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Full-Text Articles in Education

Creating Classroom Community To Welcome Children Experiencing Trauma, Katherina A. Payne, Jennifer Keys Adair, Shubhi Sachdeva Apr 2020

Creating Classroom Community To Welcome Children Experiencing Trauma, Katherina A. Payne, Jennifer Keys Adair, Shubhi Sachdeva

Occasional Paper Series

How elementary and early childhood classrooms engage with socio-emotional learning is deeply connected to creating a classroom community. Yet, much of socio-emotional learning curricula focuses on the individual child, rather than on the everyday interactions that build and sustain community. During the Civic Action and Young Children study, we spent a year in a Head Start preschool in Texas, where we noticed that although many children in the class struggled with varied difficult circumstances including poverty, homelessness, discrimination and threat of deportation, the teachers did not label them as homeless, illegal immigrants or poor. Additionally, children seemed to help one …


Preschool As A Wellspring For Democracy: Endorsing Traits Of Reasonableness In Early Childhood Education, Joy D. Erickson, Winston C. Thompson May 2019

Preschool As A Wellspring For Democracy: Endorsing Traits Of Reasonableness In Early Childhood Education, Joy D. Erickson, Winston C. Thompson

Democracy and Education

Traits of reasonableness are necessary characteristics of successfully engaged citizens within pluralistic liberal democratic societies. Given the evident unlikelihood of the spontaneous development of these critical characteristics, pedagogical effort ought to be exerted towards ensuring that this goal is realized. In what follows, we argue that preschool presents a unique and compelling opportunity for supporting this worthy pedagogical aim, such that, despite purported prohibitions entailed within arguments for the political neutrality of curricula, it ought to be promoted within this area. In the service of illustrating this point, we provide four examples of promising beginnings for this work.