Education Commons^™

Promise In Infant-Toddler Care And Education

Occasional Paper Series

This special themed issue of the Occasional Paper Series seeks to highlight and challenge assumptions about infant-toddler care and education. In the Call for Papers, we specifically asked for critical analyses of the state of the field; for contributions from practitioners, policy researchers and policymakers, teacher educators, and colleagues from international contexts to interrogate the status quo. We were not surprised, however, when the papers submitted, with one exception, came from university researchers or faculty working with students. Caregivers and teachers of the youngest children are overwhelmingly women, often with families of their own, with limited time, support, or incentives …

The Best Of Both Worlds: Partnering With The Community To Create The Guttman Center For Early Care And Education, Robin Hancock

Occasional Paper Series

The Guttman Center for Early Care and Education was established in the fall of 2016 at Bank Street College with the intention of providing quality professional development and support to Family Child Care Providers (early childhood educators running small private daycares out of their homes) in Brooklyn, New York. Completely free to all participants, the Center seeks to attract providers, regardless of age, education level or years of experience, who were interested in deepening their understanding of early childhood development. Through a deep touch community engagement strategy and utilization of Bank Street's renowned Infancy Masters Program, early educators are encouraged …

Introduction To The Guttman Articles, Virginia Casper

Occasional Paper Series

The Guttman Center for Early Care and Education came about through a 2016 grant from the Guttman Foundation to provide a quality professional development and support system to child care providers and practitioners in East New York, Brooklyn. The program paired coaching with Saturday workshops delivered in the community to address local community needs. Following participants’ graduation, the program initiated a learning network to promote continued peer learning (see the articles in this issue by Robin Hancock and Marjorie Brickley). Although the project has ended, the learning network—and thousands of interactions from the many relationships that were formed—remain and continue …

Preparing Infant-Toddler Professionals: A Community College’S Perspective, Jennifer M. Longley, Jennifer M. Gilken

Occasional Paper Series

Preparing professionals to work with infants/ toddlers is complex and unique because of the age group. Community colleges have an integral role in the preparation of infant/ toddler professionals, The Borough of Manhattan Community College infant/ toddler preservice program identified the following four elements to prepare professionals to deliver high-quality, relationship-based practices: (1) relationship-based program, (2) fieldwork opportunities, (3) curriculum, and (4) faculty.

A Bizarro World For Infants And Toddlers And Their Teachers, Marcy Whitebook

Occasional Paper Series

A bizarro world reverses our everyday realities. You may be familiar with the concept if you have ever read DC Comics or watched Seinfeld. In the bizarro world I envision for our nation’s infants and toddlers, family income does not determine whether their parents can afford to take time off work in the first months of their lives nor their right to high quality early care and education. In every infant-toddler program, whether offered in a center or home, staff are steeped in the science of child development and early learning pedagogy, and can depend on good wages and working …

Overlooked Too Long: Focusing On The Potential Of Infant-Toddler Child Care, Joan Lombardi

Occasional Paper Series

Child care appears to be emerging as a national issue. After decades of being relegated to the minor leagues of American policy, child care for working families has become front-page news. It has been almost 50 years since the passage of comprehensive child care reform. The Comprehensive Child Development Act of l971 would have provided for a network of child care programs, ensured federal standards, and provided funds to train caregivers, among other provisions. Unfortunately it was vetoed, setting back child care for decades.

Unlocking Birth To Three: Context Really Matters, Hb Ebrahim

Occasional Paper Series

It is undisputed that birth to three are the foundational years where the youngest in our society experience extraordinary growth that contributes towards their development and learning. High quality programmes direct their efforts at building caring relationships, providing nurturing environments and working in partnerships with families and communities. Acting to develop responsive programmes and equitable practices, however, is not straightforward. Contestations have been brought to the fore by dissenting voices to mainstream narratives that privilege certain ways of knowing young children. In light of this, it is critical to ask: How has the dominant knowledge base for birth to three …

