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Facilitating Conversations on Difficult Topics in the Classroom: Teachers’ Stories of Opening Spaces Using Children’s Literature
Get PDFFor this edition of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, we invited educators to share stories from their practice: times when they utilized children’s literature and conversations to address real life; the difficult topics that children experience through the mirror of their own experiences or the windows of their peers, communities, or world
COVID-19 and Online Early Childhood Education
Get PDFThis infographic summarizes some themes from a survey conducted with early childhood educators across New York in May 2020, when 65% of programs reported providing online ECE. While respondents expressed clear needs for support in providing technologically-mediated ECE - including tech support, curricular, materials, and hardware - they also displayed three key components of any ECE, commitments to relationships, flexibility, and creativity. This highlights a critical need to document educators\u27 many creative approaches and lessons learned from the pandemic.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/sc/1006/thumbnail.jp
Equitable Compensation for the Child Care Workforce: Within Reach and Worth the Investment
Get PDFThis brief outlines concrete ideas and innovative strategies to help advance early educator compensation at the local, state, and federal levels and, in turn, support the development and care of our nation\u27s youngest learners.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/bsec/1003/thumbnail.jp
Taking a Journey to The Land of All: Using Children’s Literature to Explore Gender Identity and Expression with Young Children
Get PDFChildren’s literature is a powerful tool that helps shape young children’s understandings of themselves and the world. As such, children’s literature can help young children develop deeper and more nuanced understandings about gender, gender identity, and gender expression. This article shares how teacher Kerry Elson planned and implemented a curriculum with first-grade students that focused on gender identity and expression. In this curriculum, she carefully selected children’s literature to explore gender identity and expression with young children
If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity to Promote Expansive and Critical Conversations with Children’s Literature
Get PDFIn this article, I reflect on my practices as a teacher educator and respond to the following questions: How do I foster the capacity of pre-service teachers to use children’s literature to promote expansive and critical conversations in the classroom? How do pre-service teachers report their stances and sense of preparedness when reflecting on the course? To address these questions, I share two strategies I employed in my undergraduate course for elementary education majors: 1) emphasizing children\u27s literature as windows and mirrors and 2) considering stakeholder responses. For each strategy, I include preservice teachers’ (PTs’) statements that reflect how the strategy impacted their stances about children’s literature and preparedness to use it in the classroom to foster expansive and critical conversations that are relevant and responsive to students’ diverse lives
Storytime is a Sunrise: Employing Children’s Literature to Mediate Socio-Emotional Challenges in the Life of a Young Child
Get PDFThis piece explores the trials and victories of a teacher\u27s literary therapy for Will* a student faced with the ravages of mental health struggles and instability in his home life. The purpose here is to divulge the vulnerabilities of a personal story in the hopes of generating support for other educators who might be battling similar conflicts. Along the way, as varying children\u27s books like My Happy Sad Mummy, by Michelle Vasiliu, and The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas, play integral parts in emotional healing, the teacher confronts her own internal unrests as Will\u27s obstacles inch too close to home. Exploring Will\u27s circumstances unravels her safe disassociation and teaches her valuable lessons about vulnerability and being real. Making peace with many unanswered questions becomes the best way to cope, and helping Will find wellness, leads closer to finding her own
What Do You Do When You Don\u27t Know How to Respond? Supporting Pre-Service Teachers to Use Picture Books to Facilitate Difficult Conversations
Get PDFIn this paper, the authors – a preservice teacher (PST) and a teacher educator – consider how teacher education might better prepare PSTs to use picture books to facilitate difficult conversations in elementary classrooms. They share missed opportunities from their own experiences in a fourth-grade fieldwork classroom and in a graduate-level elementary literacy methods course where they felt unprepared to respond to students’ comments about “controversial” topics. They reimagine how these experiences might have been transformed to be more educative for PSTs, first by considering how they could have responded more thoughtfully in the moment and then by thinking about how they could have built upon these particular moments to deepen PST learning. Lastly, authors share ideas for how current assignments in a literacy methods course could be revised to more intentionally support PSTs to use picture books to engage with content that may be difficult to address with elementary learners
Becoming a System of Professional Learning: Conceptualizing Improvement As a Throughline of Learning
Get PDFThis white paper introduces the “Throughline of Learning” (Throughline) model developed by the Bank Street Education Center. The model builds on the concept of the instructional core and demonstrates how focusing on system-wide adult learning needs can help districts successfully reimagine their approach to instructional improvement.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/bsec/1002/thumbnail.jp
Looking for Trouble and Causing Trauma
Get PDFThe purpose of this paper is to examine the genuine but misguided efforts to address the behaviors of Pre-K students in a Texas public school. After espousing the concept of building strong children through correction, evaluation, and intervention in my role as assistant principal, I began to question how these methods tended to lead to pathologizing the behaviors of Black pre-kindergarteners in my school. In an attempt to find solutions to the children\u27s perceived misbehavior, Pre-K teachers were charged with utilizing PBIS strategies and the RTI process for behavior. Social and emotional learning (SEL) was also considered. We discovered that SEL programs were too cumbersome and expensive and that all the approaches only seemed to reinforce teachers\u27 deficit thinking. This paper concludes by making the case for the cultural practice of othermothering as a different approach to address the behavior and learning needs of Black children
Threading the Needle: On Balancing Trauma and Critical Teaching
Get PDFThis essay describes and takes up the task of what the authors call threading the needle—teaching difficult content with a critical lens while simultaneously teaching with a trauma-informed pedagogy. Drawing data from three qualitative studies, one focused on teachers teaching for social justice in unjust school spaces, another looking at how teachers teach war to the children of soldiers, and a third how teachers teach lynching in schools near historic lynching sites, this manuscript argues that threading the needle is made more difficult by a too generalized definition of trauma informed teaching, shortsighted professional development on the topic, and too little direction on pedagogy. This leaves teachers feeling adrift and subtly signaled to avoid teaching difficult content with a critical lens, confirming for some teachers the absence of teaching controversial topics of race, class, gender, sex, and resistance altogether while others teach critically, but quietly, outside the watchful eye of the school