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Provides the first practical, hands-on resource to help early childhood educators create learning environments in which black children thrive.
There has been much attention given to the achievement gap between white and minority students, especially African American children. Through research and years of experience, the author breaks down the cultural influences on children's learning styles and provides a practical approach to helping black children thrive in the classroom. For black children, which Sullivan defines as those of African descent, there is a disconnect between learning preferences and learning environments that must be bridged before the achievement gap can be closed. This hands-on resource is filled with effective strategies and best practices to help early childhood educators expand their "toolbox" for supporting children. Increasing cultural intelligence will allow us to work across the many differences in our classrooms. As our schools become more diverse, cultural competency will be an increasingly important skill for teacher's efficacy and children's success. By cultivating the individual genius of each child and meeting children where they are today, we can invigorate the education system and provide children high-quality early education experiences. Debra Ren-Etta Sullivan, EdD, is the cofounder and president of Praxis Institute for Early Childhood Education. She has more than twenty-five years of experience in higher education as a teacher, researcher, and administrator.
In Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework--one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names, Historically Responsive Literacy, was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices. The equity framework will help educators teach and lead toward the following learning goals or pursuits: Identity Development--Helping youth to make sense of themselves and others Skill Development-- Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplines Intellectual Development--Gaining knowledge and becoming smarter Criticality--Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression When these four learning pursuits are taught together--through the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Muhammad provides probing, self-reflective questions for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators as well as sample culturally and historically responsive sample plans and text sets across grades and content areas. In this book, Muhammad presents practical approaches to cultivate the genius in students and within teachers.
Learning to Lead combines theory and practice with important topics such as human development, diversity, anti-bias, and social change. New to this edition is information on leadership connections in school-age care and nurturing leadership in children. Each chapter is designed to prompt self-evaluation and personal leadership development.
A team of the early childhood field's foremost experts and presenters share insight and perspectives on twelve professional development topics.
Create a warm and inviting place where children feel at home. Discover the many ways your home can provide comfortable places where children love to learn and love to be. Filled with no- and low-cost ideas, this book demonstrates many unique and practical possibilities for your home's indoor and outdoor spaces. Chapters are packed with colorful photographs and provide examples and tips for designing learning zones, selecting items, organizing materials, and more. Checklists, resources, and questions are included to help you evaluate your setting, implement changes, and create a place that feels like a second home to the children in your care.
This timely book counters the devastating effects of racism on children's learning with a focus on "revolutionary love." Sharing ways they've overcome personal and professional challenges in their teaching, the authors show readers how to unpack unconscious biases and examine common, but inherently racist practices that make learning difficult or impossible for many children of color. They offer in return practices that affirm and celebrate all students' identities, languages, and cultures--building a community of engaged, valued, and thoughtful learners. You'll find guidelines for selecting diverse children's books, and ways to use those books in reading and writing lessons that help children identify both glaring and veiled forms of racism and take an anti-racist stance. If you want to create a vibrant classroom community that honors the funds of knowledge that children of color and their families bring to school, this is the book for you.
Creating Curriculum in Early Childhood explores the backward design model of curriculum development, equipping readers with the tools and methods they need to effectively apply backward design in the early childhood classroom. Clear yet comprehensive chapters walk new and veteran educators through an effective method for curriculum design that promotes meeting standards through intentional teaching while engaging children in developmentally appropriate, interest-based education focused on big ideas and conceptual understanding. Featuring desired results, assessment methods, and teaching techniques specific to birth to age eight, this critical guide also includes practical tips for educators new to the method. Designed to help students and practitioners alike, this powerful textbook combines early childhood philosophy and developmental research with highly practical descriptions, rationales, and examples for developing curricular units using backward design.
Drawing on interviews with 40 winners of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—the so-called "genius awards"—the insightful study throws fresh light on the creative process.
Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.
