Early Childhood Education Commons^™

The Record, Issue 3, Bank Street College Of Education. Archives

The Record

The third quarterly newsletter from the Bank Street Archives

“It Was Hard, But It Worked:” Children’S Theories Of Learning To Read, Cristina Valencia Mazzanti, Laura Tiktin-Sharick, Madeleine Zuck, Tiphareth Ananda

Occasional Paper Series

In this paper we come together as teachers, a school leader and a professor to examine children’s theories of learning to read captured in written and illustrated texts created by 143 children currently enrolled in kindergarten to sixth grade. This collection of children’s theories of reading was created in the context of a progressive elementary school located at Smith College, a women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Our hope in examining children’s theories is to humanize and historicize current debates about how reading is taught. We also hope to offer a counter narrative to the dichotomies currently shaping reading education, …

Child Of My Heart: One Girl's Story Of Adoption, Danielle Bussolini

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This Integrative Masters Project explores the author's personal experience with adoption, written from a child's perspective. Unlike most published books on adoption, which are typically framed through the lens of an educator or parent, this work centers the emotional and psychological experience of the child at the heart of the story.

The Hanging Sculpture Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

The combining of disparate materials and distinct visual rhythms give these hanging sculptures an improvisational character and a jazz-like musicality.

Black And White Painting With Colored Tissue Paper, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

Combining materials that have very different properties can heighten a child’s sensitivity to those properties and to the possibilities they offer. In this project, instead of the usual cups of paint containing red, yellow, blue, and white, the children are given only black and white paint.

The Entwined Shape Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

This project is excellent for making children aware of the shape of the space between painted forms. It also provides an opportunity to point out how the shape of these spaces relates to the cardboard shapes they have painted.

The Entwined Shape project functions as a compliment to the Attached Shapes Project.

The Tall Box Sculpture Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

A free-standing sculpture offers a completely different experience than what was true of projects which end up affixed to a wall. There is now the opportunity to create an object that occupies the same space the child’s own body occupies.

The Standing Screen Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

In this project, children use rollers rather than brushes to paint on “scored’’ cardboard shapes. “Scored” is a term which means essentially to cut lightly. With cardboard, it means to cut the face-paper of just one side of the cardboard and not cut all the way through the material. A scored piece of cardboard folds very easily along the scored lines.

The Tube Construction Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

There is much learning by doing in this project. Children test out ideas and continuously adjust their thinking as they gain more knowledge about the material they are using. The sculpture is the material evidence of that back-and-forth process of evolving thought.

The Venetian Blind Sculpture Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

The slats from venetian blinds are quite stiff. When combined with cardboard tubes and glue, they allowed for new, and at times remarkable, solutions to the question of how one slat might be joined to another.

The Cardboard Construction Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

A limitation, restriction, or constraint can force us to consider previously unimagined possibilities. In the Cardboard Construction Project, the restriction is a material one. In preparing the materials for this project, I take cardboard and cut or score* it in as many ways as I can think of.

What will quickly become apparent is the surprising variety of forms that can be generated by altering a single material.

The Divided Box Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

For this project I use a broad variety of cardboard materials, along with some wood and paper materials, but I avoid materials with other color. The reason for doing this is to bring more attention to the different textures of the materials that are available.

The Puzzle Painting Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

In this project, each child is given a single sheet of cardboard that has been cut to form a useable puzzle. These puzzles can be as simple or as complex as suits the age of the child. Older children may be able to draw the shapes they want. A teacher can then use a mat-knife to cut the shapes out.

The Attached Shapes Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

Because this project ‘grows’ in a linear manner (one thing added to another), it often provides striking insight into how a child’s visual ideas unfold as they work.

The Shoe Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

Taking an object that is generally associated with a single common purpose and using it for an entirely different purpose is more than just a mischievous, aesthetic diversion—it is a deeply liberating act with considerable implications. It demonstrates an ability to see past the conventions and mental habits that usually limit our thinking. It is an ability that goes to the very heart of invention—not just aesthetic invention, but creative thinking itself.

The Ink Drawing Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

In this project, the children have before them a piece of paper 42” high that is pinned to the wall. A child is given a length of bamboo about as long as they are tall, to which a brush has been inserted. Because the handle of the brush is so long, even a small movement of a child’s hand can create a startlingly long mark on their large paper. This is a thrilling experience for a child, and it offers the opportunity to create a very different vocabulary of marks than they could with a small brush.

The Cut Up Painting Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

With some projects, it is the mischievous allure of a suggested action that draws children in. The Cut-up Painting Project uses this idea to open the door onto a valuable experience: take something which you thought of as whole, complete, finished, then literally cut it to pieces, and then reassemble it to discover a completely new set of possibilities.

The Stretched Fabric Painting Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

One of the first things children will experience is that it feels completely different to paint on fabric stretched over a frame, rather than on a piece of paper lying on a hard floor. The fabric has give to it, and texture. Most significantly, I use patterned fabrics, which is to say, before a child has even made a mark, there is something for them to consider and respond to. The heart of this project lies in the dialogue between the pattern the child encounters and the marks the child makes.

The Vertical Blind Project, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

This project began with a parent donating the very flexible white slats from their vertical window blinds. In the first part of this project, the children were simply given one of the slats to physically experiment with: to explore what was possible with this new, flat, white, flexible material. In addition to getting a feel for its surface texture, weight and floppiness, they explored its capacity to bend and twist. The engagement with their bodies inspired unexpectedly inventive aspects of dance and performance. After a time, we asked them to think about the blind as a material for a sculpture …

Tools, Mats, And Methods For Cutting Materials, Barry Goldberg

College Partner Collection

The material that has been essential to many projects is cardboard. Lightweight, sturdy, inexpensive and easy to shape, cardboard is a remarkably versatile material. It can also be seen as difficult to cut. With the right tools and cutting surface, this need not be the case.

