The Role of Action Research in Fostering Culturally-Responsive Practices in a Preschool Classroom

This article addresses the practices of multiculturalism and social justice as they are explored by an early childhood classroom. In response to the school requirement of participation in the Martin Luther King assembly, the children and their teachers seek to create a meaningful contribution reflective of the children's voices and conceptions of justice and equality. The article examines classroom practices as children and teachers coconstruct meaning around multiculturalism in early childhood. Through classroom research and discussion, the children develop their own concepts around these issues, finding meaningful ways to share their knowledge with the larger school community.

Section: Starting the Conversation: The Search For Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Capturing the Moment: Diverse Meaningful Documentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Capturing the Moment: Diverse Meaningful Documentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Creating Connections: Conversations With Martin Luther Kingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Creating Connections: Conversations With Martin Luther Kingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

“Rights are the Words for Being Fair”: Multicultural Practice in the Early Childhood Classroom

Bentley

2011

Benchmarks Curricular Planning and Assessment Framework: Utilizing Standards Without Introducing Standardization

Feldman

2010

The national early learning community faces the challenge of using early learning standards and assessments to improve learning environments while preserving educators' freedom to plan early childhood curriculum that accord with a child-centered focus and developmentally appropriate practices. Drawing on recent developments in approaches to undergraduate assessment, this article introduces an approach to curricular planning and assessment that uses state benchmarks as an umbrella structure to support curricular planning, assessment, and feedback among them. The benchmarks have a hierarchical structure that allows educators to think about benchmarks as embedded within educational goals, spanning different age-ranges, and involving activity across multiple domains of child development. The framework prompts educators to identify benchmarks for particular activities and to assess the age-appropriateness of activities and the degree to which they incorporate multiple domains of development. There are two primary curricular measures: (1) the match measure between educator predictions and observed activity, which provides timely feedback about the accuracy of educator predictions for different age-groups and across developmental domains, and (2) an open-ended measure, which provides information about the ways the children surprised educators by using the activity in an unpredicted manner. Both of these measures inform the development of classroom activities and curriculum. This article reports on the pilot implementation of this approach within an early learning program.

Welcoming Families: A Parent Literacy Project in a Linguistically Rich, High-Poverty School

Barone

2010

This article focuses on a parent literacy project that included shared reading and how to support this strategy with families who have a home language other than English and live in poverty circumstances. Literature about the importance of shared reading to children's literacy development is shared in tandem with the importance of building parent and school collaborations. Details are provided about the literacy project of working with families at Greenbrae Elementary with supporting photographs and parent comments. Strategies to bring such an approach to other schools are described with many pragmatic concerns addressed.Keywords Family literacy Á Shared book reading Á ELLs Parent-child shared book reading is more likely to have positive effects on children's literacy and language learning when parents engage children in multiple readings of a text; when parents encourage children to respond to text through questioning and elaborating; and when the texts read include both narrative and expository genres (Paratore et al. 2010).While engaging families in shared reading events with their kindergarten children is laudable, teachers in highpoverty, linguistically rich schools often find this involvement is difficult to attain. They may complain that families infrequently visit their child's school or their families' homes have few books to sustain shared reading events. They talk about how hard it is to communicate the important parts of shared book reading when they do not speak the language of the parents. They experience a conundrumthey value shared book experiences between parents and children but they are not sure how to pragmatically make these experiences happen. For instance, how will they encourage parents to visit their school to see shared reading in action and how will they get sufficiently, culturally appropriate books into families' homes? Further, how will they accomplish these goals when they do not share the language of their families?With these attitudes and questions in mind, I approached Greenbrae Elementary, a high-poverty, linguistically rich school, to collaborate with teachers about reading and writing instruction and learning. I was surprised as I approached the school as I noticed a group of parents talking and drinking coffee with the school's parent facilitator; an unusual experience in my working with highpoverty schools. My experiences at high-poverty schools were such that parents brought their children to school, but they infrequently interacted with teachers or the school staff. I was even more intrigued when the parents followed the parent facilitator into the building and then to the kindergarten classroom. I wondered why parents were so comfortable at this school. How did this happen and what were they doing in the kindergarten classroom?This article shares how a school rich in linguistic diversity engaged in a literacy project with parents so that they were an essential part of the school community. It documents the assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation of the parent...