Over the past 30 years, the number of working mothers of children under the age of six has doubled, according to Early Childhood Education: Learning Together, a new textbook from McGraw-Hill Higher Education, written by BMCC Teacher Education chair Rachel Theilheimer, and Virginia Casper, a professor at the Bank Street College Graduate School of Education.
Educating young children is a growing field with many paths and pedagogies, and Learning Together, which also involved Bank Street and BMCC faculty as advisors, chapter reviewers and writers, introduces students to the best practices and career options available to them.
“I think it’s important for students to have a beginning gleam of the various roles they can take on, within early childhood education,” says Casper. “It may even be that they work in a classroom for 15 years, and then go back and gets a masters degree and do advocacy or work in a hospital in child life.”
Working with—and for—children
The book provides insight into wider contexts of early childhood education, such as globalization, immigration, and early childhood in non-western cultures, and shows how careers in the field tend to fork into two paths: working with children; being a caregiver or teacher, for example, or working for children, which could include becoming a researcher, toy creator, or children’s advocate.
“There’s a lot of room now within the early childhood field to move in different directions,” says Casper. “It’s not quite as hierarchical as it used to be.”
Theilheimer agrees. “Early childhood education has over the past decades become increasingly recognized as a field,” she says, also noting how increasingly mindful educators have become, of the role of parents and caregivers, in a child’s learning. “Working together with families is the only real way to understand children and their cultures—who they are and who they’re going to be,” she says.
Real voices and faces
Learning Together profiles a range of people involved in children’s early learning—women and men, parents and professionals from different backgrounds and regions of the country.
“We have what we call ‘Real Voices’,” says Theilheimer. “Some books have voices from experts, but we decided to have people with whom readers could easily identify. So for example, one person profiled is a BMCC alum who’s a kindergarten teacher in Las Vegas, Nevada, one is a woman from Arkansas who, when her child was only six months old was called away on reserve duty, and another is a mother from California whose daughter was born with multiple disabilities. These ‘real voices’ help students see themselves in the future in lots of different positions.”
Children change us
Growth is a function of change, and both abound in early childhood learning, facilitated by what educators call “the developmental interaction approach.”
Theilheimer explains. “There’s a familiar phrase now in education, which is ‘learning by doing’. And developmental interaction really is more than learning by doing, because it goes back to John Dewey’s idea that you ‘do’, in the world, then you have a time to reflect—that’s when children make and build things about what they’ve experienced, and adults can have a conversation about the learning, and end up learning how the children think and how the experiences influence them.”
Observation—of the child, and of one’s own reactions to the child—is a rich resource for educators presented in the book through reflective exercises, case material, and connections with National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) standards.
“We learn about children from children; we learn about the individual child, and then we also learn about what to expect in the future from other children. But another thing is that we learn about ourselves,” says Theilheimer.
“One of the things that happens to people who work with children is that we hear the voices of our parents and teachers coming out of our own mouths,” she says. “And if we stop and reflect, we can think about how we want to respond, and start learning from our interactions with children about who we can be—and that is a very, very powerful result of working in early childhood education.”