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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s important for students to have a beginning gleam of the various roles they can take on, within early childhood education,\u201d says Casper.\u00a0 \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Working with\u2014and for\u2014children
\nThe 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\u2019s advocate.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of room now within the early childhood field to move in different directions,\u201d says Casper. \u201cIt\u2019s not quite as hierarchical as it used to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Theilheimer agrees.\u00a0 \u201cEarly childhood education has over the past decades become increasingly recognized as a field,\u201d she says, also noting how increasingly mindful educators have become, of the role of parents and caregivers, in a child\u2019s learning.\u00a0 \u201cWorking together with families is the only real way to understand children and their cultures\u2014who they are and who they\u2019re going to be,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Real voices and faces
\nLearning Together profiles a range of people involved in children\u2019s early learning\u2014women and men, parents and professionals from different backgrounds and regions of the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have what we call \u2018Real Voices\u2019,\u201d says Theilheimer.\u00a0 \u201cSome books have voices from experts, but we decided to have people with whom readers could easily identify.\u00a0 So for example, one person profiled is a BMCC alum who\u2019s 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.\u00a0 These \u2018real voices\u2019 help students see themselves in the future in lots of different positions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Children change us
\nGrowth is a function of change, and both abound in early childhood learning, facilitated by what educators call \u201cthe developmental interaction approach.\u201d<\/p>\n
Theilheimer explains. \u201cThere\u2019s a familiar phrase now in education, which is \u2018learning by doing\u2019.\u00a0 And developmental interaction really is more than learning by doing, because it goes back to John Dewey\u2019s idea that you \u2018do\u2019, in the world, then you have a time to reflect\u2014that\u2019s when children make and build things about what they\u2019ve experienced, and adults can have a conversation about the learning, and end up learning how the children think and how the experiences influence them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Observation\u2014of the child, and of one\u2019s own reactions to the child\u2014is 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d says Theilheimer.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne 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,\u201d she says.\u00a0 \u201cAnd 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\u2014and that is a very, very powerful result of working in early childhood education.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}