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Articles 1 - 30 of 33
Full-Text Articles in Education
Singing In Dark Times: Improvisational Singing With Children Amidst Ecological Crisis, Stephanie Schuurman-Olson
Singing In Dark Times: Improvisational Singing With Children Amidst Ecological Crisis, Stephanie Schuurman-Olson
Occasional Paper Series
Through this research-creation project -- which is represented by a process-driven ten-minute video -- the author asks what ways of knowing emerge when children and adults, more-than-human, and inhuman engage in improvised singing together in an urban park? This project recognizes our current "dark times" within ecological collapse and operates from a space that hopes to build relationality with sonic ecologies through listening-and-singing experiences, while centering the voices of children and other singers within the ecologies we sing in-and-with.
Painting Our Treescapes: A Visual, Gretel Olson, Ingrid Olson, Stephanie Schuurman-Olson
Painting Our Treescapes: A Visual, Gretel Olson, Ingrid Olson, Stephanie Schuurman-Olson
Occasional Paper Series
Two children (ages 6 and 9) represent an afternoon spent in their urban, wintery treescape through visual art, photo documentation, and written narrative. The first piece, "My Imaginary Forest", considers the seasons, animals, and issues of artistic representation of nature. The second piece describes the relationship between a favourite tree and a child, and considers others -- both present and future -- who also occupy "Our Knotty Tree". All of the words, visual art, and photo selection are those of the children.
Making Kin With Trees: Three Educators And Children Entangled With Treescapes, Stephanie Jones, Lindsey Lush, Sarah Whitaker
Making Kin With Trees: Three Educators And Children Entangled With Treescapes, Stephanie Jones, Lindsey Lush, Sarah Whitaker
Occasional Paper Series
In this article, three educators from one small U.S. city draw on Donna Haraway’s feminist, posthumanist idea of making kin to explore their personal relations with trees and their work as educators to support children’s entanglements with trees. Working in three very different contexts with children: a working-class neighborhood, a public school kindergarten, and a forest kindergarten, the three authors illuminate the “magical” emergences of making kin with trees that fundamentally shifts what becomes possible to do and be. Their writing contributes to the fields of critical childhood geographies, feminist posthumanist pedagogies in early childhood education, and writing in affect …
Children As Design Visionaries, Learners, And Socio-Political Wayfinders: Mapping The Layers, Hierarchies, And Rhythms Of A School Community, Natalie R. Davis, Roni Barsoum
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 …
Fighting For Justice In Education: How Schools Can Lead The Change Towards A More Equitable World, Tara Kirton
Fighting For Justice In Education: How Schools Can Lead The Change Towards A More Equitable World, Tara Kirton
Occasional Paper Series
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different” (Roy, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has had tremendous implications for every aspect of life. School, work, celebrations and everyday social interactions have all felt the repercussions of the pandemic. While the shutdown called for an immediate pivot from our everyday ways of being, it has also provided opportunities for stillness and deep reflection. This moment of pause has provided an opportunity to think, speak and act differently. As a parent my hope is that educators will lead the change.
