I borrow from the tradition of landscape painting to illustrate alternative perspectives on the unfulfilled rhetoric of ECE in American society. The representational genre of figurative landscapes depicts both people and context in relationships, with selective attention to critical details. A wide-angled format permits the inclusion of temporal aspects, thus conveying the dynamic relationship between how things were and how they are. With those potentials in mind, the landscape portrayed illustrates a cultural model of U.S. ECE including philosophical, socio-political, and social science contributions to what drives us a as a profession. The figurative elements of this landscape are limited to brief sketches of enduring practices and professional discourses guided by ideological foundations. The contemporary portion of this composition includes cracks and shifts in the terrain, evidence of the weight of socio-cultural and political change. This chapter concludes with an unfinished image of a radicalized EC teacher education as a creative hybrid of some of our field's long-held values and traditions, re-invigorated with imagined possibilities better suited to children growing up in a new world. (author abstract)