Kindergarten Classroom in a psychoanalytically-informed Community-Based Organization in Washington, D.C. In addition to the AERA conference, Alex has presented research at the international Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education, the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Education, and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society conferences. Alex is the editor, and author of three chapters in the volume Contemporary Psychoanalytic Approaches to Early Childhood Education (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Alex has developed a nationwide reputation for preparing inclusive practitioners across disciplines with knowledge around the applications of Disability Studies and psychoanalysis in early childhood education. She has been invited to speak for The Association of Infant Mental Health in Tennessee (AIMHiTN), and as an invited guest lecturer at Montclair University, University of Northern Iowa’s Department of Special Education (twice), Penn State’s School of Visual Arts, Utah State University’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, and Weber State University’s Office of Academic Affairs Integrated Studies Department (three times).
Selected representative conference paper presentations include:
- “Interrogating the self and disabled Other: doing disability studies in early childhood education,” AERA (2022)
- “Nurturing Inclusive Early Childhood Educators’ Professional ‘Competence,” NAECTE (2021) with Dr. Sheila Anderson
- “Speaking with Children: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to Inclusion in Preschool Classrooms,” APCS (2021)
- “The Psychoanalytic Preschool Classroom: Practices and Possibilities,” APCS (2021) with Eileen Johnson
- “The Productivity of Not-knowing: Dialogue and Disability in an Inclusion Prekindergarten Classroom,” RECE (2019)
- “Inclusion first: reclaiming psychoanalytic theory in early childhood education with Disability Studies in Education,” RECE (2018)
- “Sometimes it’s cute but sometimes it’s annoying”: children’s emotional experiences of disability and inclusion,” AERA (2018)
- “Pip, the peeing puppy: A political and psychoanalytic reading of resistance in children’s play,” RECE (2017)
- “She’s with people like us, people without disabilities”: Imaginations of self and disabled other in an elementary school classroom,” APCS (2016)
Alex Collopy Rosenwald, Ph.D. 