Playing Through Tragedy: A Critical Approach To Welcoming Children’S Social Worlds And Play As Pedagogy, Cassie Brownell
Playing Through Tragedy: A Critical Approach To Welcoming Children’S Social Worlds And Play As Pedagogy, Cassie Brownell
Occasional Paper Series
Children’s play frequently reflects the ways they understand and cope with personal life experiences and those in the wider world. Drawing connections to many of the tenants of Jonathan Silin’s lifelong work, the author offers illustrative examples of why play and children's social worlds matter as well as why adults should pay attention to what children do and say in their play. Through personal stories, the author shows how integrating play(full) experiences into the daily life of a classroom can foster children's understanding of seemingly "difficult" or "adult" ideas and events that may be confusing, fear-inducing or represent significant loss. …
If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity To Promote Expansive And Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature, Stephen Adam Crawley
If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity To Promote Expansive And Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature, Stephen Adam Crawley
Occasional Paper Series
In 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's literature as windows and mirrors and 2) considering stakeholder responses. For each strategy, I include preservice teachers’ (PTs’) statements that reflect how the …
What Do You Do When You Don't Know How To Respond? Supporting Pre-Service Teachers To Use Picture Books To Facilitate Difficult Conversations, Kathryn Struthers Ahmed, Nida Ali
What Do You Do When You Don't Know How To Respond? Supporting Pre-Service Teachers To Use Picture Books To Facilitate Difficult Conversations, Kathryn Struthers Ahmed, Nida Ali
Occasional Paper Series
In 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 …
Focus On Friendship Or Fights For Civil Rights? Teaching The Difficult History Of Japanese American Incarceration Through The Bracelet, Noreen N. Rodríguez
Focus On Friendship Or Fights For Civil Rights? Teaching The Difficult History Of Japanese American Incarceration Through The Bracelet, Noreen N. Rodríguez
Occasional Paper Series
Japanese American incarceration is one of few Asian American historical topics addressed in P-12 curriculum. A dearth of children’s literature is available about Japanese American incarceration, yet given young learners’ limited exposure to World War II historical narratives, simply reading a picturebook about the topic does not ensure that students and teachers will address the injustices involved in the event. This study contrasts the distinct pedagogical approaches taken up by two Texas elementary educators who read aloud Yoshiko Uchida’s The Bracelet, a picturebook that details a young Japanese American girl’s forced removal from her home.
We Are All Learning About Climate Change: Teaching With Picture Books To Engage Teachers And Students, Ysaaca D. Axelrod, Denise Ives, Rachel Weaver
We Are All Learning About Climate Change: Teaching With Picture Books To Engage Teachers And Students, Ysaaca D. Axelrod, Denise Ives, Rachel Weaver
Occasional Paper Series
The topic of climate change and climate justice is politically charged, doesn’t sit neatly within a single subject or content area, and raises concerns of not being ‘age appropriate’ for young children. In this paper we describe how teacher educators in an elementary education program support a student teacher who took up the topic of climate change and climate justice in her 1st grade teaching placement. She designed a unit around a picture book that focuses on the words and work of Greta Thunberg, and used a diverse set of texts to support students’ understanding of the complexity of climate …
Looking For Trouble And Causing Trauma, Marquita D. Foster
Looking For Trouble And Causing Trauma, Marquita D. Foster
Occasional Paper Series
The 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's 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 …
Choosing Advocacy
Occasional Paper Series
Two articles comprise this publication. In "Beyond the Story-Book Ending: Literature for Young Children About Parental Estrangement and Loss," Megan Matt analyzes over 30 books for young children on the topics of abandonment, estrangement, divorce, and foster care. She observes that this loss might appear as an event within the story or as a fear articulated by a young child. She states that, as an educator, she hopes that she can make the children realize that their own stories are "real" and legitimate, no matter what messages they might encounter or fail to encounter in the media. In "Walking the …
Toward A More Loving Framework For Literacy Education
Toward A More Loving Framework For Literacy Education
Occasional Paper Series
No abstract provided.
Claiming The Promise Of Place-Based Education
Claiming The Promise Of Place-Based Education
Occasional Paper Series
No abstract provided.
The “Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations” And Its Role In Maintaining White Supremacy Through Mathematics Education, Laurie Rubel, Andrea V. Mccloskey
The “Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations” And Its Role In Maintaining White Supremacy Through Mathematics Education, Laurie Rubel, Andrea V. Mccloskey
Occasional Paper Series
In this study, we offer an analysis of the phrase the "soft bigotry of low expectations" and considers its role in rhetoric about U.S. mathematics education policy and practice, especially in regards to Critical Mathematical Inquiry. From the phrase’s origins in a speech given by President George W. Bush in 2000, to its current use on social media, this phrase offers a lens into white supremacy and "tools of whiteness" (Picower, 2009), and their persistence in U.S. schooling paradigms, especially about mathematics. We analyze specific, recent instantiations of the phrase on blogrolls and Twitter, in addition to more implicit …
Mathematics For Whom: Reframing And Humanizing Mathematics, Cathery Yeh, Brande M. Otis
Mathematics For Whom: Reframing And Humanizing Mathematics, Cathery Yeh, Brande M. Otis
Occasional Paper Series
Mathematics for social justice allows students to see mathematics as an analytic tool to understand and influence issues important to them and their communities. Existing work in teaching mathematics for social justice often connects to secondary curriculum. But what about elementary mathematics? This paper describes the theoretical frames and gives an example of social justice-oriented mathematics with elementary-age students. We share the process of analyzing published K-6 mathematics curriculum as an entryway to engage in investigations that raise students’ awareness of social issues and to develop their mathematical power and sense of self as mathematics thinkers and doers.
