Early Childhood Education Commons^™

Our Children, Their Stories: Storytelling In The Classroom, Malik Torres

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

My Master’s Thesis is about children and their stories. It seeks to understand story creation in the classroom and connect it to the cultivation of the broader classroom community. Here, storytelling is understood in its five forms: reading stories, oral storytelling, drawing stories, writing stories, and acting out stories. What threads these forms together is classroom community. In my thesis, I focus on a concept called “the narrative classroom.” A narrative classroom makes space for both play and storytelling; it incorporates the multi-modal process of literacy into a classroom environment centering children and their stories as official knowledge. Most importantly, …

The Importance Of Visibility In Curriculum And Teaching Practice, Jasmine Bailey

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

I am arguing that it is absolutely necessary for all teachers and administration to see the importance of making all children visible and valued and that they should include this idea into their curriculum plans and teaching practices. Despite the focus on representation, visibility in the curriculum is still lacking. I will detail how visibility is affected by the differences in how children learn, children who have experienced trauma and power dynamics and oppression.

This thesis will aim to express and display the value that all children should be made visible in the classroom. This includes all backgrounds and ethnicities …

The Negative Effect Labeling Has On Students' Relationship With Education, Mikayla Cunningham

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

Labeling students is a common practice in modern education but it is harmful to the relationship between the student and their learning process. I will first provide a clear definition and provide examples of labeling. I will show however innocuous or scientific a label may seem, it can have detrimental, lingering negative effects on a child’s relationship with their schooling. I will then demonstrate through real-life case studies the experience of students that have both been labeled and have not been labeled, showing the exact labels that were applied to the students, their educational progress, and how the labeling directly …

The Need For Spanish In Mainstream Classrooms: A Celebratory Reclamation Of Linguistic Identity, Keila Torres

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

This paper is a testament to the sociocultural importance of bilingualism in mainstream U.S. classrooms, specifically pertaining to the Spanish language and communities in which there is a large percentage of Spanish speakers. Approximately 13% of Americans are native Spanish speakers, this is equivalent to 40 million people. States like Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas can boast populations that include over 1 million Hispanic people (United States Census Bureau, 2019). However, our school curriculums do not reflect the large percentage of Spanish-speaking students who roam their hallways. I argue that traditional …