Abstract
Policymakers’ demands for standardization and improved student achievement increasingly define what early childhood educators working in publicly funded programs teach. Doing so has made it difficult for educators to engage in practices with children that incorporate their sociocultural worlds into their instruction. To begin to address this challenge, this article examines the experiences of one pre-kindergarten teacher who participated in a professional development course that asked her and her colleagues to implement culturally relevant lessons with their students in their high-stakes urban teaching context. She took up this challenge by examining the issue of parental incarceration with her culturally and linguistically talented students. Analyzing her and her students’ experiences in this investigation provides insight into how early educators can begin to address their students’ sociocultural worlds through culturally relevant pedagogical practices within their standardized teaching contexts.
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Notes
The state identifies almost 60 % of this district’s K-12 students as 60 % Hispanic, 25 % White, and 10 % being African-American. Over 60 % of the students are identified as economically disadvantaged and 25 % of the students are identified as bilingual or as an English as second language learner. In the Pre-K program, 90 % of the students are from low-income families, 55 % percent are English language learners, and over 50 % meet both income and language requirements.
The authors would like to thank Natalie Weber and Dr. Kiyomi Colegrove for their assistance in the data collection and transcription process of this study.
Unless otherwise noted, all data for this theme came from the video of the lesson and field notes. There are some quotes from Ms. Caldas that came from PD Sessions and her interviews, and in this theme, we clearly identify those statements.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the National Association for Early Childhood Teacher Educators Foundation for their support of the project that led to this article.
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Brown, C.P., Mowry, B. “I Wanted to Know How They Perceived Jail”: Studying How One Early Educator Brought Her Students’ Worlds into Her Standardized Teaching Context. Early Childhood Educ J 45, 163–173 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-016-0776-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-016-0776-z