Power To Change: Math As A Social-Emotional Language In A Classroom Of 4 And 5 Year Olds, Elinor J. Albin, Gretchen Vice
Power To Change: Math As A Social-Emotional Language In A Classroom Of 4 And 5 Year Olds, Elinor J. Albin, Gretchen Vice
Occasional Paper Series
Tells the story of how mathematics influenced a long term investigation around feeling powerful within an early childhood classroom. Written by Early Childhood Teacher, Elinor J. Albin, and Dean of Faculty, Gretchen Vice, this essay outlines the guiding questions by which teachers at The Advent School in Boston, MA connect mathematics to overarching themes and social-emotional learning. “Power to Change” concludes with observations about how and why mathematics provided a language for building social-emotional intelligence in four and five year olds.
Loving America With Open Eyes: A Student-Driven Study Of U.S. Rights In The Age Of Trump, Margaret N. Becker 9828901
Loving America With Open Eyes: A Student-Driven Study Of U.S. Rights In The Age Of Trump, Margaret N. Becker 9828901
Occasional Paper Series
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, the students of my 4th grade classroom in a public school in East Harlem had lots of questions about our country. Over and over they wondered: What is a right? How can we protect ourselves when we disagree with the government? This paper stories the year-long study of rights in the United States that grew out of these questions and the learning that came out of this curriculum, as well as works to define what patriotism means to me as an educator and a citizen.
Kids Make Sense... And They Vote: The Importance Of Child Study In Learning To Teach Responsively, Frederick Erickson
Kids Make Sense... And They Vote: The Importance Of Child Study In Learning To Teach Responsively, Frederick Erickson
Occasional Paper Series
A lecture that discusses the "developmental-interaction" perspective and practice that has become the hallmark of Bank Street. Erickson builds upon the relations of mutual influence among students, teachers, and learning environments, and taking account of the relations between local practice within the small-scale "here and now" interactional ecosystems of immediate learning environments and the workings of culture, language, and society across more distal connections in social space and time.
The Developmental-Interaction Approach To Education: Retrospect And Prospect, Nancy Nager, Edna K. Shapiro
The Developmental-Interaction Approach To Education: Retrospect And Prospect, Nancy Nager, Edna K. Shapiro
Occasional Paper Series
This paper analyzes the past, present, and future of the developmental-interaction approach to education: human development and the interaction between thought and emotion as well as the interaction between learners and their environment. Shapiro and Nager review the history of the developmental-interaction approach, outlining its essential features and tracing Bank Street College's distinctive role in its evolution. They then reassess key assumptions, address criticisms of developmental theory and its place in education, and suggest possible new directions.
"Noise Level Zero" And Other Tales From The Bronx, John Wolfe
"Noise Level Zero" And Other Tales From The Bronx, John Wolfe
Occasional Paper Series
Wolfe reflects on his journey of teaching in various settings, teaching him what public education should and should not be. He compares his experiences at two public schools in the Bronx with very different approaches to public education.
Principles For Responding To Children In A Traumatic Time, Sal Vascellaro
Principles For Responding To Children In A Traumatic Time, Sal Vascellaro
Occasional Paper Series
A list of principles that aim to help educators in their struggle to respond to the range of traumatic experiences many children have to live with—the death of a loved one, serious illness, violence, drug addiction, homelessness. This list offers something tangible to use as they respond to the children in their care.
