Education Commons^™

Learning Within Socio-Political Landscapes: (Re)Imagining Children’S Geographies, Kathryn Lanouette, Katie Headrick Taylor

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Stories From Islita Libre: Digital Spatial Storytelling As An Expression Of Transnational And Immigrant Identities, Jennifer Kahn, Daryl Axelrod, Matthew Deroo, Svetlana Radojcic

Occasional Paper Series

In this essay, we examine the relationship between students’ spatial literacies of their neighborhoods and communities and their transnational identities, the latter which have complex, broad spatial and temporal dimensions. Over four months, we, a team of university researchers, led a series of instructional activities with a class of racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse first- and second-generation immigrant students in an 11th grade introduction to research course. Here, we document the ways in which students learned about various data sources for inquiry to create digital, layered map-based stories about the factors that shape their (and others’) immigrant experiences in their …

Learning To See More Clearly: Extending Lucy Sprague Mitchell’S Vision For Geography Teaching, Abigail Kerlin, Ellen Mccrum

Occasional Paper Series

In 1934, Lucy Sprague Mitchell called for teachers and students to make maps in order to better understand the world around them. Her inquiry method is still critical to developing geographic thinking in students and can be extended further. Map making can not only clarify relationships in our environments, it can also be used to develop students’ abilities in perspective taking. Making maps, sharing and juxtaposing of maps can support students in understanding that others experience the world differently. Maps can tell stories of our experiences in space that can expand our understanding of one another. This understanding of a …

Mapping Racespace: Data Stories As A Tool For Environmental And Spatial Justice, Emily Reigh, Meg Escudé, Michael Bakal, Edward Rivero, Xinyu Wei, Collette Roberto, Damaris Hernández, Amber Yada, Kris Gutiérrez, Michelle Hoda Wilkerson

Occasional Paper Series

In this essay, we share our experiences of leading a middle school data science workshop on the topic of environmental racism (ER), in particular, the disproportionate burden of pollution on communities of Color. During the workshop, youth explored case studies of local and global data-based environmental advocacy, analyzed datasets that we provided, conducted journalistic research, and created maps and other data visualizations. Our goal was to provide opportunities for youth to recognize the strengths and limitations of data, identify environmental inequities, and advocate for social change.

How Urban Forest School Gave Us The Connections We Needed During The Pandemic, Margaret Nell Becker

Occasional Paper Series

In the wake of the pandemic, teachers were asked to change their curriculums to meet the health, safety, and social-emotional needs of our students. Urban Forest School provided a way for my students to learn safely outside, while also helping to reconnect with a world that they had been isolated from for an entire year. This paper will detail how, through unstructured play outside, my students created meaningful landmarks that provided sites for multi-faceted learning and connection during the pandemic.

Children As Design Visionaries, Learners, And Socio-Political Wayfinders: Mapping The Layers, Hierarchies, And Rhythms Of A School Community, Natalie R. Davis, Roni Barsoum

Occasional Paper Series

Despite the seemingly intractable problems of public schooling, we (as researchers and dreamers) remain encouraged by the persistent efforts to reconfigure and reimagine the sociopolitical landscape of schools. We begin this essay by recognizing the work of individuals bravely and imperfectly expanding notions of what schools could and should be. We stand in solidarity with the innovators sowing, designing, and reaching toward more just social futures, dreaming of schools for children that are not so distant from the paradise Butler (2001) describes (Figure 1). This liberatory dreamwork coincides with long histories of communal ingenuity (Vossoughi et al., 2016), resistance against …

We’Re Not Migrating Yet: Engaging Children’S Geographies And Learning With Lands And Waters, Anna Lees, Megan Bang