The Nurturing Care Framework: From Policies To Parents, Linda Richter

Occasional Paper Series

When most people think of early childhood development, what comes to mind is preprimary school learning; similarly, when they think about how best to ensure a child turns out well, their thoughts turn to adolescents. The FrameWorks Institute in Washington, DC, calls this “aging up,” a phenomenon that has been demonstrated as a bias in policy and public thinking in several countries, including South Africa (Richter, Tomlinson, Watt, Hunt, & Lindland, 2019). Yet it is the earliest period of life, from conception to two to three years of age, that most strongly regulates our trajectory across the course of our …

Infant Toddler Care And Education: Speaking Up For Young Children And Their Caregivers, Virginia Casper, Sharon Ryan

Occasional Paper Series

Much of the policy-and practice-focused research on infant-toddler care and education has been concerned with the issue of program quality. That is, what elements constitute a quality program for infants and toddlers that ensures their ongoing developmental success? Researchers have sought to identify the structural and process indicators necessary for young children to receive the kinds of responsive interactions that contribute to positive developmental outcomes.

Reading Emotions: Designing Digital Tools To Strengthen The “Social Brain” Of Young Children With Autism, Kirsten M. Benjamin

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Autism (ASD) is characterized by impaired development in social interaction and communication. This can affect the ability to develop relationships with peers and family. Being limited in this area leads those with Autism unable to translate their own emotions and the emotions of others. As technology develops, so do methods of teaching facial emotion recognition. Building these skills can increase the social communication abilities of those struggling with Autism. This paper will explore the effectiveness of various educational applications (apps).

Taking the lessons gained from previous iPhone application designs I will attempt to create a new application that incorporates the …

New York City Pre-K Leadership Study, Veronica Benavides, Faith Lamb-Parker, Sheila Smith

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Presents key findings from a study of New York City pre-K leaders that evaluated how leaders support teachers and what factors help or hinder leaders’ efforts to positively impact learning for all children.

Elements At Play: Influences Of Gender On Play In Single-Sex Settings, Elizabeth "Lily" Geiger

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This thesis will examine the ways that gender impacts dramatic play in early childhood classrooms by analyzing experiences in two single-sex school environments. The paper will review past and present literature as it pertains to the general topics of play and gender and pose insights about the role that both play in single-sex classrooms. It will also take into consideration the various gendered elements of our world and the impact of our social environments. The aim of the paper is not to propose next steps for gender education, but to examine current work through descriptions and observations in two classroom …

Welcoming The Stranger: Essays On Teaching And Learning In A Diverse Society

Occasional Paper Series

This issue of "Occasional Papers" is filled with stories by and about "strangers"--people of all ages who perceive themselves or have been perceived by others as outsiders either because of who they are, where they have come from, or even how recently they have arrived in this country. Successful educators know that the ability to welcome the stranger into the classroom, indeed an entire group of strangers each September, is essential to building a productive, caring community of learners. They know, too, that, from the point of view of students new to the school or society, the culture of the …

High-Needs Schools: Preparing Teachers For Today's World

Occasional Paper Series

In the second decade of the 21st century, some schools are in trouble and some schools are not. The subject of this Occasional Paper is the preparation of teachers for schools that--lacking sufficient resources, effective leadership, or vocal advocates--are failing to educate their students by any reasonable measures. The teachers and teacher educator contributors to this volume offer a more variegated set of responses grounded in a diversity of local experiences. Their approaches to researching and understanding the immediacy of becoming a teacher are based on decades of working in hard-pressed urban schools and the institutions that supply them with …

Classroom Life In The Age Of Accountability

Occasional Paper Series

Concerned that various reforms promising greater professional autonomy and status as well as student success are actually disempowering teachers, impoverishing intellectual life in schools, and serving as a portal for the marketization of teaching and education, editors invited teachers to respond to the ways in which the proliferation of standards and testing combined with their own loss of professional control is altering the landscape of American education. The editors' goal was to raise questions about whether and how educators are balancing the demands of high stakes testing, scripted curricula, and a focus on performance outcomes with the emotional complexity of …

