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Vulnerable Literacies
Get PDFWe’d find them nestled behind earlobes, amidst eyelashes, between fingers, in folds of the neck, along the scalp, behind knees, cozy in armpits, in zigzagged waistband imprints, hidden in eyebrows, or brazenly mid-chest. Who knew the body had so many hiding places?
There is always a bolt of shock when the examined spot—a speck of dirt, a freckle?—comes alive with spidery legs. Mother and child then engage in a practiced routine—a submission of the body, a pinch of skin, a tug of war with a barbed proboscis, a cold swab of alcohol. The wriggling visitor is always observed with a mixture of wonder and disgust.
At pick-up time, the teacher hands me a small piece of blue paper. A tick encased in plastic tape is attached, labelled with my child’s name, the date, and time. 9.00 Uhr. 29. Mai. It was found on the throat, and I’m told we should observe the area for a few weeks. There weren’t any ticks in Brooklyn. Romantic ideas about forest kindergartens are one of the reasons I was drawn to Germany. We celebrated a fourth birthday on the sidewalk in front of our 800-square-foot apartment and then boarded a plane for fields and forests. It was intended to be a year for me to finish my dissertation and a chance for the children to learn their father’s language. Best now, we were told, when the brain’s still plastic and hungry for new language. Unlike my stiff graduate school-trained, word- sated mouth, unable to form the doughy German ö at the back of the throat, the children gooble up this new language and are speaking fluently to teachers and friends within weeks. I am a shockingly slow learner. I spend my mornings in a dimmed room wielding pixelated daggers like epistemic and irreducibility. Later, I blink in the soft afternoon light stumbling through basic niceties with the German parents waiting to collect their children in the damp forest
What Stories, Like Water, Hold: A Response to Fikile Nxumalo
Get PDFThe stories we tell carry our beliefs, our histories, and our relationships. They orient us toward particular ways of living and being, both with each other and with the natural world, and guide us into our sense of self and our encounters with difference. They describe what is made alive and what is rendered in service
What Can We Not Leave Behind? Storying Family Photographs, Unlocking Emotional Memories, and Welcoming Complex Conversations on Being Human
Get PDFEveryone was startled by the flood that burst forth from my previously dry tear ducts, even me. What was supposed to be an ordinary oral presentation of a culminating assignment for Wendy Luttrell’s popular graduate school course on visual methodologies, Doing Visual Research with Children and Youth, had morphed into a strange waterworks festival starring me as the headlining performer. In addition to Wendy, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, the audience included Tran Templeton and several other peers who were also my fellow doctoral students at Teachers College, Columbia University.1 The course drew on Wendy’s work with children and youth in a public elementary school located in a working-class city in the Northeastern United States (Luttrell & Clark, 2018). Wendy’s intent was to inspire a “need to know more stance” (Luttrell, 2010, p. 233) about children and youth, that is, to cultivate a curiosity about how young people (re)constructed their lives and represented themselves, particularly with regard to the complex intersections of social identities, such as class, race, gender, and immigrant status. The assignment directions were seemingly straightforward: Wendy asked each student to peruse her extensive archive of photographs and videos, choose a focal child, then provide a visual analysis based on a video recording of that child making meaning of their own photographs
Welcoming Play in Times of Trauma: A Response to Cassie Brownell
Get PDFI’m honored and delighted to welcome Cassie Brownell to a growing community of early childhood play researchers. In one sense, welcoming implies an unequal power relation where an established member of a community introduces an unknown newcomer. This feels a bit disingenuous. Cassie is already a rising star in our field and really needs no introduction! Her work is part of an exciting new trend in literacy research that blends play with social activism and community building
Quintessential Jonathan
Get PDFIt was only a year ago, but many worlds away, Jonathan and I took a few hours off from a conference to hike in the hills above Las Cruces, New Mexico. The conversation wandered around people we know in common, those we have lost, and ideas we shared over 25 years as friends and colleagues. We kept returning to the topic of legacy, however, based on Jonathan’s recent reconceptualization of the term (Silin, 2020) and my interest in thinking more about it. As I listened to him explain his more generative version of this venerable notion, I remember thinking how these ideas were so quintessentially Jonathan
The Residency Revolution: Funding High-Quality Teacher Preparation
Get PDF(Re)Investment helps districts find ways to make shifts that can permanently embed residency funding into local budgets. The Residency Revolution is about identifying and maximizing the savings that a high-quality residency program can bring to a district.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/pt/1012/thumbnail.jp
An Invitation to Imagine Education Otherwise
Get PDFThis article presents an invitation to imagine education otherwise, what education could be if we took a restorative justice approach and make immediate changes. It focuses on the changes needed to make this vision a reality. Covid-19 has exposed many of the inequalities that exist in education and how these inequalities have negative effects on the neediest students. You are invited to imagine schools as sites of justice and freedom, to think of teaching that is centered on children, caring, and building relationships with families
Raising a Coconspirator: A Letter to My Daughter
Get PDFIn this letter to her daughter, the author utilizes a journey map to anticipate some of the decisions and actions she will have to make and take in order to raise her as an antiracist co-conspirator. As a white parent to a white child, the author explores necessary moves towards racial literacy, rethinking obedience, and revisiting concepts of independence. She explores the way in which her parenting must be envisioned differently given this current COVID moment amidst the movement for Black lives
The Role of the Father in the Young Child’s Life and Development: What Do Early Childhood Teachers Need to Know?
Get PDFThe contribution of the father to the young child’s life and development has been looked at far less than that of the mother. This paper analyzes how fathers impact the development of growing children and why this issue matters to early childhood educators. By extension, it analyzes the impact of a father’s absence. In today’s society of increasingly diverse parenting structures, many children are growing up in fatherless households. For such children, teachers may prove to be significant figures in the hierarchy of attachment. This paper begins with a brief history of attachment theory. It then provides an overview of family, teacher, child interaction within such a society and describes how the early childhood curriculum draws from the topic of the family. Next, it focuses on the nature of fatherhood by placing it in a cross-disciplinary context, with many experts attributing some of the ambiguity regarding the purpose of fatherhood to the tension between biology and culture. It also investigates the father’s contributions to nurturing, discipline, and play. The paper concludes with considering different reasons for father absence, bearing in mind that not all of these configurations carry potential trauma for children. Ultimately, the paper proposes that today, while the importance of father involvement may be increasing in some ways, it may be diminishing in others, especially when medical advancements allow women to control their biological destiny now more than ever. Throughout, the paper argues that educators should deepen their knowledge of alternative family structures and promote family-school partnerships, while recognizing their significance in the hierarchy of attachments for young children. A handbook for teachers with working models and suggestions for practice appears at the end of the paper
Roles for Candidates in the Classroom
Get PDFThis animated PowerPoint presentation shows different models for integrating aspiring teachers into the classroom to help with instruction while furthering their own learning. With more than a dozen examples, it\u27s a helpful starting point for partnerships seeking to shift towards a more cohesive P-20 education system.
The presentation includes voiceovers and timed animations. You can choose to present without these if you\u27d prefer. Settings are in the slideshow tab of PowerPoint.
Download here.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/pt/1014/thumbnail.jp