Occasional Paper Series

Considering the places, the geographies, of children’s learning, of human learning, is fundamental to seriously considering not only the “whats” or the content of learning but perhaps more importantly the “whys” and the “hows” of learning and the overall goals of education. The whys and hows of education construct what is deemed relevant and irrelevant as well as what is rendered invisible to the “here and now” to children’s lives (Apple, 2004; Iorio & Parnell, 2015; Nxumalo et al., 2011; Tesar, 2015). We argue in our work that issues of place, and relevancy to the “here and now”, is always …

Learning Within Socio-Political Landscapes: (Re)Imagining Children’S Geographies, Kathryn Lanouette, Katie Headrick Taylor

Occasional Paper Series

In this special issue, we bring together educators and researchers to (re)imagine what it means to teach and learn within the immediacy of the here and now, an orientation crucial to confronting contemporary threats to children’s lives, democracy, and the planet. We seek to extend and broaden Mitchell’s original conceptualization by centering the past and future alongside the immediacies of the now, elevating Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) perspectives in children’s geographies and exploring potentialities of mapping in analog as well as emerging digital forms. We also aim to carry forward her commitments to listening to children with …

More Than Civil Engineering And Civic Reasoning: World-Building In Middle School Stem, Alejandra Frausto Aceves, Daniel Morales-Doyle

Occasional Paper Series

This narrative essay describes a project in an urban sixth grade science class that began as an effort to link civic engagement with disciplinary learning in chemistry. The ways in which students took up this project prompted the authors to see urban infrastructures as engineered sites of learning with world-making possibilities. By interrogating the ways in which science and engineering practices are imbued with values and happen in places, teachers can engage young learners in critical examinations of their built worlds. The authors argue that there is an opportunity in K-8 engineering education to avoid reproducing some of the pathologies …

Website Review Guide, Prepared To Teach

Prepared to Teach

This deck shares examples of strong teacher residency websites.

Communications Guide Version 1.0, Prepared To Teach

Prepared to Teach

This guide is focused on messaging about teacher residencies. It provides recommendations about branding, visual, narratives, and social media.

A Primer For Incorporating Pre-Service Co-Teaching Into Teacher Residencies, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

Pre-Service co-teaching – where teacher candidates engage as co-teachers during student teaching – is a strong instructional model, especially when combined with yearlong teacher residencies. This brief features a combination of resources, ideas, and activities that can help your preparation program/school district partnership create a shared understanding of pre-service co-teaching.

Technical Report: Listening To Teachers Study, Mark K. Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This is the summary report for the second year of the Listening to Teachers Study which asks how early childhood educators in New York City (NYC) have been faring through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The study’s purpose has been to seek deeper understandings of what NYC’s early care and education (ECE) workforce has experienced during the Pandemic to inform decision-making about the city's future ECE systems by raising issues for reflection and action-oriented discussion.

The study has followed a multistage, exploratory-mixed methods design, incorporating: 1) ongoing consultation with ECE stakeholders to incorporate questions of interest to them – and their …

Towards A National Definition Of Teacher Residencies, Pathways Alliance, Prepared To Teach, National Center For Teacher Residenices

Prepared to Teach

The Pathways Alliance has developed this definition of teacher residencies to help clarify the field's use of the term. Our intention with this document is to support local partnership discussions about residency design and improvements and to provide state, regional, and federal leaders with a condensed yet thorough definition to guide policies that can support high-quality residencies to attract, prepare, and retain a robust and diverse teaching workforce.

The initial draft was co-constructed by the Teacher Residency Working Group, a collaborative group of Pathways Alliance members with expertise in residency development, support, and research. To inform and revise this definition, …

A Framework For Coaching In Early Childhood Settings: Drawing On Bank Street College Of Education’S Developmental-Interaction Approach (Dia), Virginia Casper, Milenis Gonzalez, Tarima Levine, Emily Sharrock, Annie Schaeffing

Bank Street Education Center

Coaching helps teachers activate and better articulate their previous knowledge, skills, values, and belief systems, along with new concepts, to construct and continually refine an approach that is meaningful in their everyday work. This framework captures some commonalities of a positive coaching stance across contexts while allowing enough flexibility to make use of these ideas in ways that will serve that setting and teachers best.