Toward A More Loving Framework For Literacy Education

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Inclusive Classrooms: From Access To Engagement

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Challenging The Politics Of The Teacher Accountability Movement: Toward A More Hopeful Educational Future

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Life In Inclusive Classrooms: Storytelling With Disability Studies In Education

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Progressive Practices In Public Schools

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Constructivists Online: Reimagining Progressive Practice

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Claiming The Promise Of Place-Based Education

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Living A Philosophy Of Early Childhood Education: A Festschrift For Harriet Cuffaro

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Supporting Young Children Of Immigrants In Prek-3

Occasional Paper Series

This special issue of the Occasional Paper Series describes practices and policies that can positively impact the early schooling of children of immigrants in the United States. We consider the intersectionality of young children’s lives and what needs to change in order to ensure that race, class, immigration status, gender, and dis/ability can effectively contribute to children’s experiences at school and in other instructional contexts, rather than prevent them from getting the learning experiences they need and deserve.

Critical Mathematical Inquiry

Occasional Paper Series

Welcome to Issue 41 of Bank Street’s Occasional Paper Series. The issue features a collection of papers by authors with a shared affinity for the work of critical mathematical inquiry (CMI). In what follows, we present our framing of mathematics education as a participatory venue for CMI and situate it in the context of another, perhaps more familiar approach to teaching mathematics for social justice (TMfSJ).

Elementary Mathematics And #Blacklivesmatter, Theodore Chao, Maya M. Marlowe

Occasional Paper Series

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has opened up conversations in schools across the country about systemic racism, a “new” civil rights movement, and the treatment of children of color. In this article, a veteran elementary teacher uses the #BlackLivesMatter movement to help her students see the power of mathematics in their own lives, taking care to first connect with her school community so as not to incite trauma. Using an age-appropriate activity to investigate the feelings of anger felt by the Black community of Ferguson County, Missouri, shortly before the police murdered Michael Brown, we construct a conversation on what elementary mathematics …

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.

The World In Your Pocket: Digital Media As Invitations For Transdisciplinary Inquiry In Mathematics Classrooms, Lynette Deaun Guzmán, Jeffrey Craig

Occasional Paper Series

Building a curriculum from online digital media may provide opportunities for students to draw on their funds of knowledge, deconstruct dominant narratives, and engage with complex multimodal artifacts. We focus on an example of how we have used a digital infographic, The World as 100 People, to unpack global and local issues in mathematics classrooms. Using digital media as invitations for critical mathematical inquiry, we call for mathematics educators to push back on (1) the way mathematics should be formally taught in schools, and (2) a common practice of social media restrictions in schools.

Collaboration And Critical Mathematical Inquiry: Negotiating Mathematics Engagement, Identity, And Agency, Frances K. Harper

Occasional Paper Series

When faced with the challenge of supporting students to do the “messy” mathematical work necessary for exploring social justice problems through critical mathematical inquiry, teachers might rely on more procedural or direct instruction. Because how students learn matters as much as what they learn, this can inadvertently limit students’ engagement with mathematics. Instructional strategies designed to foster equitable collaboration can support critical mathematical inquiry by promoting norms for equitable student engagement and mathematics identity development. As teachers and students negotiate what counts as mathematics engagement and who has access to mathematics, students’ authority over mathematics and social justice issues increases.

Cultivating A Space For Critical Mathematical Inquiry Through Knowledge-Eliciting Mathematical Activity, Debasmita Basu, Steven Greenstein

Occasional Paper Series

Learning mathematics becomes more effective when teachers leverage their students' mathematical and everyday knowledge as resources for instruction. Thus, tasks that reveal these forms of knowledge would be especially useful to teachers. Unfortunately, such tasks are hard to find and even harder to create. Consequently, we developed a collection of mathematical tasks that we hoped would elicit “children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases (i.e., the understandings and experiences that have the potential to shape and support children’s mathematics learning—including children’s mathematical thinking, and children’s cultural, home, and community-based knowledge)” (Turner et al., 2012, p. 68). These tasks proved to be productive …