From borrowing to localization: Implementing the pyramid model in a Canadian early childhood context

This study examines the implementation of the U.S.-developed Pyramid Model for Promoting Social-Emotional Competence in Infants and Young Children within a Canadian early learning and childcare context, using Policy Borrowing and Lending Theory as the guiding framework. Drawing on three waves of focus group interviews with 18 early childhood educators and 10 Pyramid Model coaches conducted between 2023 and 2025, the study explores how a globally disseminated, evidence-based intervention was adapted and localized within a provincially regulated early learning system in a Canadian province. Findings reveal that the transfer of the Pyramid Model involved far more than procedural training or technical implementation. Instead, the process required reconciling structural and curricular differences between the imported model and the province's early learning curriculum framework, navigating linguistic and cultural gaps across bilingual communities, and exercising professional agency to reinterpret and indigenize the model in practice. Educators and coaches engaged in active negotiation—filtering, translating, and hybridizing elements of the model to ensure cultural relevance and pedagogical coherence. By situating these findings within Policy Borrowing and Lending Theory's conceptual categories of cultural misalignment, local reinterpretation, and resistance, this study contributes to broader understandings of educational borrowing in early childhood policy. It underscores that effective cross-national transfer of evidence-based frameworks depends not only on fidelity to design but also on contextual responsiveness, cultural translation, and the empowerment of local practitioners as co-creators of innovation.