District 75 Redesigned For Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Elizabeth White

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This paper is intended to analyze what is currently offered by the New York City Department of Education, and District 75 (D75) school programs, to students with moderate to severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their families. Changes to District 75 programming, based on current research, could vastly improve educational outcomes for students with ASD. Individuals on the autistic spectrum have been historically underrepresented, under-resourced, and underestimated. This paper highlights an educational and social justice need for change. Using the framework that analyzes race and ability called Dis/ability Race Studies (DisCrit), educators and administrators will come to understand that disability …

Who's There For The Directors?, Mark K. Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This third report from the Listening to Teachers study’s second year focuses on a subsample of early childhood program leaders (n=113) in NYC. Among the key findings in this report:

• Support from supervisors lowered the odds of survey participants reporting potential burnout.
• However, the odds of program leaders reporting potential burnout were 1.7 times higher than for other respondents.
• The odds of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) respondents being in leadership roles were significantly less than their white colleagues.

While this study's self-selected sample makes these findings ungeneralizable, they do raise the critically important question, What is …

Registered Apprenticeship Programs And Teacher Residencies: Building Shared Understandings Between Workforce Development And Education, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This brief is the first in a series exploring principles that Prepared To Teach has surfaced as helpful for designing Registered Apprenticeship Programs for teacher residencies to promote and support high-quality teacher preparation systems. Sign up for our monthly newsletter for future releases.

Is There A Lesson From Comparing The Covid-19 Pandemic To The Experience Of Disability? A Response To Carol Rogers-Shaw’S “Disabled Lives & Pandemic Lives: Stories Of Human Precarity”, Tonette Rocco, Debaro Huyler

Occasional Paper Series

In “Disabled Lives & Pandemic Lives: Stories of Human Precarity,” Carol Rogers-Shaw narrates several stories that convey the anguish, trauma, loss, and horror experienced by many during the pandemic. Through storytelling, she demonstrates that “the pandemic experiences we shared might provide a foundation to build … parallels between living with a disability and living in a pandemic.” Even so, Rogers-Shaw cautions us not to get distracted by pandemic-related issues or inspirational stories. Instead, she correctly points out that COVID-19 pandemic experiences mirror the unpleasant aspects of daily life for people with disabilities.

Disabled Lives And Pandemic Lives: Stories Of Human Precarity

Occasional Paper Series

The idea for Carol Rogers-Shaw’s essay began in April 2020, six weeks into the initial COVID lockdown, at her Zoom-based PhD dissertation defense. Carol’s dissertation brought together a narration of her life as a person with a disability and her work as a high school teacher of students with identified disabilities, conceptualized and reconceptualized through the lens of critical disability studies.

Feisty Stories Of Living With Disability, Scot Danforth

Occasional Paper Series

Carol Rogers-Shaw’s rich memoir continues a fascinating tradition of autobiographical disability narratives that include works such as Stephen Kuusisto’s (1998) Planet of the Blind, Terry Galloway’s (2009) Mean, Little, Deaf Queer, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s (1998) Willow Weep for Me, and disability rights leader Judy Heumann’s (2020) Being Heumann. These exemplify what Garland-Thomson (2007) called “fresh and feisty disability narratives” (p. 119). Without apology, and often with great pride, these stories place the impaired and vulnerable body at the center of the plot structure. Through her own narrated experiences and by weaving in myriad encounters with her many disabled students, Rogers-Shaw …

On Turning Tables, Hubris, And Humility: Reflecting Upon Carol Rogers-Shaw’S “Disabled Lives & Pandemic Lives: Stories Of Human Precarity”, David J. Connor