Re-Visioning The World Trade Center, Alexandra Weisman
Re-Visioning The World Trade Center, Alexandra Weisman
Occasional Paper Series
This is a story that takes place more than a year after September 11, 2001. It is about the complex, ongoing ways that this event has affected curriculum. It is also about the thoughtful and ingenuous ways that eleven- year-old students at the Bank Street School for Children came to “re-vision” the World Trade Center site through three different perspectives.
Introduction: Teaching Through A Crisis: September 11 And Beyond, Alison Mckersie
Introduction: Teaching Through A Crisis: September 11 And Beyond, Alison Mckersie
Occasional Paper Series
An introduction to a volume of essays that provided a vehicle through which educators could share their experiences following September 11. This includes how teachers were addressing the troubling questions that the tragedy raised: What kinds of conversations had been sparked among children, teachers, and parents? How had curriculum shifted in response to this heretofore unimaginable event?
The Need To Be Apart In An Inclusive Educational Setting, Zenaida Muslin
The Need To Be Apart In An Inclusive Educational Setting, Zenaida Muslin
Occasional Paper Series
This paper illustrates the need for direct acknowledgement and support of children and faculty of color in inclusive educational settings. Muslin recounts her experiences at many different schools and how each offered a new perspective on diversity. The most profound impacts she has made in her community stem from her work at Bank Street School for Children, where she and her fellow faculty recognized the importance of having separate meetings and focus groups devoted to the concerns of people of color within the institution.
Conversations With Children About Death, Molly Sexton-Reade
Conversations With Children About Death, Molly Sexton-Reade
Occasional Paper Series
This paper emphasizes the need for conversations around death in the classroom. Today's children are exposed to information about death through a wide variety of media. Teachers have a responsibility to provide opportunities for children to process this information in ways that are developmentally appropriate - acknowledging children's "magical thinking" as well as experiences children may have surrounding death.
Wouldn't It Be Cool If Everyone Turned Out To Be Blue? Building A Curriculum About Sexual Orientation For Nine- And Ten-Year-Olds, Stephanie Nelson
Wouldn't It Be Cool If Everyone Turned Out To Be Blue? Building A Curriculum About Sexual Orientation For Nine- And Ten-Year-Olds, Stephanie Nelson
Occasional Paper Series
Nelson draws upon her experiences as an elementary school teacher to discuss ways in which sexual orientation can be addressed through curriculum. Aspects of the curriculum implemented in the Bank Street School for Children included "Gay Talks", read alouds, debates, and discussions about civil rights and how they relate to the LGBTQ community.
Performing Gender In The Elementary Classroom, Gail Masuchika Boldt
Performing Gender In The Elementary Classroom, Gail Masuchika Boldt
Occasional Paper Series
This paper raises questions about teachers’ interventions into children’s exchanges around gender in elementary classrooms. Masuchika Boldt argues that gender is ever-present in the classroom and children are constantly making assertions about the meaning of gender and the authenticity of their own and others’ gender performances. She speaks to the question, “If a teacher does interpret this exchange as being at least in part about gender, what, if any, response is called for?”
Introduction: Talking Tough Topics In The Classroom, Jonathan G. Silin
Introduction: Talking Tough Topics In The Classroom, Jonathan G. Silin
Occasional Paper Series
An introduction to this Occasional Paper, in which four educators describe their approaches to tough topics in the classroom—gender, sexual identity, death, and diversity. Despite differing subject matter, the essays have much in common from which we can learn. An important commonality is the involvement of at least three kinds of learning— cognitive, emotional, and social.
Teaching My Child To Resist In Kindergarten, Christine Ferris
Teaching My Child To Resist In Kindergarten, Christine Ferris
Occasional Paper Series
Ferris describes how she taught her son to resist in his kindergarten classroom while drawing on her own experiences as an educator. Their experience draws attention to common teaching methods that do not promote socialization or free thinking. This also highlights the issues that can arise when the value system of a school does not align with a family's own beliefs - especially when alternative schools are not a viable option.