People And Movement: A Unit Of Study On The Great Migration, Maria Arteta-Martelo

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This unit of study for third graders on the Great Migration was developed to fill a gap in a year-long immigration curriculum by incorporating Black history and the often-overlooked experiences of internal migration.

"It's Really The Support System That Makes It" Expanding Infant-Toddler Child Care Options In New York, Voices From The Field, Mark K. Nagasawa

Straus Institute for Thriving Children & Families

This report discusses findings from a small, exploratory study of early childhood educators' experiences working to expand access to high quality child care for infants and toddlers. Because of who participated in the study, it takes a particular focus on the federally-funded Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership program. The study's contribution lies in surfacing fine-grained policy issues that complicate expansion efforts from the perspectives of professionals who live within a fragmented early care and education (ECE) system every day. This "non-system" (1) makes it difficult to provide continuity of care to children and their families; (2) lacks appropriate space(s) to …

Why Indigenous Children’S Literature Matters: A Native Hawaiian Perspective, Julie Kaomea

Occasional Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Making Connections To The Local: Exploring The Role Of Indigenous Literature In Early Childhood Education, Lori Huston, Dr. Jan Hare, Ashleigh Janis, Leigh Kweon

Occasional Paper Series

Indigenous children's literature is a vital resource for nurturing cultural understandings and appreciation from an early age for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. This paper presents insights gathered from a workshop titled "Nurturing Indigenous Childhoods Through Themed Picture Books: Making Connections to the Local," which emerged as a culmination of our collaborative work on a massive open online course (MOOC) centered on Indigenous pedagogy in early childhood education. We curated a list of Indigenous children's books and engaged in discussions on the significance of Indigenous literature in nurturing cultural identity and literacy learning. In doing so, we aspired to create …

Descriptive Inquiry To Advance Democracy In Early Childhood Special Education Teacher Preparation, Soyoung Park, Rae Leeper

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

The field of early childhood special education continues to be dominated by deficit-based perspectives of young disabled children. In contrast, Descriptive Inquiry supports educators to see children as multifaceted and full of strengths, promoting the democratic aim of schooling to nurture individual human flourishing for the good of society. Through a qualitative discourse analysis, we explore how 36 graduate students applied Descriptive Inquiry to their work with young disabled children. We highlight four cases of graduate students and their focus children in this article. Our findings indicate that Descriptive Inquiry can serve an important means of advancing democracy for young …

What Happened To The Creative In The Creative Curriculum?, Lacey Peters, Mark K. Nagasawa, Maria Mavrides Calderon, Abigail Kerlin, Helen Frazier, Beth Ferholt, Erica Clarke Yardy, Margie Brickley, Alisa Algava

Straus Institute for Thriving Children & Families

This empirically-grounded commentary questions the basis for New York City Public Schools’ (NYCPS) adoption of the Teaching Strategies products—the Creative Curriculum (CC) and Teaching Strategies GOLD—as the mandated curriculum and assessment systems for early childhood education (ECE) programs administered by the New York City Public Schools. In an analysis shaped by our hybrid positionalities as early childhood educators, parents, policy makers, and researchers, we argue that this decision is a local case of neoliberalism’s simultaneous narrowing of educational quality and a transfer of public funding into private hands under the guise of the free market. Our commentary, …

Building Responsive & Sustainable Early Educator Apprenticeship Programs, Annie Schaeffing, Brooke Tucker, Liz Hartline, Lily Rosenthal, Davia Brown-Franklyn

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

This publication shares key findings and design recommendations from the Bank Street Education Center’s evaluation of Vermont’s early childhood education apprenticeship program. Drawing on excerpts from interviews and focus groups, the report explores how apprenticeship models can support early educators in earning credentials and degrees, and how program design can be adapted to better meet the needs of the early education workforce.

Methods For Meaningful Connection: Supporting Teacher-Child Relationships In Early Care And Education, Sheila Smith, Maribel Granja, Cristina Medellin, Mark Nagasawa

Straus Institute for Thriving Children & Families

This report discusses a combined professional development/exploratory research project focused on how to support relationships between early childhood educators and children. The project piloted the Teacher Reflection Tool (TRT), a very brief reflection tool, paired with a community of practice approach with 19 early childhood educators across 10 classrooms. Among the lessons learned were that the participants:

• Viewed positive relationships with children as family-like and individualized
• Observed that their relationships with parents influenced relationships with children
• Found that the TRT helped them to notice and reflect on their interactions with children in new ways

Among the recommendations that emerged were: …

It's Time To Bring Block Play Back To Kindergarten Classrooms, Davia Brown-Franklyn

Bank Street Education Center

Originally published on Medium, this Op-Ed describes the necessity of block play in kindergarten classrooms for the development of essential skills, such as spacial awareness and abstract thinking, language and literacy skills, mathematical reasoning, and critical thinking and problem solving skills.

The Storytelling Study: Understanding Ourselves And Others Through Storytelling, Georgia Moses

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Study on oral storytelling in early childhood education is ample. Study on oral storytelling in the elementary grades, however, is limited. This is likely due to the connection between storytelling and dramatic play, a creative and imaginative exercise that loses value in many classrooms as children grow. The emergent themes across the developmental stages of seven, eight, and nine year olds illustrate the need for and power of storytelling in second and third grade classrooms. The Storytelling Study is an interdisciplinary, multimodal curriculum in which children foster deeper understandings of themselves and others through the exploration of oral storytelling. The …