Occasional Paper Series

What can be learned about the pandemic through the lens of disability, and conversely, what can we come to know about disability through the Covid-19 pandemic? Rogers-Shaw contemplates these reciprocal questions in a highly original essay that is wide in scope. After thinking about how to best describe the experience of reading her work, the word “wondrous” came to mind, as the essay is both delightful and powerful. Why? Because she examines and explores what has recently concerned many of us in education, that is, the pandemic’s impact upon the lives of both teachers and students with and without disabilities. …

Disabled Lives & Pandemic Lives: Stories Of Human Precarity, Carol Rogers-Shaw

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, I pay particular attention to four concerns that have come to the fore in startling ways for people worldwide during the pandemic. These include building empathy and community through the struggle to manage the fear of death, acceptance of disappointment and frustration, recognition the importance of being in tune with one’s body, and living with chronic grief. Drawing on stories from my life as a teacher and as a person with a disability, I hope to provide readers with both a way to reflect on the ongoing existential and practical concerns raised by the pandemic, and to …

Introduction To Carol Rogers-Shaw’S “Disabled Lives And Pandemic Lives: Stories Of Human Precarity”, Gail M. Boldt

Occasional Paper Series

The idea for Carol Rogers-Shaw’s essay began in April 2020, six weeks into the initial COVID lockdown, at her Zoom-based PhD dissertation defense. Carol’s dissertation brought together a narration of her life as a person with a disability and her work as a high school teacher of students with identified disabilities, conceptualized and reconceptualized through the lens of critical disability studies.

Forgotten Frontline Workers, One Year Later, Mark K. Nagasawa

Straus Center for Young Children & Families

This is the second in a series of reports discussing findings from a June 2021 survey sent to New York Aspire Registry members who work in NYC (n=663). It also follows up on Forgotten Frontline Workers, a report issued last year which focused on family child care (FCC) professionals’ experiences earlier in the pandemic. The results discussed in this report come from a self-selected sample (n=97), and cannot be used to draw conclusions about all FCC professionals in NYC; however, their value comes from recognizing each of these participants’ humanity and the important policy-relevant issues …

Progressive Virtual Learning For Our Youngest Learners, Erica B. Held

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This study addresses how teachers build a progressive curriculum online for our youngest learners. Our youngest learners learn through play and the author sought to gather data in order to understand how teachers approached this age group in an online space. To conduct the research, ten observations were made of a pre-k class and a first grade class. Throuobservation and recording, four main themes were identified that progessive educators were using to create progressive curricula: Building Community, Progressive Pedagogy, Student Voice and the Home-School Connection. To build community the teachers observed had students bring objects from home, offered consistent morning …

Six Stories: An Examination Of What It Means To Be Asian American, Gillian Sherman

Graduate Student Independent Studies

The author, who herself identifies as Asian American, engages in a personal exploration of her own and others’ experiences of being Asian in America.Through a review of the literature of documented stereotypes of Asian Americans as well as interviews the author conducted with five women who identify as Asian-American, an examination of what it means to be Asian American is presented. Futher, consideration of the impact of international and interracial adoption experiences on the identity development of adoptees from East Asian countries is explored through two of the interviewees’ experiences who were adopted as well the author’s own experience of …

Teacher Preparation Programs And Teacher Candidates Supporting Staffing Needs During Covid-19 - Program Highlights, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

A compilation of programs from across the Prepared To Teach National Learning Network that have creative staffing models that directly address staffing and substitute teaching shortages.

A Path To Equity: Solving New York's Teacher Turnover & Quality Challenges, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This white paper frames both the case for and an approach to addressing persistent teacher quality, diversity, and turnover challenges in the State of New York. A growing set of research and promising practice informs the report, which is intended to offer a high-level understanding of the complexities around how the economics of teacher preparation both drives educational inequities and can be shifted to promote educational quality and equity by investing in funded teacher residencies.

Federal Funding For Aspiring Teachers: An Investment In The Nation's Future, Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

Prepared to Teach

This concept paper is a high-level overview of the case for and a pathway to achieve universal residencies across the nation created to inform policy discussions at the U.S. Department of Education.